Hello
i have something here to speak about, and i hope that a second patch fix it )

When playing a trader, i faced up a Pirate with 60 force, i was just 20, he beat me, so i load my last save game... i added some new chips, now my force is 80, he will NOT beat me.. LOL THAT'S WRONG.. coz now he's now with 100 force ( i don't know how they leveled up ).. he destroyed all my ships ( they were fully loaded with guns and men )...
Load the same save game, buy other ships, spend all the money on munitions and men, now i'm 110 .. another fight, he's 120 lol, he beat me again.. ( Always automatic fight ) !
Pirates keep being more stronger, i guess if i have a 1000 force ships, they will have 2000 !!
OK guys, it's good to lost a ship or two, but not all the crew.. and how they level up like that, it's the same SAVE GAME !!!

And thanks

They are pretty easy to beat on manual. The first time I tried I had one ship (+26 i think) against three ships (80+) and I sank them all with around 40% health left.

Pirates get stronger the longer you leave them - so it pays in two ways to dealing with them as early as you can. You get a reward and you cut down attacks. Also you can plunder their hideouts.

If you want to auto fight then you need to train a Captain either using the Teachers in the Tavern or by manually fighting. It is best to use a "Pirate Hunter" so that he gets more experince then you can use a strong convoy with that Captain and auto fight.

Have a look at this post about manual combat.

http://forum.kalypsomedia.com/showthread...#pid127773

Never autofight unless you have a significant power advantage. You will ALWAYS lose.

As to how the change power between reloads, are you sure you are encountering the exact same pirate fleet? There can be several about, maybe in the time you took to refit your fleet they moved around and you are just seeing a different group each time.
Also, it's perfectly possible that they are scaled to your strongest fleet or something, though I doubt it.

As to this,

(08-05-2012 01:54 PM)billyplod Wrote:  Pirates get stronger the longer you leave them - so it pays in two ways to dealing with them as early as you can. You get a reward and you cut down attacks. Also you can plunder their hideouts.

If you want to auto fight then you need to train a Captain either using the Teachers in the Tavern or by manually fighting. It is best to use a "Pirate Hunter" so that he gets more experince then you can use a strong convoy with that Captain and auto fight.

Have a look at this post about manual combat.

http://forum.kalypsomedia.com/showthread...#pid127773

I think you are missing the point of the question billyplod. The pirates did not have time to build up as you are saying because he is reloading to before the fight.

Pirates don't scale to your strength. In fact, I never found any pirate fleet above 120 in strength (which you can get to pretty fast just by using Frigates).

On the other hand, english military convoys may come stacked with Liners and those will ruin your day.

My suggestion is to just hold on with your trade routes with no escort (I know losing 20k in materials is bad, but it's much worse losing 100k ships) until you reach a point where you can buy big ships.

When you finally manage to get your first (I actually only use one) strong war convoy, it becomes pretty simple dealing with the pirate threat. Oh, and I mostly do automatic combat unless I actually want to capture their ships (which I do if their fighting force is considerable, meaning they have good ships to attach to my fighting convoy or simply to sell at the nearest dock).

(08-05-2012 01:41 PM)plast Wrote:  They are pretty easy to beat on manual. The first time I tried I had one ship (+26 i think) against three ships (80+) and I sank them all with around 40% health left.

Well, i have trouble believing this, cause when i face an enemy that is over twice as strong as me, i tend to get totally and thoroughly blasted to pieces pretty quickly.

Maybe its the combat side in this game thats not as good as other sea combat games, but i am normally good at combat in these games, but the combat in PR3 is very poorly done.

I know its mostly a trading game, but they did say you could choose what to do, but it seems like you can only do what you want, once you have a huge trading empire to fund it.

yea i find that the combat in this game isnt as good as others
the game mainly focuses on trade
if you leave pirates alone they get ALOT of gold really fast and when you kill them you become rich
but if you play as a pirate/adventurer, attacking other nation ships and so on, you'll basically be pissing everyone off
and when they're at peace and they come attack you, you'll die sooner or late if you go on large voyages and your trade convoy will pretty much die instantly since the nation that you have 0 rep with will basically spawn on your trade no matter where they are

(08-05-2012 07:56 PM)tides Wrote:  yea i find that the combat in this game isnt as good as others
the game mainly focuses on trade
if you leave pirates alone they get ALOT of gold really fast and when you kill them you become rich
but if you play as a pirate/adventurer, attacking other nation ships and so on, you'll basically be pissing everyone off
and when they're at peace and they come attack you, you'll die sooner or late if you go on large voyages and your trade convoy will pretty much die instantly since the nation that you have 0 rep with will basically spawn on your trade no matter where they are

I am not a fan of trading, but it seems like the combat side of this game was severely neglected, i mean, i am not into trading at all, but i can admit that the trading on it, is almost flawless, i just wish the difficulty settings were more modifiable to make the game more fun to play for those that don't need it to be challenging to be fun.