Before you begin
You will have a lot of fun as a pirate, but it helps to have a few pirates in your crew. To ensure that, you should try to get the Privateer sprint unlock first, so you can have a Blackheart as a starting contact. The sprint unlocks can be a little challenging until you get the hang of it. One key point is that you have to survive 50 blockades, but you don't have to have much ship or crew left after. You can accept a lot of damage and crew death; plan to walk away from bad "hands" to try another planet. For this unlock, the bounty hunter template may be useful. Give yourself a year before doing much blockading, and try to get a nav assist upgrade for help escaping ship combat.
I recommend unlocking the Galtak Freighter starting ship; it has the most cargo capacity for its price range. This sprint unlock only requires 10 missions in 2 years, which should be easy if you have a template with a lot of starting contacts.
Unlock details on the wiki:
startraders.gamepedia.com/UnlocksStarting the game
Here's one possible starting setup, with some reasoning below.
Attributes A: strength 14, quickness 24, fortitude 24, charisma 26, wisdom 24, resilience 24
Contacts B: first three are local: blackheart, smuggler, fixer; others can be to taste and depend on what you have unlocked. With no unlocks, consider contacts which grant trade permits like intelligence officer, merchant and prince. I usually use FDF commander (for command dice), ex-spy and prince.
Ship C: any of them are fine; I like to start out earning money with trade so I use the Galtak Freighter.
Experience D: commander, to have at least some command dice.
Skills E
If you are using the default map seed, it's a good idea to start as De Valtos. They own the nearby sector Farfallen Rim, which has a good combination of indie planets and De Valtos planets to sell things at. (Thanks to JimmysTheBestCop@steam for this tip at this exact post:
steamcommunity.com/app/335620/discussions/0/1640915206465990199/#c1640915206478771160.)I tend to go for attributes A on all my builds, because attributes figure into a lot of missions and they can't be improved afterwards. For pirates, since the blockade mini-game uses resilience and charisma, I recommend higher values for those.
Pirates "find" a lot of different types of cargo. When choosing contacts, it is helpful to have as many contact types with black market as possible. It's random, but hopefully they will come up on different planet types. The three I listed first are guaranteed to have black market. Others may have black market, or may be locked, but look at ex-spy, merchant, prospector, retired explorer, salvage broker, spice trader, weapon dealer, weapon smuggler. Even pirates need a few friends; it's helpful to have contacts outside your starting faction who can grant trade permits.
Some people recommend starting with ship B. For me, the first ship is a starter and won't see much combat anyway, so I tend to go for high cargo instead.
For starting officer jobs, take military officer (for stiff salute), smuggler (for early missions, holdout is a must-have), and either commander or pirate. Many people have a doctor-combat medic with a third weapon skill for the combat team. I try to leave at least one job slot open, and fill it later depending on how the run goes. A lot of passenger and prisoner missions include wilderness exploration or negotiation, so explorer or diplomat may be a good choice.
For starting crew talents, get two skill saves for every ship area, one doctor, and either one command or one intimidate. If you have started as commander, you can get both command and intimidate.
Early crew leveling
As soon as your doctor levels, add combat medic and get a second doctor skill save. Try to get two command and two intimidate saves as soon as possible, via secondary jobs like pirate, military officer, or commander. This is basic advice for all builds.
You will want one solid combat crew with 1-2 secondary fighters as backups just in case. There are many different opinions on how many combat officers you should have; I use two: the doctor/CM and a front line swordsman/assassin. Soldiers are a cheap but effective way to fill the middle slots and backups. Soldiers should have at least one position 2 talent and one position 3 talent so in case they get shifted they can still be effective.
Within the first year, start gathering your pirate band by recruiting at your Blackheart contact. Since pirates give both pilot and gunnery dice, but not ship ops, you may need an extra crew dog as you replace your pilots and gunners. Be sure to keep two skill saves; navigators can pick up the tactics skill but make sure to keep the pilots with skill saves.
Early missions
In your first year, you are not a pirate, you are a merchant. The goal is to build up the crew you want and start them leveling, while getting some basic ship upgrades.
For the first year I only leave the home system to drop off the arbiter, and that only near the end of the year. Do one or two local missions for each local contact, and pick trade items based on the destination. Get the level 1 trade permit soon. Build up your reputation with all your local contacts. Find a military 9 planet where you can get the A5 weapon locker upgrade. Make a note of any low law level indie planets of different types, where you will be able to sell rare trade goods or high permit items. For the common map seeds, this is probably well known, or you can make notes from a previous playthrough.
Since you are a pirate, you will be attacking a lot of other ships, and most factions will wind up hating you. Early on, you should pick at least one faction besides your home faction, preferably two, with whom to stay on good terms. Be sure to bribe your way out of contacts with those ships so you don't lose rep; even one point of rep loss per contact can add up and snowball.
Early ship upgrades
Since you will be adding crew, it's helpful to get a barracks upgrade early. On the Galtak Freighter, you can upgrade in place from barracks 4 to 5. Before you have much crew combat, try to get at least the A4 weapons locker and preferably the A5. Depending on the starport and whether you have an engineer with Assisted Installation, this may be 70-110K credits, plus I would keep 20K as a reserve. This requires a military 9 planet, which you will usually come across during initial exploration. Then a nav assist 4 to escape, and a second passenger cabin. I don't usually upgrade the starter ship apart from these; thereafter I keep almost my income to save for a good second ship. My suggestion for ship combat at this point is "run away". Pick escape with a pilot/nav talent to boost escape; fire torpedos if you want.
Your second year
In your second year, you are not a pirate or a merchant, you are a mission runner. The contacts you have will be giving mostly passenger missions. Switch out a couple of the weapons you aren't using to get 2-3 passenger cabins and one prisoner cell. With four contacts in your home sector, you can "mission stack" by visiting each one, clicking all their missions, and planning a route. For each "run", select a system 2-3 jumps away and stack up all the missions along that path. Don't overbook your cabins, and before accepting a commodity mission, make sure you can buy the materials. In particular, you can't get spice in the starting De Valtos sector, so don't accept missions that require delivering spice.
It's a good idea to establish a foundation of 4-5 pirate crew. As mentioned above, once you run out of room in your barracks, you can replace pilots and gunners, watching out for your pilot saves.
As your crew levels up, keep your eye on the blockade mini-game. You will be using this a lot, both from missions, and on your own. Talents that work into this include Gunner rank 8 Twitchy Trigger, Crew Dog rank 5 Hawkish Siege, and in case you have a Zealot, rank 5 Fanatical Siege. For pirates, rank 1 Corsair's Eye and rank 5 Infamous Presence will be important, and later rank 11 Terror of the Skies. Regarding the rank 5 talent Terrifying Extortion, it "seems" helpful to get merchants to drop loot. But, the loot that tends to drop is low level and randomly distributed, so it almost seems to cost more to travel around and turn it all in. Unless I am missing something, I don't recommend this.
Another area to look for is talents that allow you to escape combat. Bounty hunters in particular will be a problem. In addition to Military Officer Stiff Salute which you should have early, consider Pirate rank 8 Blackheart Fraud, Smuggler rank 5 Forged Permit and Faked Signature, and E-Tech rank 8 Counterfeit Identity. I have used up to four of these in a single contact, to avoid combat when I needed to.
If you have unlocked the FDF commander or you get lucky at finding a contact who gives Military Officer recruits, it is worthwhile to start developing 1-2 of these also; command dice are very helpful for ship combat.
If you stack missions well you can have a million credits within 5-6 hours of playtime, captain level 12-15, 6-8 years in game time on Hard difficulty. This is my trigger for buying a combat ship and going pirating. A million credits is enough to buy a decent midsize ship and upgrade it to succeed at ship combat.
What type of pirate will you be?
During the second year, you have to decide what type of pirate you will be. There are two successful types: the ones that blow up ships and salvage, and the ones that cripple ships and take cargo. Both types work. I am not sure which one has the highest return of credits per player hour; but the ones that take cargo "feel" more like pirates to me and are more fun.
If you decide to work towards a cargo pirate, then you will also need 1-2 smuggler recruits, and choose talents that replace risk cards in the black market. I have recommended smuggler talent on one officer early to get Holdout and protect your passengers; it may be sufficient to add talents onto this officer, but a small number of dedicated smugglers helps in reaching the black market safely.
For cargo pirates, the talents that increase yield of looted cargo are also important: For smugglers, Pirate rank 1 Rigorous Search, and Military Officer rank 1 Strict Search. For merchants, see Pirate rank 11 Looter's Instinct. You should have several rank 1 Raider's Scrutiny, to sort out which smugglers and merchants are actually worth attacking.
Your second ship
Your second ship should focus on either salvage or cargo. Both ships will have some things in common: midsize ships with a small number of high level weapons and a number of boosters. In fact, my successful designs differed only by one module: the salvage pirate has a large salvage bay 3, while the cargo pirate has a large cargo hold. Both have a nav assist 4 and pilot assist 4, and a few passenger and prisoner cabins. There are a number of ship construction guides to help with the details of selecting a ship and filling it. I have used the Dragoon Cruiser successfully many times.
The salvage pirate just fires at enemy ships to destroy them, and then uses the salvage post-combat option. The large salvage bay adds up to 35% to the yield. The advantage of this approach is that it doesn't require dealing with specific cargo afterwards, and doesn't require boarding. This makes each combat relatively fast in terms of player time.
When you play a cargo pirate, you need to keep from destroying ships. You can approach to range 3 while firing, but when the enemy ship reaches about 20% health, you should stop, and rely on boarding. If you are lucky and have weapons with a high cripple percentage, you may disable ships just with weapon fire; but usually it also requires at least a few rounds of boarding. This takes longer in terms of player time. Sometimes it results in a few units of Fertilizer. But sometimes you score a full load of Power Generators for 200K credits! That feels much more like a pirate to me.
Later in the gameWhen you have your second ship, you can cruise around and blockade anywhere. The main terms in blockade success are low military and government, and high economy and starport. You can rate systems by this; stay away from two planet systems where both have high military and government. Mix this with taking high credit value missions from your starting quad contacts; you can still "mission stack" but along the way, do some blockading on your own.
Any time you upgrade to a combat ship with larger barracks, you can fill it with specialists from your contacts. But, a good approach for basic crew types like e-tech, navigator and soldier is conscription. Take the Quartermaster rank 8 talent Welcoming Conscription; before starting a combat, note which one standard crew type you need most; attack any ship and cripple it; and then conscript one crew with the highest level of that type. You can conscript more at once, but crew conscripted without WC will have bad crew traits in addition to low morale. At high difficulty and mid game, the crew will be higher level than you can get from contacts, but still lower level than your own crew. At impossible difficulty you can conscript crew whose level is higher than your own.
For cargo pirates, I wind up prioritizing the cargo based on "credit per unit". Early in a run, I will take all the cargo, including low "credit per unit" items like fertilizer. But as my hold fills up, I will discard the lower value per unit and keep the higher value, especially things like power Generators or rare trade goods. If I have found a good planet to blockade, I find it is worthwhile to keep a stash nearby and dump my hold into it. Later, I can pick out items that all sell at the same place, and make a turn-in run to sell them all. This is where black market contacts can come in handy.
When you have a pirate officer level 15, you can look into the Murderous Tribute talent. This has quite a lot of conditions to satisfy. But, it allows you to capture a ship, pay a fraction of its price in advance, and then sell it. This can easily make several hundred thousand credits at once, even a million later in the game. To maximize the income, avoid damaging the ship at all; this involves a long series of crew boarding combats for the larger ships.
For example: is it wise to dump physical attributes for non-close-combat captain? Just max charisma and resilience, and lower priority for atts? And which combos give good sinergy, for different pirate roles: pirate/MO/Zealot or maybe pirate/MO/smuggler? I'm very undecisive player and can not start new game if I haven't decided what to do. Thank you for this guide, it really helps.
