Oddities: Pirate and Colony Frenzy

[Arralen]

... as I'm not sure if these qualify for real bugs, so I'm putting this up for discussion here ... might move it to the bug thread later?!
Anyhow, here's what I saw in some recent games (1.651 version):

Colonizing Frenzy
Paradise always had 2x the number of colonies than the other AI players, and me - never had enough money to keep at least 60% research and start that many new colonies. Yet, when I look at the faction items/bonuses I don't see anything that could cause this.
Am I overlooking something?

Pirate Frenzy
In at least 2 of 5 games I started, at some point every ***** pirate on the map started to move vs. on colony to attack it. I shadowed a bunch of them for 5 turns or more - they only switched directions the turn that colony was conquered.
In one game, they went for an AI colony, then came after one colony of mine, and my capital after that, where I killed them all off with a bunch of freshly build destroyers. Then I went to recapture my lost colony, and all pirates that spawned behaved as usual again (moving around mostly randomly unless they "see" something they can attack).
No aggressive AI/barbs, so what is this?

PS: savegame attached which shows both

 

[God-Emperor]

I havn't grabbed your savegame yet, but...

As I recall, from some behavior I noticed with the version that had the pirate hordes bug, if someone has a golden age it seems to trigger the pirates to become very aggressive for a while. So somebody probably built their National Epic wonder or the Founders' Monument.

 

[bryanw1995]

I've noticed that Paradise is often the runaway. I think it's just that he has so much more commerce income that he can keep the slider very high and still settle lots of cities.

I've noticed the same behavior with barbs, I just build lots of military, typically 3 defensive units very quickly + I try to get 3-5 air units up asap for the entire civ's defense. Every time I try to focus on invasion ships and/or ignore system protection I lose solar systems right and left.

 

[God-Emperor]

I forgot to come back to this and respond to the first part...

Paradise is one of the two best civs for rapid expansion (the other is New Earth, with it's 2 population per new colony including the original system at the start of the game). There are two main reasons paradise is good at this, and both are economic things from its trait. First is the 10x starting money. They start with 100 instead of 10, which is a lot like two (or maybe 3) free awards of money from wreckage or inhabited planets. This alone can keep them expanding while delaying the research rate reduction. The second factor is the free mag-lev networks on every planet in each system. This gets them more commerce per unit population quicker and without costing any . Instead of spending production building them, they can more quickly build other things, like colony ships and their escort ships. A third reason, probably much less important, is their UU. The long-range bomber, with +1 range, can give them a slightly better scouting ability as it will reveal more plots when they do recon after building one.

In this particular game, your expansion was hindered by having a high commerce but low production home system. Those two big yellow 1/1/6 planets in the innermost culture zone can provide a lot of commerce, which is probably why you founded Knowledge, but the low production, and food, slowed your expansion. It will be very nice later in the game, but in the early game population growth and empire expansion is usually better (up to the point where ti crashes your economy).

By the way, your choice of things to build may also be slowing you down in this game. You really do not need to build habitation systems so early in RC-2 and RC-3. They are relatively expensive and they don't do much for you at this stage of the game, while there are still plenty of useful places to put your population without them.

Also, the whole "don't go under 60% research" thing is just a general guideline for Civ4 noobs. You should seriously consider letting it get lower. Possibly a lot lower, as long as you are sure it will be temporary. The AI certainly does. Dropping to 30% is not so bad, especially if you have already founded a value (which can help a lot once it spreads, or is spread by you on purpose since the spread is often pretty slow, around your empire and you get the shrine built). This is especially true in FFP, where the possible places to settle are restricted to a relatively small number of specific locations. You can't just "squeeze in" a couple of extra cities in mediocre, or worse, locations to get a little extra output and meet the minimum qualifications for the big economy boosting national wonders (although the ability to build multiples of the buildings in each system in FFP makes this a lot less important than in regular Civ). Colonization of new systems is important. When considering your research rate remember this: 30% of 100 is just as much as 60% of 50, and has a lot more upside once the recovery (from growing population and buildings and connecting systems for trade routes and such) gets going since 60% of 120 is more than 100% of 60 (and sustaining 100% research rate in FFP is difficult).