Everything you wanted to know about Trade and Piracy! - Stellaris Tutorial

What is trade? What is piracy? How do I stop those stinking pirates? All these questions and more are answered in this quick tutorial about trade and piracy in Stellaris as of the 3.7.

[@4freeedom]

thanks for the tutorial! piracy would always keep ticking up no matter what i did, so it's great to have a thorough breakdown of how to deal with it!

[@straightupnothavingagoodtime]

Great work! Found this on my recommended, and I'm happy to have found your channel. Hope to see more content from you like this in the future!

[@ruukinen]

One thing missing is, does trade route protection also have a range like collection range? Do I need to secure every node on the way to the capital or only every x node for example? I knew those UI parts but the system was something I didn't really put much thought into as pirates were mostly a minor nuisance when playing regular empires. The fact you lose out a percentage of trade was something I wasn't aware of although it makes sense and just looking at the tooltip would have told me that. Thank you for the excellent video. I guess I would really like guides on every facet of the game but understand it is hard as the reason they don't exist is that the game evolves so quickly that the ones we have are now out of date.

[@phillerb3529]

Protection also has a range to it. Building fighters on star bases is the best way to extend that range to protect more systems. Also building defense platforms within a system helps (and you don't need a starbase). Overall, you only need protection in areas where piracy is an issue and not everywhere. So don't worry about securing every node. If you're playing a regular empire, having a smattering of starbases, mostly in systems with settled worlds, and you manage your trade routes to optimize the path, piracy shouldn't be a serious issue. A little piracy never hurt anyone, right?

[@radaro.9682]

Thank you.

[@bsquared9]

Hi there @Phil Can you please confirm which release of stellaris this video is for? The current version of stellaris is 3.8.3 as of this comment. And 3.8 was released several weeks prior. But you mentioned that this was for 3.7

[@phillerb3529]

It is for 3.8, I misspoke. Piracy and trade hasn't really changed for many patches now though.

[@Bill-2203]

Does a criminal heritage empire differ in its relation to trade value?

[@phillerb3529]

Great question. They differ a little. Criminal Heritage Mega Corps don't need trade agreements with other empires to set up branch offices. So they can 'gather' trade value from other empires as they please. However, these branch offices also produce crime on the world's they are stationed on, which has the benefit of harming that empire's economy, but also attracting the attention of the AI empire to fight crime with enforcers. So there is great potential to get more trade value out of a criminal heritage mega corp if you can manage your criminal branch offices keeping ahead of the AI's attempts to shut them down. As for internal trade value, from what I can tell through my own play through and what's on the wiki, criminal geritage mega corps still suffer from internal piracy and use the regular trade routes/trade collection mechanics (which is a little disappointing).