Pirate

A pirate is a rogue UFO that may sometimes fly into your colonies and steal their spice. They are very easy to defeat, and usually pose as no threat if there is an Uber Turret on the planet. When Pirates are stealing spice, you can abduct the spice crate and the Pirates will leave the planet, since there is no spice to steal. The pirates will often come in groups of spaceships. There will be about five little gunner ships that have 50 Hit Points, and there will be a large ship they stay near that has 250 Hit Points. These groups can be easily destroyed with an Anti-Matter Missile or Mega Proton Missiles. Pirates may also fake a rare signal, although the signal only appears when a player mouses over a planet, either way, they are not very dangerous.

Trivia

 * Pirates have the Knight's special ability (Summon Mini-U), although it is not used often.
 * The UFOs Pirates use are random across saved games, for example, one games pirates may use one kind of spaceship while another saved game will have pirates using different ships.
 * The Species of the space pirates is unknown. They might belong to various species.
 * They are a reference to Space Pirates from various Sci-fi Series.
 * When an enemy empire is attacking your planet and you destroy the last world of that empire, the ships attacking your planet become pirate ships, suggesting the origin of the pirates.