Whats the largest Pirate Fleet you've every fought.

[Monsieur Alphonse]

According to Thamis (CA) each ship in a fleet of twenty stops 5 percent of trade giving you more profit. I have had very expensive fleets making enough money from raiding to pay for it self. The problem is that this last usually not very long since others will join the raiding feast and your income will become less. The AI knows which trade lane is profitable to raid. But raiding trade lanes is a good way to weaken your enemy.

[Didz]

Thats slightly different to John117's view. My only data showed that a pirate fleet sitting on my trade route from the East Indies stole 20% of the spice being shipped on that route. But I neglected to note how many ships were in the pirate fleet so it might have been 4 ships each stealing 5% each.

If each ship steals 5% of the trade then a single 20 ship fleet would steal it all, whilst 20 x 1 ship fleets dotted along the trade route would only steal about 54% (5% of the residual trade passing along the route).

[Fisherking]

I don’t know about anyone else, but fleets in the game I play are limited to 10 ships.

If you put more ships in you can get a CTD or just missing ships in a shadow fleet.

I have fought multiple pirate fleets but nothing approaching these numbers. Maybe there has been some recent change that allows more or some people are remembering larger numbers than were actually there….

[Monsieur Alphonse]

I don’t know about anyone else, but fleets in the game I play are limited to 10 ships.

If you put more ships in you can get a CTD or just missing ships in a shadow fleet.

I have fought multiple pirate fleets but nothing approaching these numbers. Maybe there has been some recent change that allows more or some people are remembering larger numbers than were actually there….

The amount of ships a fleet can have depends on your graphic settings. If you play on ultra you can have 20 ships. Normal units size, or small lowers the amount of ships you can put in a stack.