Quote Originally Posted by Randal View Post
Well, having a pirate menace is historical. In the 1st century BC there were huge pirate fleets operating from Crete and Cilicia. Lots of individual pirates preying on commerce, but also fleets that engaged the Romans in battle and defeated them. The Romans sent various fleets and magistrates against them, with only limited success. One of Pompeius' extraordinary commands was a mission to defeat all the pirates in the Mediterranean. And even after his son Sextus organised a fleet of pirates to continue the war against Caesar through unconventional means.

It was the Romans themselves who caused this problem. They had defeated and weakened the eastern powers such as Macedonia and the Seleucid Empire and had forbidden them from having big fleets. This created a power vacuum they neglected to fill themselves. It's similar to what happens in-game when there are a -lot- of eleutheroi ports in the region.

Pirates in the Baltic sailing to the Mediterranean still is weird. But the big pirate fleets themselves make sense to me.
I agree -to some extent- that the amount of pirates are accurately represented. What I find unrealistic is the 16-unit or entire full stack. It's a contradiction with the way pirates have historically operated. Such a fleet would require manoeuvring and logistics that go against the hit-and-run tactics of piracy.