In the past I've edited the Bughunt conditions to be more lenient, but that actually seems to be less of a problem in recent versions. Or more likely, I'm still in early-ish game and mostly avoiding underground missions and bandit towns.
Fakedit: Wow I just got ninja'd hard, ha. Stop killing Lokk'nars, Robsoie!
Some of the city tilesets are way too elaborate, the worst part about X-piratez is looking for three enemies split among dozen three-story apartment buildings.
Yeah those three-story apartment buildings are definitely the worst. Personally I fiddled with the bug-hunt settings a bit, just to make sure it *always* triggers on turn 15 instead of being weirdly conditional. Mostly for special missions where Dioxine makes a "riddle" of hiding an enemy or two in unreachable places, but it can help on normal missions as well.
bughuntMinTurn: 15
bughuntMaxEnemies: 20
bughuntRank: -1 # commanders are VIPs
bughuntLowMorale: 100
bughuntTimeUnitsLeft: 0
(Edit the user\mods\Piratez\Ruleset\Piratez.rul file)
Just a note : those lines are now located in ...\user\mods\Piratez\Ruleset\Piratez_Globals.rul
[snip]
A minor issue that other people have run into is not being able to research Zombies due to capturing Fatmen alive, not dead. An edge case, but still silly. Find this:
- name: STR_ZOMBIE
cost: 15
points: 150
dependencies:
- STR_ZOMBIE_GRUBAS_TERRORIST
- STR_ZOMBIE_STERILE_TERRORIST
- STR_ZOMBIE_STERILE_CORPSE
- STR_ZOMBIE_GRUBAS_CORPSE
And simply delete the corpses from the requirements.
Building-destroying missiles are the worst kind of random. They're less likely to hit certain valuable buildings, sure, but they'll still do it - and they're almost impossible to intercept. You can build a bunch of defenses, and probably should build some, but those randomly miss. So: open Piratez_factions.rul and search for missilePower, and delete those two lines.
I haven't actually tested this, I've only edited my savegames when I got sick of multiple unstoppable missile strikes. Removing the base-destroying quality had a pretty fun side effect in those cases, I expect the same is true with this. It's both positive and negative, and I think it's a lot more appropriate.
Last but most important - what to do about all these ninja interceptors? I don't know yet. What I do know is that, in a pinch, you can go into your save game and search for the ID of the "shipping". 201, for example. Then you simply change its latitude and longitude to be somewhere else. Voila, auspicious wormhole.