We in Tymas, on the other hand, had numerous highly-optimized TL32 warship designs which had been combat-tested against each other before and after the combat changes, prior to the pirates showing up, because we were Properly Paranoid (and continued refining them and making new ones periodically after the pirates showed up). And this despite the fact that most of us tend to spend a lot of time playing other games or doing other things instead of playing Hazeron all the time.
(We also have lower-TL warship designs, and other lower-TL ship type designs, and I would highly recommend founding a new capital after you get to space in a system capable of producing good-TL ships (including armed ships) on its own without any trade with other systems. E.G. TL24-30, although the higher you go the less likely you are to find a system that has every needed basic spaceship resource at that TL or better)
Of course, the situation with a powerful empire with TL32 resources, technology, and the ability to build giant patrol fleets*, is very different from a less-powerful empire without such resources, without as many worlds, and without the players (although the patrol fleets were entirely Ikkir's doing, so it's not a matter of needing numerous people to pull them off - it's just needing enough officers, good enough ships, and so on).
* Guarding all your systems is, of course, impossible, but officer farms don't need protecting from pirates - hell, pirates currently prevent abandonment.
Haxus just recently fixed the servers-themselves-stalling-due-to-a-bad-city-name-borking-SQL glitch, although it was difficult to do anything since everyone was in limbo 90% of the time until he was able to fix that. Not sure if the mail is working again yet or not. Haven't been checking my mail - I lost a couple cities during that problem, but they were just simple officer farms, and could be easily rebuilt in about 5 minutes each, if I wanted the officers (and it takes far less time to travel now with warp drive, if you have it).