To back up what MichaealIgnotus is saying here, I’ve been writing up my Legendary campaign on these forums, and one thing that really struck me was how out of whack the rewards for piracy are.
In this post, I raided a NJ haven for a Thunderbird. Total mission rewards were:
1 Deceptor machine gun
2 Cyclops sniper rifles
1 Thunderbird
1 NJ aircraft railgun module
1 NJ aircraft rocket pod module
1 NJ aircraft armour module
A medkit, half a dozen mags of ammo, and some minor stuff
Now, I haven’t gone to the wiki and looked up the value of all that, but just from a glance, it’s clear that those rewards are vastly greater than any “normal” mission. And in exchange for this you lose . . . 6 points of reputation. That’s less than you gain for hitting a single Pandoran Lair.
But what really makes it ridiculous is the way that the factions just shrug this off. Trying to justify it as “well, the factions put up with piracy because they need you”, as Voland is doing, makes absolutely no sense to me, because if the factions are this stupidly rich, why aren’t they just hiring you to win the war for them? They’ll give you 350ish materials and 60ish tech (or whatever) for saving one of their havens, but they don’t seem to mind very much when they lose an aircraft and a squad of soldiers that are worth 10 times that much. In fact, they barely even seem to notice. When you raid a haven, murder the defenders, fly off in their aircraft, then show up at the haven next door expecting to trade, you’d expect that the faction leaders would at the very least make a few snarky comments, but you don’t get any reaction at all. It’s particularly noticeable with Synedrion, who whine about Arthrons, whine about NJ’s technicians, whine about Tobias West in general, but suddenly go silent when you kill them and take their stuff. In fact, they seem to get more upset about you killing Pandorans than about you killing Synedrion soldiers.