my proposition is to leave pirates as they was before and just turn of possibility to speed up pirates with AP or make that 1 AP speed up pirate mission for 10 min ...
This update was in the making for some time, because combat needs to be interesting as well as challenging.
As pointed out above, you need to study the enemy fleet before attack and make a strategy, it should be easy once you get the hang of it.
I would suggest a mothership with a few fighters / specialized ships, and try to pair the interceptors against enemy damage dealers and bombers against enemy tankers.
Looking into counting all ships in the mothership hangar when taking the mission, to boost the mission power.
Good suggestion to keep the scan data if scan was completed on a particular ship, will make it so.
Also working on adding some more information in combat analysis, maybe a few icons to see what each ship type is, combat fighter, tanker, damage dealer so you don't get a surprise if you run into a bomber squadron
Aside from that, all professions need to have something, and so mining and trading is less risky and moderately profitable, while combat should be challenging, riskier and more profitable.
I've checked the Pirate looter stations and there is always loot in the cargo bay, but if you choose to destroy the station with "Capture / Destroy" attack, there is a chance that all the loot will blow up with the station, so then it will say the cargo bay is empty because it was destroyed. However the real reward of the looter mission is the "Safety Override Mk ???" module you occasionally find, witch is worth a lot, kind of like a treasure hunt. More missions like that will be introduced soon, where the boss will have a really nice module or nothing.
