Obviously there are no pirate bases, but if you manually direct your surveyor to a ship graveyard there will usually be pirates there. This is understandable, but if I put my surveyor on auto survey, there are no pirates in the graveyards. I can understand that the game AI knows when a ship is on auto, but I don't understand how it removes the pirates from the graveyards.
When you change to auto survey, your ship initially seems to avoid the graveyards for a short period, but after it has been on auto for several turns it goes right into them and gets the lost ships and movement bonuses that come from the graveyards. I do not understand how the pirates are magically removed for an auto surveyor and when I take over and manually direct the ship the pirates are suddenly back. If anyone know how that works in the game mechanics please explain it to me.
Another thing that happened to me while playing tonight. I was getting erratic pops from my speakers when I went to the shipyards and the diplomacy screen. It was just one pop when I opened a shipyard screen but in the diplomacy screen it was a persistent popping noise. It was so distracting I turned off sound effects in the options screen and that stopped it. No problem with the music just the special sound effects,
I also noticed that my surveyor was moving erratically when I started the game, and there were no exhaust trails coming from the ships. I soon got engrossed in the game and stopped noticing whether this erratic behavior continued. In fact I forgot about it until I had saved and closed the game.
Tonight is the first time I have had problems like this and before I turn it into a support ticket, I figured I would ask if anyone else has had similar problems.
EDIT: Oh well , fixed the sound by switching from system configuration to stereo and the ships seem to be running smoother after reloading. I am still not getting the exhaust trails that I see on the streams and YouTube.