I'm a long time player of the Civilization series. In Civ on standard settings, barbarians are all over you almost from the beginning of the game - they are everywhere. In every game you must deal with them by building early military units, otherwise they will utterly destroy you. This is fine and balanced because everyone is affected equally.
Galactic Civ has not handled this well at all. In most of my games, pirates are a non factor. I've had games where I pump out colony ships and take 15 planets and never run into a single pirate. On the other hand, in about 1/4 of my games, there is a pirate sniper or two waiting near my home world and it kills my scouts, which puts me behind, or worse, it kills a colony ship.
This is very bad balance. In Civ it's fine because everyone must deal with barbarians, so everyone must build warriors and archers before sending out settlers. In Galactic Civ, only one or two players, it seems, must deal with the "barbarians". Everyone else can just happily spam colony ships to their hearts' content. The player that starts with two pirate snipers near them is just handed an automatic loss. This is because they have to spend turns researching military technology, then more turns building military ships. In that time, everyone else has boosted their ship speed by +2 and pumped out a colony ship or two.
Please balance the pirates - put them everywhere so that everyone must deal with them. In fact, this would be a good way to slow down the colony rush in the early game as well.