Sounds Pretty Cool to Me!!!     The thing with the Pirates is pretty interesting  You could give them All the Tech research and ships and caps too, even beef up the specs if you want, and give them crystal and metal extractors on the Pirate base that gives very very good income, and then fasten your seat belt and hold on!!!    It seems that as they research and build and research and build their fleets will just get larger and larger, while as you say, the map will have the other two players with just the set amount that was given on the map. Oh, you would need to disable the factories for them, but that might not be too bad.  Hmmm.... can we really do that though?  Just the set amount? Maybe we could raise the cost or set a higher delay on the ships so that the Pirates always have an ever increasing edge? Maybe by the end of the game our little 50 ship fleet can in no way ever ever overcome the 500 plus the Pirates have, or the 1000.  

Sorta like no way to win at all, just outlast the other person?    Hmmm.... Just thinking out loud, hope i havent ruined your idea.

-Teal

Go for it, I'm surprised more mods haven't asked to include your alternate game mods. Of course, I don't think you have to use pirate ships. It be awesome if the pirates could use ships from all races (and mabye even a couple for various other mods), but just 300+ pirates with a couple of Marza's would be challanging enough (Sadly I don't think you can spawn lvl 6 capital ships at start ). Good luck with it.