Gameplay Questions

[Mot]

Just want to preface this by saying thank you to MK for an amazing mod, and I wasn’t sure where to ask these so I figured a new forum topic would be easiest.

This is just a forum for asking noob questions that don’t have readily available answers

Q: Does it matter which flag I fly during propositions? i.e should I be switching to a pirate flag before I raid the beach or convoy in question?
I had an English character approach me and ask me to raid an English convoy of slaves. Obviously he had an English flag so I kept mine up (he also had a 96 gun 1st rate, looked funny with my armed sloop in the lead). There didn’t seem to be consequences but I’m not fully sure how the reputation system works, particularly in regards to individual nation rep.

Q: is there any penalty for turning down propositions in the tavern?
Q: is there any penalty for agreeing to talk but then not showing up?
Q: can i give my maps to my navigator, or was that a New Horizons thing?
Q: do skill books work on your crew if you put them in their inventory?
Q: do things in the cabin chests carry across when I transfer ships?

No doubt I’ll have more as I progress, though for the most part the tooltips are very clear.
thank you in advance to anyone who can clear some of these question up.

[Jeffrey]

I will have to look up a couple of these, but I do know the answer for a few of them right now.

Q: Does it matter which flag I fly during propositions? i.e should I be switching to a pirate flag before I raid the beach or convoy in question?
A: I don’t think it much matters. If you engage open-sea, when close enough for recognition as a threat, your flag automatically turns Pirate anyway. When doing a shore-based attack, the fight is automatic, no matter what flag. I think the reputation among nations is solely determined by how many soldiers you personally kill, or ships you fire upon/sink (officers and companions that do it for you, don’t count against you). In fact, if you don’t want to risk a nation reputation drop, and your officers/companions are stacked with skill books, armor, cool weapons, great ships, you can sit back and let them do all the work and nothing will count against you. Order them to board and loot the ships, and don’t fire any shots yourself. No points against you! Of course what fun is that? LOL

Q: is there any penalty for turning down propositions in the tavern?
A: I will have to look this one up.

Q: is there any penalty for agreeing to talk but then not showing up?
A: Kind of…if you agree and don’t show up, the other captain’s relation to you goes down slightly. When it reaches a certain point, they will stop asking you and also, if you ask them to join you, they will refuse. I made a slight change to this where there is still a small chance for them to agree to join you if you deliberately ask them, but only to a certain point and if too low, they never will. MK and I discussed changing that further to always allow some chance, so expect further changes to this where they may still approach you, based on some scores.

Q: can i give my maps to my navigator, or was that a New Horizons thing?
A: I don’t know what giving maps to a Navigator does in New Horizons and I don’t think it does anything in this game. If it is a treasure map, I’m not sure it works if you are not holding it…I will have to look.

Q: do skill books work on your crew if you put them in their inventory?
A: Yes, the skill books increase your officer/companion skill points.

Q: do things in the cabin chests carry across when I transfer ships?
A: Yes, ship chest transfers to any ship you take control.

I will get back to you for more definitive answers on the ones I am not sure.

[Mot]

Thanks Jeffrey!

I was never sure which flag to be flying. A follow up question; Do I only need the letter of marque if I intend on seeking out fights? at the moment I’m mainly doing quests and propositions, so when I do fight other nations they initiate.

I frequently agree to meet captains only to rent a room at the tavern because that same captain has taken all the sailors, and of course they’re gone the next day. I guess I should just turn them down from now on unless I’m ready to go.

In New Horizons (I forget which build) you could give the maps to your navigator and still see them when hitting M, so your inventory could be slightly cleaner. Sorta helpful, though maps don’t really impact weight so it’s not a big deal (I also kind of miss the weapons locker, but GOF ERA is just so much better in so many ways! Also legit copies of POTC are hard to find)

Thank you again for the answers!

[Jeffrey]

A letter of marque will allow you to go to the governor of that nation and start a ‘nation questline’. This will provide a way to quickly increase rank, title, some money, and possibly gain some of the rarer weapons/items.

Keep in mind, once you do one nation’s questline, you will not be able to do any other nation questline in that same game. Also, if you happen to attack (even accidentally) your nation, or a friendly nation (like a pirate captain mission from the tavern as soon as you shoot a person/ship…you might be able to get away with it if you let your officers/companions do everything while you sit back, like I mentioned earlier), you will lose that letter and greatly reduce your reputation. If you lose it, you can always buy one from a Pirate colony diplomat in the tavern…for a bunch of money.

We are planning a modification to allow a single game instance to eventually do any/all the nation questlines. This will differ slightly than the PANQL mod that came out, as you won’t have to go in a particular order. I am near certain we can accomplish this quite simply with an idea MK presented me…just needs to be worked into the scripts.

When I get a bit more spare time, I will do a little digging into the code and get you the rest of the answers you seek.

[Mot]

I love that idea! Thank you again Jeffrey, for both your responses and for all the effort you and MK put in.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 5 months ago by Mot.

[Mot]

Q:What are the percentages next to skills?
e.g Leadership 79% (+76) 24

So I have 24 leadership, I assume the numbers in brackets is my bonus from items/books, but what is the percentage number?

Q: What does f4 do?
it seems to change my ship but I’m not sure what’s actually happening? (sorry if the controls are explained somewhere, I checked the ReadMe but couldn’t find anything on controls)

• This reply was modified 7 years, 5 months ago by Mot.

[Jeffrey]

Q:What are the percentages next to skills?
e.g Leadership 79% (+76) 24

A: The percentage you see is how often, when that skill is used to calculate and determine a result, it is helping you. In your case, when Leadership is used to determine a course of action, your score has favorably helped you 79% of the time.

Q: What does f4 do?

A: F4 runs the console.c program, which I often use to test various things. I try to comment out everything in there, but if your ship is changing, I suspect it is probably still running a test I was doing with one of Orazio’s new ships, granting it to my main character so I could check it out. The console.c is useful for an end-user like yourself, to correct some things with an override to a bug’s misbehavior, manually re-init some tables, etc. Typically, best to avoid it unless you specifically alter what you want in the console.c code execution with proven code.

[Mot]

Q: Is there any kind of rep system with the pirate faction
Or is there any sort of penalty for fighting other pirates/handing them over to the authorities

[Jeffrey]

Q: is there any penalty for turning down propositions in the tavern?
A: There is no penalty for declining a proposition in the tavern, or if declining at the very beginning of the conversation on their ship. There is a penalty in that personal relation if you ask for details, then decline.

Q: can i give my maps to my navigator, or was that a New Horizons thing?
A: I have not tested, but from looking at the code, you should be able to view maps held by your navigator, or any of your fighters too.

Q: Is there any kind of rep system with the pirate faction
A: Selling any prisoner results in your reputation decreasing slightly (downward from Hero, toward Bloody Assassin). As a result, the loyalty of any of your officers that are at the upper end, (Hero, Trusted Sailor, etc.) will lower, but any officer that is below the mid (e.g. shark), their loyalty will improve. Also, you do not gain any experience for selling Pirates, but if the prisoner is of a different nation than where you ransom them back, your trading skill improves slightly, but if they are the same nation as where you ransom them, you get a bigger trading increase.

On another note, I have now implemented a way to Play All Nation Quests in a single game. There is also an option to have your fighters spawn on a boarding deck near you every time. Neither of these is tested or uploaded, but they are coded, so they will hopefully make it into a future upload soon. The new Shanty music option was changed slightly per a request from MK, where the english tunes only occur when flying a Pirate or English flag. Future shanty music will contain tunes in other languages (Dutch, Spanish, etc.), which will then be heard when you are flying the relevant flag.

[Mot]

As always thank you for reply! I’ve been enjoying the update, I receive far fewer “I’m busy” dialogs from store owners and I occasionally hang around in port just to listen to an interesting shanty.

I love the sound of the boarding mechanic, as sometime I lose officers when they spawn on the other ship and get surrounded, though recently I bothered to give everyone armour/good swords and guns so they’re doing a bit better now, though it takes quite a while to equip officers given the clunky trade interface.

I’m nearing the end of the Morgan quest line and I would love to play another nation without starting from square one!

On a side note; when I installed the update it deleted everything in my cabin chest, though at the time it was just a handful of wines and elixirs so no great loss.

Thank you again Jeffrey!

[Jeffrey]

Ha ha, those songs were one of my favorite part of AC IV, so glad you like them.

I noticed I didn’t really answer your question about the Pirate ransoms. The sale does not really affect your relation to Pirates; they always dislike you when you meet at sea and relation with them is not affected, nor does sinking their ships increase bounty hunter hostility.

That ship chest problem is unfortunate. I know that adding the new ships causes some new error logs showing a gun mismatch, but that doesn’t really cause a problem in game play from what I can tell, it’s just one of those ‘warning’ type messages to show there might be a definition problem, but there really isn’t as the RealShips array type is now pointing to an old index, but isn’t really used for anything in the ship’s operation. The item changes, ship changes and location changes causes my OnLoadReinit to correct some things during save-loads, but a side-effect must be to remove your chest items and I was unaware of that. I will look for where that happens and see if I can correct it. Of course it does not help you if it already removed them, but I would definitely like to fix it for future updates.

[Jeffrey]

Oh, and if you are doing the Morgan quest, that is the Pirate line and you can already play a nation questline (France, England, Holland, Spain) after you are done (or when Morgan tells you to come back much later and to go ahead and work for another nation…but you have to start/finish the whole thing during that waiting period or you must finish the Pirate line, then start a nation); that ability was already part of the original game.

But you can only do one of the nations and that is what I hope to remedy with my new update that I am working on.

[chris gardner]

Hey I just have a quick quick question in regards to purchasing ships; is is not possible to find a class 1 or 2 ship for sale at the shipyard?
I’m a level 27 atm, 100 navigation, but I believe I’ve only seen a class 3 for sale twice, and that was back like >5 levels ago. I don’t think I’ve seen a class 2, and I’ve defiantly never seen a class 1, at least in this mod. I thought I remember vanilla AOP2 selling class one ships and they are sometimes even available for sale at the start of the game

Does ERA’s only sell up to class 3 ships in the shipyard? Sure if you capture a 1st rate and sell it id expect to be able to buy it back, but do they ever show up for purchase on their own?

[chris gardner]

Edit: I just saw for the first time a class 2 for sale, so im assuming all classes will eventually so up for sale. I guess my question is, what determins when the higher class ships show up? Is it rank, navigation skill, or a combination of the 2? At rank 27 and 100 navigation, IMO i feel like I should have seen a 1st class by now

[modernknight1]

What ships come up for sale is determined in the ships utilities file. I am very stingy about what ships come up for sale. Think about it, 1st through 3rd raters would have not been super common to begin with in the 17th century Caribbean. Those were basically King’s ships owned by the state – not something which would have been commonly for sale.

It is possible but I have made it very rare. My idea is that if you want one – go get one from the enemy. If you want one from your own country, when you find one you like, sail out of the port a good distance into the open sea still in view of the port. Then run up your Jolly Roger. The ship will come to you and you can take it without having to tangle with the fort, although there may be other harbor ships that come as well. You have to determine the risk. I’ve used that technique in the past.

I have discussed with Jeffrey certain rewards in the future. Something we are planning to do is random people on the streets offering a ship for sale that they have inherited or obtained against debts. In addition, in the future we might have a governor award you larger ships as you are promoted.

There is another option for you though. In Your game’s mod options – they have been set by default to REALISTIC SHIPS PURCHASE set to ON. If you are not happy with the realistic selection at the shipyards, then go to mod options and toggle to REALISTIC SHIPS PURCHASE and set it to off. Now many more ships will come up for sale. I know this for a fact because I wrote the Ship’s Utility file carefully. 1st rates and 2nd rates still wont be as common as others though – but a little more common anyway.

MK

• This reply was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by modernknight1.

[megaprime]

Im not really sure how the Fort assault manages resources for example I have the landing troops ability and I want to have all of my crew weapons should I have weapons on all my ships or only on the flagship as the game stacks the crew of the fleet on my ship during an assault

[tulkas]

I have a little question.

When my skills reach 100, do the books in my inventory still useful?
For instance, my navigation skill is at 82 now, and I have a boost of 18 provided by books and trinkets. When reach 100, the books will add nothing at all. Will they still be useful? Will I do more damage with my pistol having a skill of 100 and a book adding 30?

[modernknight1]

Tulkas, it was a question I had myself a few years ago so I tested it out.

The answer is no. Once you reach 100 points – that’s all you get, so you can drop, sell, or stash the extra stuff into your ship’s chest. I always get rid of all of the extra unnecessary books and items once I get to 100 – unless its just really cool stuff I like, such as the leadership necklaces and medals.

Stealth is the one that takes the longest to develop. I have been thinking about new items to boost that as well.

MK

[tulkas]

Woa! Thanks for the answer!
That was fast!

[Maltacus]

What difficulty should you choose if you want to have neither bonuses nor penalties because of the difficulty level, or at least as little as possible of those?

[modernknight1]

I’m not certain there is such a thing in this game LOL. However, if what you mean is that you want the most normal game possible where it is not overly easy, but not intentionally difficult either, I would choose Captain or Corsair. I myself usually play on Commodore because I like it a little bit harder. The reason I don’t like it higher than that is because loot just gets uninteresting at that point.

The higher the difficulty level, not only is the game harder and opponents harder, but good loot becomes much more rare and many/most corpses have nothing at all on them. I like loot! I like finding new and good items!

MK

[Maltacus]

I’m not certain there is such a thing in this game LOL

Yeah, a fair point I guess. If we narrow it down to just NPC levels, is there a difficulty level where your 100 sea dogs are just as strong as the enemy 100 sea dogs in a boarding battle (captain skills and weapons and all other things being equal)?

[modernknight1]

Well I can’t give you a good answer on that Maltacus.

If I had to describe in a visual way why – I would say it is because this game is like a bunch of slide rules cludged together.

If there was someway that we could freeze your level to say 15 and you would never progress beyond that – then I could quantify what you ask to some degree.

However, as you get higher and higher level, the game causes your RPC to become almost GOD LIKE IMHO.

This is another reason I like the higher difficulty levels, because once you’re at level 35+ on Sailor difficulty, you can sink ships with a single broadside of hotshot. You can kill opponents with one or two strokes of your sword.

You know that might not be a bad idea for a mod. A static toggle that allows the player at a given time to change and lock his level to a lower level than what he currently is. From there the lock would not allow him to level up. He could go back in when he wanted to and toggle the lock off and advance once again. Hmmmmm Interesting to consider. Jeffrey? Thoughts?

MK

• This reply was modified 7 years, 2 months ago by modernknight1.

[Maltacus]

Nice metaphore. But do you mean that there isn’t any slide rule, or slide rules, that govern the difficulty levels effect on the npc levels during boarding? Since they get much stronger with higher difficulty than with lower, all else being equal.

A mod vision I have for this game – but one I lack the skills to realise – would be to separate the slides so you could choose to have lots of loot, but also lots of costs, disloyalty, smart ai, but not supernaturally strong npc:s.

[Capt Qbert]

Ok, I’ve searched around and could not find a resolution to this question (or possible bug) regarding the ‘Industrial Espionage’ missions. I’ve done a few of these with no probs but last night I could not complete one.

I was asked to steal the blueprints for a new corvette from Basse-Terre, thus:

1. I go to BT, sneak in at night and sleep until morn in tavern
2. In the morn, sneak over to the shipyard and go into the room with the guard
3. Wait until night time (I waited until midnight) and go into the room where the shipyard dude sits at his desk (he is gone as expected)…
4. When I try to grab the blueprints, I cannot! They are there on his desk but there is no hand icon or way for me to pick them up….and I have tried every corner of his desk and even all over the room for a hand icon but nothing.

I also tried other methods with no luck (bribed the guard to leave door open next day, killed the guard, opened all chests in guards room, left ship yard, rested and came back a few days later, left the city, got on my ship, sailed around, came back and sneaked in again and still no hand icon).

The quest still shows as active in my log book btw.

I pulled up F11 to see if there was something I could do there (advance quest line?) but I have never used the Dev console and did not want to mess my game up (yes, I clicked X to exit). 🙂

Any specific help on what I can do to complete this quest via an F11 ‘cheat’?
Or did I miss something obvious?

Thanks guys,
CQ

[modernknight1]

Captain Q,

One question, does the hand icon show up when you go into talk to the Shipyard Master?

My technique for that quest is much more rogue. I will ensure I have all of my business in the town completed so that I don’t need to come back.

Then I go to the front door of the Shipyard and Quicksave.

Then I go into the Shipyard in broad daylight – run to the desk, and grab the plans. He will say something like “Axes” men, get them.

You and your men auto draw your swords. I immediately put mine away and run to the exit before anyone dies and then once outside – run to my ship as fast as I can before anyone dies. If someone I REALLY like who I was trying to level up as a companion gets killed, then I save-scum by going back to that save and trying again.

Jeffrey might be able to help you if you can provide him with a save-game file from before you enter the shipyard.

MK

[Capt Qbert]

I’ll need to double check if the hand icon shows up when the shipyard dude is there but I don’t think so. Will test tonight and go from there. Thanks MK!

• This reply was modified 7 years, 2 months ago by Capt Qbert.

[Jeffrey]

I am not 100% certain, but basing on my memory, I believe MK is correct that the only way to get them is when the shipyard master is present. Also, do not stand and fight as he also becomes immortal during the fight and the only option is to flee.

[Capt Qbert]

LOL, yeah I read about how he is ‘immortal’…not gonna mess with that guy. 🙂 “This is Spart….errr…Shipyard!!!!!”

Thanks guys, cant wait to test it out tonight once kids go to asleep!

[modernknight1]

Well it shouldnt actually be that way. Its been a long time since I did that quest by staying in the other room till after midnight, …but you used to be able to steal the plans that way also.

MK

[Capt Qbert]

Ok, all good now…the hand icon showed up in both situations:
1. Where you wait until after hours in the other room and then grab blueprints.
2. Via direct grab and run from his desk during day time.

I have no idea why the hand icon did not display earlier and I checked every desk inch. 🙂 It did take me over a month game time to get back to this quest so maybe that fixed it? Wish I still had that older save.

So all good in Qbert’s pirate landia again. Tnx for the feedback guys!

[Capt Qbert]

Ok, just 1 question today captains…

When I give my officers books & items to increase their ship skills, how do those stack up?

Specifically, I gave an officer whom I was going to assign as captain of a captured ship a book with +10 Nav and 2 items as well (one with +10 Nav and the other one with +30 Nav IIRC). So that would = +50 Nav, but when I check him out after assigning him to his ship, it only shows +30 Nav to his Navigation skill. Is it supposed to be this way or am I missing something/is this a bug?

Tnx guys!
CQ

• This reply was modified 7 years, 2 months ago by Capt Qbert.

[Jeffrey]

The books are derived from GOF and they included an option for how they stack. ‘On’ limits the amount of stacking, so that may be the reason.

Load your save game, then Esc to menu. Go to Options, then lower right Mod Options. Scroll down to ‘Less powerful skill books’ and if you want the full stacking, turn it Off.

[Schiavonna]

@ CaptQbert: it’s in your ‘options’ dude – “make skill books less powerful…” ON/OFF. “ON” reduces everything (in theory) to a 10% bonus. Switching to “off” gives you the full bonuses for each item.

Nevermind – Jeffrey beat me to it

• This reply was modified 7 years, 2 months ago by Schiavonna.

[Capt Qbert]

Aha! I totally forgot that it was a setting that could be changed in the Options menu…thanks guys!!!

I actually like it the way it is but thought it might be a bug so reported just in case. The full bonus setting gives to many skill points so I will leave it as is.

Cheers Capts,
CQ

[Capt Qbert]

Ok, another Q…

I found an ‘Armillary’ while looting some bodies last night and it gives +10 to ‘Intellect’. Huh, what is this?

I can’t find any reference to an intellect skill or ability for your character (or any effect this may have on him when in his inventory). Is the Armillary an item planned for the future or a left-over from the early days of this game?

Just super curious about this item and if it usable? …thanks in advance for any info!

CQ

• This reply was modified 7 years, 2 months ago by Capt Qbert.

[Jeffrey]

This is an item exclusive to ERAS and has been around for awhile. That +10, is technically a +1 and it should be displayed on the character screen in the PIRATES section as a +1 to Insight. This should help increase improvements made for accuracy and stealth progressions if you keep it in your inventory. Then, when you engage in activities where stealth or accuracy is required, your progression should get a slight bump when those particular skills are incremented through use.

[Capt Qbert]

Thank you as always Jeffrey, I’ll put it back in my characters inventory and check it out again tonight.

Strong wind and grog to you,
CQ

[Maltacus]

I have started the French nation questline on corsair level.

In the second quest, when the not really regretful governor lets you out of jail you are supposed to get your stuff back. That did not work for me. I tried again a few times and about half of them ended up the same, the rest worked. Is this a bug or are you supposed to do something in the dungeon, like walk to a crate or barrel or something to get the items back?

On the third quest, five (I think) spaniards accompanied the commandant in his so called dinner party. They had rank 180 and 380-400+ hit points… That feels totally absurd. Is the quest supposed to be that way, with some kind of spanish demigods in that house while the rest of the town is held by common humans?

[Jeffrey]

First, that French prison code tries to store all your items in a hidden, temp attribute, then upon release, attempts to copy them back to your pchar.items attribute. Weird that it fails sometimes, as the code looks OK to me. But, what I found is that none of the other prison episodes that behave similarly, use the same function as that particular case of the French line. In fact, the functions it uses are only used in that one place. So, since you encountered a bug, I simply made that part of the French line use the same code as all the other prison episodes use.

Second, it is well known to me that when playing a higher difficulty level, there are certain fights/scenes that are scaled way too high at even moderate difficulty setting. I have done work on a similar fight for the Isabella quest (when you fight the guards after you are accused of the murder) so that moderate difficulty setting is better represented. I am now fairly satisfied with that particular scene when scaling up as high as 7 difficulty. I can only beat them all about 2 or 3 times out 10 tries at level 7 difficulty and I come very close to victory most of the other times. Seems about right for a 7 setting to me.

What I will do, is dig that Isabella scene up and apply the NPC stats similarly to that part of the French line you mention.

[Jeffrey]

I have something for testing that fight. Do you have a save from before midnight, when you’re waiting for the time to go looking for the girl in that room? I want to try out my changes.

[Maltacus]

You rock, Jeffrey. Yeah, I have one save from just outside the door, just before going in, and another save in Havana waiting for the waitress to have delivered the ring. Should I send them to you, and in that case how?

[Jeffrey]

Yes, the earlier one waiting for the waitress. If you were waiting at the door, the fighters have already been generated in the code and I need a save prior to that.

[Maltacus]

How should I send it? You can’t attach files to personal messages, can you?

[Jeffrey]

PM sent

[Jeffrey]

I have good news and bad news.

Good news is that I rebalanced that fight in the commander’s house.

https://mega.nz/#F!jl1zjSaC!CdBYterMnYkhdEbQy9rQKg

Update.zip

Bad news is that it doesn’t much affect your fight because at your particular character level, not much gets changed. The original game sets those enemies at rank 18-23, and my rebalancing does not change things all that much, because your character is level 17.

The reason you have difficulty is because I see that you have virtually no fighting perks, so it will be difficult to stay alive; you do not have Advanced Defensive Arts, Sword Dancer, or Elite Fencing, so you don’t do much damage in your attacks and have little effective defense. You also have very few healing potions and your gun is only good for one shot due to a very lengthy reload time for the Matchlock Arquebus.

However, you can win that fight; I have done so several times, but you can’t stand toe-to-toe and fight them (with more perks, I believe you probably could), you need to find cover because you can’t withstand multiple attacks with no defensive perks.

As soon as you enter the room, do not wait for the dialog, run to the left, up the stairs, and get behind the soldiers on the upper floor…let them start walking down the stairs, then follow them down, not allowing them back up. Keep going down, but stay on the stairs and let the commander get close enough to start the dialog. After the dialog finishes, run up the stairs, around the corner, but do not go all the way to the upper level…stay just short and turn around.

As soon as the first soldier gets within view, quickly shoot and get into blocking position. Stay just far enough up around the corner that a lower guard cannot attack you, keeping just the one in front of you in fighting range. Defend and attack when there is an opening/pause in the enemy’s attacks; do quick attacks as fast as possible to prevent your opponent from retaliating. Do not let him shoot you and you MUST parry if they engage a force/overhead swing (with your poor defense, the damage from those attacks is too much for your character). Do your best to maintain position near the top of the stairs, they will slowly push you up. Attack as often and quickly as possible to dispatch each of them before they get you far enough up the stairs where they can push around each other and start to surround/multiple attack you.

By keeping just one opponent in front of you on the stairs, you can block/parry every attack (not getting hit from all sides) and the soldiers that shoot will not hit you, as they are blocked by the other soldiers, hitting them with friendly fire vs. hitting you.

I have defeated them this way several times now.

Good luck!

[Maltacus]

Thanks Jeffrey, awesome work. I look forward to trying it out.

I actually managed to win one of the times I tried the fight before, with character levels 180-230, taking up the position in the corner furthest from the stairs, so I don’t think it will be impossible now. That chimaera blade is wicked… I found the corner of the stairs too hard to see from properly due to the camera zooming in too much for my taste. Regardless, my issue is with the unbalanced levels of the enemies and overall logic and sense of such situations (the commandant having an ambush is perfectly logical, the door out being locked is absolutely not logical, for example) and not with actually winning or losing the battle.

[Jeffrey]

But I don’t think it’s so much an imbalance in the enemies, but more a case that they are are tailored specifically to be fighters, they have fighting perks, their guns are decently quick reloading. If you had allocated a couple fighting perks yourself, and a faster gun, you would much more handily defeat them.

As it stands now, your character is not well-suited for fighting engagements against multiple attackers, despite that really nice sword (I noticed that Chimera and that thing is sweet!). I am not sure the scene should be adjusted further downward if the player character has no perks…to not give perks to the opponents. I don’t like that idea. I prefer that if you are going on these quests, you have to expect some battles and grant yourself perks accordingly in anticipation of opposition.

[Maltacus]

I tried the fight again and the enemies still have levels 180-230. Are they supposed to be that way after your changes too? The fight went way better than last time so I can well imagine something other being edited, but I don’t know what I should be looking for. Anyways, Dona Ana is once more out of the clichéd bad relationship. But perhaps sightly seasick as the ship got into a storm on the way to Tortuga, hehe…

Faster gun? To reload you must put the sword away and that room is a bit tight for running during the time it takes to reload. It could work better in a cave or outdoors I guess. Or are you perhaps playing with auto-reloaded pistols?

Again, my point is not that Peter Cloise had trouble here and now but that the enemies could be level 180 at all (I had read somewhere that the max character level was 50-something, is that correct?) and especially that early in the nation questline.
If they had levels 18-23 but were almost as troublesome due to their fighting abilities (which I think they would be) but without the mountain of hit points from the extra levels, I would be perfectly fine with that.
As a comparison, isn’t Oliver Trust level 32 or something when you face him? Also that the player character goes in alone in that room or in whatever other unknown and evidently suspicious place without the accompanying bodyguards…but that is another issue entirely.

[Jeffrey]

When you state 180-230 level, I thought maybe that was a typo. But since you mention it again, where do you see that? I am nearly sure they will still be about 18-23. That range would have stayed similarly for you because for a player character at 17, that seemed about right because a decent fighter is still better than NPC ai. The ‘balancing’ I did, was if the player is lower or higher level than 18, the NPC levels will adjust along with the player to better match everyone.

And yes, I did balance out the hit points, because they were also getting a large boost, but I changed that boost to use the difficulty setting selected, instead of always boosting a huge amount. Now, it checks the difficulty rating and boosts according to your setting. So in that sense, yes, the fight is slightly easier for your Corsair setting than it was before.

[Maltacus]

When you press F12 you see the name and level and Health of the person closest to you, or if it is closest in front of you. Here is for example the commandant in Havana compared to one of Oregons guards. Before your changes he had 400+ hp.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by Maltacus.

[Jeffrey]

Well look at that! I never knew about that feature, LOL. I see the 230, and I did some traces to the log files and they show the same thing, so there is a problem.

Glad you showed me this, because you have uncovered a bug. The function FantomMakeCoolFighter used to make those characters, calls another function for figuring a rank, called GetCoffDiff and turns out that function is passed an integer for the Rank, to convert based on difficulty setting, but the calculation uses a float type and apparently there is a problem with the implicit conversion of integer to float and somehow gets multiplied by 10 when your difficulty is higher than 5 setting. I fixed it by explicitly converting the integer to float, then using that to do the rest of the calc and now it turns out OK.

Thanks. I’m uploading the correction to Update.zip now. It will take a little while to complete.

[Maltacus]

Which file or files contain this code? The whole update covers a lot and I would rather avoid overwriting the files I have edited myself.

Glad to be of service. It’s certainly encouraging to hunt bugs when someone looks them up this quickly.

[Jeffrey]

It was a small change and you can apply it yourself if you don’t want to download the entire update. Find Program\characters\QuestsUtilite.c, open in a text editor and search down for int GetCoffDiff(. Replace the entire function with this:

int GetCoffDiff(float num, int _maxRange)
{
    //#20171010-01 Bug fix implicit int to float conversion
    float _num = num;
	switch (MOD_SKILL_ENEMY_RATE)
	{
		case  1: _num *= 0.6;  break;
		case  2: _num *= 0.75; break;
		case  3: _num *= 0.85; break;
		case  4: _num *= 0.9;  break;
		case  5: _num *= 0.95; break;
		case  6: _num *= 1.0;  break;
		case  7: _num *= 1.1;  break;
		case  8: _num *= 1.2;  break;
		case  9: _num *= 1.3;  break;
		case 10: _num *= 1.5;  break;
	}
	_num += 0.5;
	if (_num > _maxRange) return _maxRange;
	else return sti(_num);
}

[Maltacus]

I pasted that code and the levels are no longer multiplied by 10 but the hp have soared to the skies again, they might even be higher than before any of your changes.

Which function creates the hp boost?

• This reply was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by Maltacus.

[Jeffrey]

I thought perhaps you already had that change in your existing code. That part is in another program and is a bit more complicated a change. If you don’t mind obtaining the Update download, you can just copy Program\Quests\quests_reaction.c.

I think that would be the easiest way to get that part, rather than try to modify the file in the appropriate places.

[Ron]

Ok I screwed up somewhere. The Shopkeepers keep telling me to come back tomorrow over and over. Is it Rep?

[Jeffrey]

Dupe answer from another thread, but it applies to you also:

This has been a common complaint. The problem is a side-effect of ‘busy’ services that were built into the original COAS from the other heroes that you can meet in the taverns, join forces if you speak to them (example: Diego, if you are playing as Peter).

In COAS, it hardly ever happened because there are only a few characters, but now that we added many more heroes, they are everywhere and that ‘busy’ code is causing this ‘busy’ service for store, governor missions. I will build an option to disable that into the ‘Mod Options’ but for now, I do have some code that might help. Find Programs\scripts\PSHero.c. Open in a text editor and at the top, change the #define to this:

#define PGG_TASK_MITIGATE 1000

It won’t take effect until you leave the current town you are in. But, if you leave and go to another town, it will hopefully remove the ‘busy’ feature from now on.

[Maltacus]

How can you change it so that fighter officers are always coming with the captain? Someone managed to do so with the des Moines beach which was an excellet change.
I think it is a pathetic feature, utterly unrealistic and improbable that someone would suddenly decide to leave the bodyguards behind when going into the most suspicious situations imaginable. I’m not saying it has to be changed for everyone but it breaks my game for me, so I would really appreciate any help in finding out how to edit that.

[Oldtimer]

Hi all,

agree with Maltacus abt. fighters coming along with the skipper. IMO at all times.

Is it possible to buy a ship without losing your current one, spare officer present?
If yes then how?

Another thing, char relations: Pardal hates Speirdyke yet invites him to joint action. There are many more examples like that. Challenge to a duel should be more realistic and immersive, man vs man or ship vs ship.

I`ve played enough to submit a extensive Christmas wish list but will wait until Holidays are over. Just one very labor intensive wish: all ships to one scale to get realistic size differences between them.

Merry Christmas all,

Oldtimer

• This reply was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by Oldtimer.

[Vincent]

Oldtimer, you can buy a ship without trading in your current one to get it – now let’s see if I can explain how, since I kinda suck at that. So, when you go to buy a ship, there should be a vertical menu on the far left of the ship purchasing window, with an arrow at top and bottom. All you have to do is use the arows to scroll the selection box in that menu to an empty slot (the one with a parchment look and a ship drawing, IIRC), and then buy the ship you want – it will then be placed into the empty slot, giving you two ships in your now fledgling fleet! Let me know if that helped, will ya?

As for other matters, I agree that in many cases a captain’s fighters would come with – but I can also see it causing problems unless certain things get overhauled. Most caves – in particular the ones that have lots of halls and few rooms – would NOT be capable of hosting multiple characters in a useful fashion; they’d just get stuck in front of or behind you, and be utterly useless. Building interiors may be a bit better, but definitely not by much, and I absolutely HATE having fighter officers appear in my cabin (not only does it crowd up space and make moving around difficult, but it’s not very realistic to have them in your CAPTAIN’S CABIN all the time – it’s called stalking, and that’s bad, m’kay?). In the end, we would probably have to see some big overhauls for interior spaces before fighters can really tag along as something more than a major annoyance.

I do like the idea about character relations affecting what other captains tell the player in taverns, Oldtimer, and would also like to add behavior changes dependent on that relation level as well – some people really don’t like each other, so it makes sense that they would tend to challenge someone to a fight instead of offering work. You can also have NPCs who dislike you greet you with more hostile language, and act in a less helpful fashion overall as well.

I, too, am building up a bit of a wishlist, but I want to play the new update for a bit before finalizing it.

[Oldtimer]

@Vincent

Hi,

abt. confined spaces being crowded with your men, you can dismiss some temporarily before entering said space. With time you will learn how many can be comfortably allowed to follow.

Re ships buying I think I understand and will try your method.

THX for your attn.,

Oldtimer

[modernknight1]

WOW! Feedback! Amazing! Love it! Keep it coming.

So I’ve been traveling and just arrived at my destination this evening. So I am just now seeing this and just now getting Jeffrey’s combined update. I will test it tomorrow so that we can get it out to everyone for a Christmas present.

SO yeah just as Vincent stated, as long as you have a spare officer that can take over as captain of a new purchased ship, you never have to give up the one you have. I know the interface isn’t always intuitive, but once you get used to it, it is like second nature.

Second on officers being with you all of the time, this just isn’t possible for so many of the questlines without ruining the challenge. Jeffrey opened it up so that on beaches and places where the fights were damn near impossible, fighters make things much better. We can entertain case by case circumstances, but I enjoy a good challenge and once you get good at swordplay (find our tutorial) you can own whole groups on your own once you’ve leveled up a little. In fact I find that this game makes you “God Like”. Jeffrey and I discussed adding a toggle to options that allows you as a player to max leveling. So if you never want to go beyond level 15, you can set it there and that’s is where you will stay.

On the ships, I have to tell you that this is one place where I will be hard to budge. Their set up and classes have been determined after a great deal of thought and play (hundreds of hours) and it was not done lightly – but deliberately with great forethought.

Consider that our ship class system is not meant to reflect some sort of codified British navy class system of the 18th century.

Certainly the 17th century saw the beginnings of organized naval classification, but it was far from standardized or set in stone. In some cases (especially on the high end) the ships do conform to a sort of naval ship classification, however, I looked at this system as not just one of historical or capability classification, but also a system that could allow for better game balance both in encounters and in what players are allowed to play without penalties when.

Certainly the penalties are imposed to reflect that your player can not yet control that “CLASS” of vessel yet, however, when we examine the vessels in the lists, each has very deliberate strengths and weaknesses with regards to crew size, cargo capacity, speed and armament. Usually if it seems that a ship is too low of a class for its capabilities, examine it further. Historically was that type of vessel common and easy to handle? Is it unusually slow or can only mount small ordinance and house a limited crew? Suddenly that 50 gun ship doesn’t look so great when we see how small its guns are or how slow it is or the smallish crew compliment for its size. All of these things were taken into consideration.

I am always willing to consider moving ships around if one has a good reason. In fact, you will notice a few moves in the update because of player input. In addition, I continue to make new better skins all the time. I can always add another version of the same ship as a different class with different numbers and a slightly different appearance. This has already been done with several ships. This is not unrealistic in any way when we look at the wide range of capabilities present in historical ship examples given us in so many different sources of documentation. I myself have a soft spot for class 5 and 6 ships. love our variety and am always on the look out for more ships.

Looking forward to those wish lists fellas!

Thanks

MK

• This reply was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by modernknight1.

[Oldtimer]

Mr. Knight,

I think you misunderstood me re ships. I mean adjusting PHYSICAL ship sizes so that they conform with RL differences. Otherwise it`s me misunderstanding you.

Re officers accompanying you I both agree and disagree. Challenge is OK, fake challenge is not. Meaning if we have a totally unleveled game world(which I prefer) but want quests to be doable at any player lvl we must allow PC to compensate his low skills somehow.
Example: the invitation to a cave meeting you get, sometimes at lvl 1, one on one. IIR COAS correctly the enemy there is 20 lvls above you. I succeeded once and never take this mission anymore.

Leveled game world is OK provided quests become available FIRST when PC lvl makes the game think he/she has a fair chance of success.

Rgds,

Oldtimer

[Maltacus]

Merry christmas to all!

MK, it’s nice to see the feedback is appreciated. I know you have felt a lot of dissapointment at the lack of interest in the mod.

About the lone captain issue; I would like to point out that as I said I am not pressing the point that you should include fighter officers all time in the official release, but please tell people like me and Oldtimer how you did it when you added fighter officers in the des Moines etc – its a request for modding advice rather than implementing. Then we can mod our own versions to our liking and everyone gets the most out of their own gaming.

[Jeffrey]

I did DesMoines shore by looping and manually placing the fighters during the particular quest function in reaction_functions for when you land at shore_ship3 location, but I later discovered what is probably an easier way; I think where you find LAi_LocationFightDisable, where the 2nd parameter is true, disables the ability for your fighters to get loaded in the location (such as DesMoines during the quest, or Panama during Morgan). Find those and either remove or change 2nd parm to false and I believe your fighters will load in that location.

[Jeffrey]

OK, that last post was wrong. I did some digging, and the real function is LAi_LocationDisableOfficersGen, but it doesn’t work for that particular shore because the locator definitions in the model have the wrong group name (probably a typo); it is a bug. I will fix the locator file and I bet it works without the workaround.

Give me a bit to fix and test.

[Jeffrey]

Yep, that adjustment to the locator file fixed DesMoines; the workaround is no longer needed.

However, there are indeed some locations that are explicitly set to not allow fighters (e.g. Panama route). That is handled by that function: LAi_LocationDisableOfficersGen

[Jeffrey]

By the way, I peeked at a few of the inside locations (houses, rooms, etc.) and it will still disallow your fighter officers from spawning inside for fights such as the ‘dinner party’ or Isabella scene because of the same problem that Des Moines had; there are no ‘officer’ group locators. Now Des Moines was a typo error in that it had ‘officers’ group locators, but should have been ‘officers’ group, so I fixed that. This means my workaround is not necessary, but might prove useful for those other inside situations, if desired.

Those other scenes for insides, since they are lacking that ‘officers’ locator group, we would have to copy the method I used in reaction_functions.c, MC_DesMoinesInShore, where I looped through the fighter officers and used PlaceCharacter at a free, random locator within the location.

[Maltacus]

Very interesting! The code needed to place fighter officers in disallowing houses and similar locations would be this, right?

 //Boyer mod #20170318-33
    if(MOD_SKILL_ENEMY_RATE > 3){ //Go ahead and allow Hero's fighter officers...they will be needed and everyone will likely be killed anyway if not high enough level
    //#20170318-20
    for (i=1; i<=MAX_NUM_FIGHTERS; i++) {
	string officers = "Fellows.Passengers.Officers."+"id"+i;
        if(CheckAttribute(pchar, officers))
        {
  	   int iOfficer = sti(pchar.(officers));
	   if(iOfficer > -1){
           sld = GetCharacter(iOfficer);
	   //PlaceCharacter(sld, "goto", "random_must_be_near");
	   PlaceCharacter(sld, "goto", pchar.location);
	   }
        }
    }}

• This reply was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by Maltacus.

[Jeffrey]

Yes, that’s it. I noticed in my previous post, I confused things a bit. The problem with Des Moines is that it had ‘officer’ no plural as the locator group, but for your fighters to show, the model must have ‘officers’ with the ‘s’ for a locator group.

What I’ve found so far is that most of the inside model locations have no such group and that is the magic that prevents them from ever appearing, with no need to do anything in the script to prevent them. That bit of code you found from my workaround, will find locators in the ‘goto’ group and place your fighters, and all the models will have goto locators.

[Vincent]

Good to hearthat the feedback is appreciated, MK! Can’t wait to get my hands on the new update, it’ll make an awesome Christmas present!

[Jack]

Hello everyone,

I haven’t seen the question posted anywhere (or maybe I haven’t looked hard enough), so I’ll just ask it here.

I saw a post from Jeffery in the Bugs forum; he’d posted a picture of his character (Jacquotte Delahaye I think), but with a different outfit on.

If possible, how can I swap outfits on my characters?

[Maltacus]

Some characters change their look when they wear one of the different clothing outfits that you can find (quite rare). Some also change their outfit when wearing a cuirass, instead of showing it wearing a (seemingly not so fitting) cuirass on top of everything else. Jacquotte is or used to be one of those characters, changing to blue when wearing anything new, be it a beggars rags or a shining Spanish plate.

[Jack]

Ah I see, I’ll have to keep an eye out.

I assume that I can just equip these outfits like a cuirass then?

[modernknight1]

Eventually a bunch of characters will have more outfits. My first attempts at character textures were very amateurish and I am reworking a bunch of them now that I have got really good at this. So the Hans Sloane texture (Dr. House) with the white hair is getting a complete overhaul because so many don’t like him.

There were almost several other characters that made it into the update that I almost have finished but they will have to wait. We are working on SO MUCH NEW STUFF!!!

Eventually I hope to have new breastplate outfits for all of the female characters and many of the main male characters.

Each outfit is a whole different texture for that same model – that takes time gents.

MK

[Jack]

Exciting! That’s great to hear.

Just coming from GOF 1.2 and 2.0, all this new stuff is awesome 😀

[Oldtimer]

Hi all,

I promised feedback and ideas after holidays but I think I will do it after playing with the upcoming new ver. Seems like a better idea.

What I am very interested in is stowage chests on ships without cabin. Why? Well, I would like to make a playthrough with such a ship. I am a dedicated single SMALL ship player.
If adding chests to these is not doable, then perhaps you could leave items for safe keeping with port control, moneylender or tavern, for a small fee. These items could be lost if the city in question is sacked.

Another thing, ability to take crewmen along with you after mooring. A shore party as it were. Perhaps via the “think aloud” function while onboard.

Rgds, Oldtimer

• This reply was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by Oldtimer.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by Oldtimer.

[Jeffrey]

Cabins will be opened up for class 7 ships in the next update. It will be available for existing saves, so no new game required.

The crew party mentioned is being debated/considered.

[Oldtimer]

THX awfully!

Rgds, Oldtimer

[Oldtimer]

Hi all,

a question abt. perks:

– they work, according to description only when relevant officers are appointed. But,

– what abt. player perks like, player has increased speed, navigator does not. Will the ship benefit from increased speed anyway or?

Same but regarding NPC officers in players crew?

Rgds, Oldtimer

• This reply was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by Oldtimer.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by Oldtimer.

[Jeffrey]

The description mentioning only when assigned to relevant officers is a holdover from COAS, that has never been changed, and is a bit misleading. Here’s how they work:

You can assign yourself the ship perk, and it will have effect, with/without any officer in the correlated position. So if you assign yourself ‘quick reload’ for cannons, it will work even without a gunner.

However, if you assign those perks to a ship officer, they must hold the related position on your ship for that perk to work. So if you assign an officer ‘medic’, but they are the navigator, it won’t work as that person has to hold the Doctor position.

Since it is unlikely you will gain enough experience/points fast enough in the beginning to cover all the bases yourself, it is suggested to assign officers into positions where their skill points in that position exceed yours (if theirs are higher, during battle their skills will be used if they are in the position for that field of expertise), AND they have more of the related perks for that particular position, so that you get the benefit of their higher skill points and the perks.

If you look at the Character screen, click on Ship Perks, the green highlights mean that you don’t have the perk, but your officer does and you get the benefit, the brighter white means you hold that perk, and the more faded are the perks you are missing from both yourself and your officer.

[Oldtimer]

Righty,

I understood captains perks correctly then. Abt. officer perks perhaps I was not clear:

– Gunner has God of Death, no Musket volley but bosun has Musket volley, only. Will the ship benefit from it?

THX for your attn., Oldtimer

[Maltacus]

Yes, musket volley is a bosun skill and god of death is a chief gunner skill so your ship will benefit from both. It’s a bit counter-intuitive that a gunnery skill is the prerequisite.

[Oldtimer]

THX for your attn.,

Rgds, Oldtimer

[modernknight1]

@ Jack,

Thanks for the enthusiastic comment. We are pretty proud of our work and its just going to get better.

MK

[Jack]

This might qualify as a bug, but is also the reason for my asking; whenever I perform an upgrade on a ship, be it hull integrity through to cannon size, the sails change to the really moldy looking ones.

So, is it possible to change what type of sails my ship uses?

[Oldtimer]

Yeah, these horrible sails drive me up the wall.

Rgds, Oldtimer

[Maltacus]

My thoughts as well. It would be cool to have mouldy sails after a storm or so but when repaired they would turn back to the standard texture. The sail textures are located in

(hard drive folder)\ERAS2.6\RESOURCE\Textures\Ships

…and the mouldy ones are called “parus_common.tga.tx”. You can replace that and be rid of the mouldy texture both before and after an upgrade. Copy another sail texture, perhaps the nicely detailed “parus_dirty.tga.tx”, to another locations, rename it to “parus_common.tga.tx” and paste back in and overwrite the old file. Totally compatible with saved games and so on.

I agree that it is a bug that sails change look after modifications of other things than the sails themselves.

[Jack]

Oh awesome, thanks for the help.

You don’t happen to know what the clean white sails are called do you?

[Maltacus]

That should be the “parus_silk.tga.tx”, that texture is very white anyway.

[Maltacus]

How do you initiate a duel/brawl in the tavern? It’s mentioned in the vanilla game manual but apart from the sellers of fake treasure maps I have never understood how you challenge people to a duel. When you threaten insulting patrons the tavern keeper always threatens with calling for the guards and nothing more happens.

[modernknight1]

OK WOW! So this discussion on sails threw me for a loop. An ugly moldy texture should not be appearing on standard ships. Sure I have some patched ones (a new black one in the update which looks much more realistic which I just did a few weeks ago in fact) – but this texture you mention is not in my game. So I got thinking and then I realized just based on your description of it – what happened.

Its an old one I imported a LONG time ago in testing new things out.

When Jeffrey was doing the texture rewrite for the entire game to make ALL our textures more efficient, many textures that were duplicates were thrown out. The game reads textures both from the Resource/textures/ file AND the RESOURCE/textures/Ships file. So after we talked about it on the phone we verified that that ugly one you guys hate was accidentally used to overwrite the intended one as the standard sail texture. Sorry very much about this – they both had the same name you see.

Jeffrey has already made the fix and the old one is back in place. Maybe if more people would actually post screenshots I could have caught this AGES AGO!!! It was not happening in my game you see because I never replace my resource content in my running test version because most of the new RESOURCE and texture content come from ME – I am the source.

Again sorry – this would have been immersion destroying for me. I wish I had known about this back when it first started to happen.

FIXED in the update!

MK

• This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by modernknight1.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by modernknight1.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by modernknight1.

[Maltacus]

MK, move that poor screenshot thread to this main forum here so people see it more!
“Golden Age & Pirate related Books, Movies, Videos, and Documentaries” is not where you expect to find it. Also, if it is possible, could you edit the first post in it to include a description of how you go about to capture screens in the game, find them, and post them on this site? Such very basic practical things is a far greater obstacle than one might think, I know from experience.

There is another sail texture apart from “parus_common.tga.tx” that show the mouldy sails, in a more (!!!) torn version, don’t remember the name unfortunately. Don’t know if it’s relevant if you will change it so the game no longer reads from RESOURCE/textures/Ships but I’m throwing it out none the less.

[modernknight1]

Thanks for the heads up Maltacus.

Yeah we will get rid of it. We might use those in the future in the DLCs somewhere or quests, but after you take the ship you could change it to a regular sail when you repair it. None of the ships in the game should have shredded sail textures. Some have the stripped or patched or black or crimson sails – but NONE are shredded. Never intended – totally accidental.

MK

[Anton]

Good morning, I wanted to ask a little question about a topic that is breaking my mind. The issue is that the vast majority of the time I talk to a smuggler, he tells me that he can not meet because he has other businesses and almost always (90% of the time) I fail the mission of the governors. My question is if there is any way to kill the smuggler even if I do not meet with him. I also mention that sometimes when speaking with the clients of the taverna they tell me that X person is going to meet with the smugglers in a specific place, but as before, it happens very rarely. Please help me with this problem.

The mod that I have installed is the Moderknight’s GOF: Privateers & Profit mod # 2 Version 2.7.0 the golden age.

[Anton]

Sorry for the tag, didn’t know it

[Oldtimer]

Hi all,

started as pirate, paid up for peacing out with France. France is neutral on the nations screen, but their forts and ships still attack me. I`m also attacked by city guards. Sometimes I see a message: France has identified you as a threat. Why is that?

BTW, I fly English flag when I try dealing with France.

Rgds, Oldtimer

[Jeffrey]

The relations mechanisms remain unchanged from COAS and may not be entirely intuitive.

If you are a pirate, the ‘nation’ relations take precedence, and if you review the screen, every other nation is enemy with Pirate. So even if you fly another flag, there is still a chance, based on your stealth, number of ships, rate of ships (lower rate numbers have increased chance of discovery, as does a larger number in your squadron), and some of your luck, determines whether they recognize you as a threat and proceed to attack you.

That ‘neutral’ or ‘hostile’ rating also comes into play, where if you are ‘neutral’ to France, there is a lower chance of them deeming you a threat, than if you were ‘hostile’. Also, that relation continues to worsen if you ever kill or attack that nation, and eventually, once you exceed ‘hostile’, you will now have a bounty on your head. So, by paying to revert back to ‘neutral’, all you’ve done is increase your chance to ‘sneak’ into port, assuming you are flying a friendly flag to disguise yourself.

That’s how COAS works, and as such remains the same for ERAS.

[Oldtimer]

Well,

not very intuitive as you say. Actually I see no reason to pay for neutral relations as the game is now. Better to save that cash and buy a LoM when tired of pirating.

THX for your attn.,

Oldtimer

[modernknight1]

You know this gets me thinking…. dangerous I know. Wouldn’t it be great if we could base the hostility factor on “FAME” points rather than nation flag. Certainly if you have a good reputation with that nation, you can sail right into the port provided you fly a friendly/neutral flag. However, even if you ARE a pirate, if you just haven’t done anything to distinguish yourself yet or become famous at a low level, even if you do sail into a hostile port, as long as you are flying their flag, no one cares – because you are a “nobody”.

It would be cool if we could add a fame scale along side the reputation functions.

MK

[Oldtimer]

Fame AND rep? Looks like AoP 2 if I am not mistaken and that is good. AoP 2 was not all bad by far.

On stealth calculation I wonder what makes your stealth skill increase?
I think that flying english colours as a pirate and being attacked because recognized as a limey by, say, the Dutch, should increase your stealth. Is that so?

Rgds, Oldtimer

[Christoph]

Hi Buccaneers,

let’s see if I get this posted after modernknight1 (thanks for that) changed something in my profil.

Sometime in these games (ERAS, COAS, TEHO…) I like to simply do trading and enjoy the life at sea :)))
This is not quite easy because of the pirates and military patrols, what a surprise :)))).

What I never find, may be it exists here, is a possibility to join a regular trading convoy, to have some more protection.
Something like when traders ask me in the tavern if they can join me and I am the protector, but the other way around.

Is there a possibility like that?

Cheers

[Jeffrey]

That sounds like a nice feature. I can’t promise anything soon, but I think the idea is a good one and will add it for the ‘to do’ list of things/features we plan to add to the game.

I’m currently working on a really nice surprise feature right now, that is taking precedence over any other right now.

[Maltacus]

In my latest game I noticed that the other captains don’t gain levels when competition is turned off in the mod options. I don’t have the very latest update but the version before that.
Is this a bug or is it a consequence of competition being turned off? I think they gained levels before even with competition disabled.

[Jeffrey]

Can you do me a favor and make sure you get the latest update, then continue playing? My intent was if you toggle that option, they should still gain experience, but no longer ‘steal’ the services from you.

However, just prior to the last update, I did find I made a mistake in the part of the code for testing that option where I did this:

if(xcondition);
return;

You will note that I mistakenly put a semicolon after the if() and while syntactically, that is correct and causes no compile error (it just does nothing if the condition is true), it caused the rest of the logic to never execute because logically, the very next statement caused the function to exit because in every case it would ‘return’ out, so nothing that followed would ever execute. I just corrected that in my latest upload a day or so ago.

If after some time in your game, if they still fail to gain experience, report back and I will have to further look.

Thanks.

[Maltacus]

I’ll try that, and hope my character survives long enough to see a difference.

[Maltacus]

Yes, that seemed to do the trick. I turned on competition and competitors ranks have gone up. I’ll see if they seem to continue once I disable task competition again. Thanks a lot, Jeffrey.

[Christoph]

@Jeffry: So obviously this feature realy doesn’t exist. Also I am happy you think it is a good idea. If you want I can propose to formulate, how could think it should work. I kind of pre-work/thinking, without knowing if this is possible to implement. Let me know. Cheers

[Christoph]

Another question regarding “The letter of marque”. I read, that the letter of marque is the entry for the national question line. To get a letter of marque you have resolve tasks from the gouvernor. So far so good. Is there anything else, any advantage linked to the letter of marque? Or in other words. If you don’t want to go for the national quest line, is it worse to get a letter of marque? Do I have any advantage of that?

[Oldtimer]

Hi,

AFAIU if you attack a ship from a nation your country is at war with without a LoM, everybody will tag you as a pirate.

Rgds, Oldtimer

[Christoph]

hmmm, I am pritty sure that is what I did a couple of times, but I have no problem to enter ports from England or France. There is no sign, that anybody is considering me as pirate.

[Oldtimer]

Could confuse the thing with other pirate games. The devs should have a definite answer.

Rgds, Oldtimer

[Jeffrey]

As far as I know, the only reason for a LoM, is to engage a national quest line. I can’t think of anywhere that it provides any benefit, other than that.

If you attack any ships your base nation (regardless the flag you currently fly, but your base nation that you started the game) is at war/unfriendly, it does no harm toward any nation that is friendly. So if you are French, and attack Spain or Pirate, you are fine. If you are English, and attack Dutch, Pirate, Spanish, you are fine. If you attack a friendly nation, that specific nation starts becoming hostile, then offers a bounty on your head. If you have a LoM, if you attack any friendly nation, you lose the LoM and any gained title.

If you start becoming hostile, it also becomes more difficult to sneak in their ports under a false flag.

[Christoph]

Thanks. I am not sure, but it could also be, that there is reputation drop if you attack without LoM. I attacked a group of dutch ships and after have sink one of them my rep decreased.

Anyway another question. I took a task from the Gouvernor of St.John to kill some smugglers with 3 days. I sailed around the island, I ran around in the jungle and couldn’t find anything. I controled ships I found near the port…. I have no clue what I have to do.. any hint, idea ?

[Jeffrey]

You need to have at least one unit of contraband, on any ship in your squadron (they are red items in the store). After accepting the mayor mission, go to the tavern (or to the store first and buy at least one contraband; you need it for the correct smuggler dialog to show) and speak to the smuggler and tell him you want to sell. They will arrange a meeting at one of the shores of your current island. Go there, tell the smugglers they are very bad (LOL) and kill them. Return to the mayor.

[Christoph]

Thanks Jeff.

Coming back to the LoM, I am asking myself how many jobs I have to finish before I get the LoM offered and if the jobs should be done with one Governor. What I mean is. If I would have to finish 10 jobs successfully, is it 10 in total independent which governor (of course from one nation) or do I need to finish 10 jobs for one governor?

[Jeffrey]

I’m not 100% sure, but I don’t think all the missions need to be completed for one town mayor and can be several. The number is random, between 5 and 10 for when he will offer you the LoM.

[Christoph]

What to do with money? I know a bit of a strange question, but I realized, that over time, especially when you have better ships and officers it is not that hard to get more and more money. But for what? I am sure there are many ways to spend your money in game, but also many hidden ways. What else can I do with my money, as buying ships, goods ? Is there a point in getting more an more money? Buying house? Buying titels? Buying a plantage……

[modernknight1]

I like to put my money in the banks. I like to buy my favorite ships and put them in storage. I also like to perform every upgrade on my favorite ships which usually makes me flat broke if I do two ships at the same time.

Jeffrey and I are trying to figure out how we could bury treasure as a future capability as well.

MK

[Christoph]

@Jeff: I know you find it a good idea and may be you want to put this to your internal list (without any expectations of course)

I quickly put together, how I could see a trade convoy feature to work.

————————–
Entering the port masters office and in one
of the commuication options with the port master there is new option to ask for upcoming trade convoys.

–> Offering 0 – 3 upcoming convoys within the next 5 days ( or less)
with target cities of the same nation, but may be not on the next island.

–> I decide for one convoy and sign in and I have to pay a certain fee
(I could also see, that you join in as protector ship and get money paid)

–> The day when the convoy is leaving, I have to jump one my ship in the harbor
and I have to sail to the convoy outside of the harbor. I have to get to the flagship
and report there.

–> Then the convoy starts! Now I could see 2 options, depeneding on what is easier to achieve.

1.) I get an information screen, that the convoy is on it’s way and if nothing happens,
I will find myself in the target port. If the convoy encounters enemies or storm, the game puts me and the
convoy into the action.

2.) Or I can see the convoy moving over the map (without having control over it)

————————–

[Christoph]

I have a question to the more experienced guys. When going for a higher level when starting a new game, which game elements are going to change? I guess see fights, melee combat, …

But also leveling, getting experience…? And what else is changing?

Thanks

[Maltacus]

When you fence; do you gain experience/personal skill points based on the total damage you inflict or the number of hits you make?
Is it better to inflict 10 hits dealing 10 damage each instead of one hit dealing 100 damage, experience-wise?
Does the same apply for pistols?
When you play cards or dice, how is experience gained? Is it the amount of money spent, or gained, or is it the amount of cards and dices bought, or amount of games won or played?

[Jeffrey]

Did not know, so had to look up the code and mentally follow the logic to find out. Here’s what I found:

Gun, experience based on damage amount: higher damage = higher experience

If enemy immortal, nothing
If miss, nothing

Blade experience based on damage amount: higher damage = higher experience

If enemy has fewer points than damage inflicted, the damage is reduced to remaining HP for experience calculation

Cards and dice, higher stakes gains more experience, multiplied by number of wins or losses, where wins gain more experience than losses

[Maltacus]

So in my example, is it neutral for the experience whether you kill the enemy with 10 hits dealing 10 damage each instead of one hit dealing 100 damage? Or does the game reward highly damaging hits to the point where a few of those are worth more than many weak hit, amounting to the same total damage?

[Filipe]

Does some of the weapons like the Neptunus sword have a hidden feature or its just like any other sword with just plain damage?

[modernknight1]

No. However its not like any ordinary sword because it has extremely high damage numbers assigned to it and it is worth such an incredibly high amount that you could almost buy a fleet with it. No magic weapons in ERAS.

MK

[Jeffrey]

None of the weapons have any special feature that I’m aware of.

[Filipe]

hmm good to know, I thought that as being the starter sword for Davy Jones it could have something special with it.
so just to understand it clearly the mod doesn’t have any type of special ability within weapons and so neither item in general?

• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by Filipe.

[modernknight1]

Items can give you bonuses based on what they are just like the books. Compass or navigation devices give navigation bonus. etc, etc, etc…

The only thing that could be considered somewhat magical is that some religious items can give luck bonuses. I explain in the narrative – motivation and state of mind (BELIEF) causes luck. Think of Dumbo’s Feather. He didn’t actually need it to fly – but he thought he did.

MK

[Filipe]

ok thanks for the response, I was about to keep using that sword but I have some substitutes

[Christoph]

Hi again, I am a bit confused about my reputation. My reputation is going done and I am not aware of doing something wrong. Now my question: Does the reputation of my officers have an impact on my reputation? So if I have swindler and scoundrel in my team, does this have an effect on my reputation as well?

[Filipe]

As far as I know, the reputation will always return to the regular sailor if u don’t do bad or good actions for some time.

[Christoph]

Yes, but I went to “swindler” from regular sailor without doing any bad, I was even only doing good things

[Jolie Rouge]

I don’t even have any officers and my reputation went down to bloody assassin just for defending my ship and the cargo and searching corpses and chests.
Don’t know what’s considered bad with doing that; nothing has changed after getting a patent.
Would think it’s a bit off balance since being good would mean to let them board and kill you.

[Filipe]

Which are the characters with weird attack animations like Davy Jones?

[Oldtimer]

CONSTRAINED HEROES.

Hi all,

the above works on new game only. Should I enable this from start screen options before creating a profile or can I do so when a new char is already done, before first save?

Rgds, Oldtimer

[Jeffrey]

You must toggle that option BEFORE clicking New Game on the menu. Once you’ve selected a character and started the game, it’s too late as all the other NPC heroes are now already in the game and there is no easy way to remove them.

For some reason, it never dawned on me at the time (probably just habit of adding on/off toggles to the mod options screen), but I now realize the better way, would have been to add that toggle option on the actual character selection screen, to make it more clear that you are starting the game with that option.

I will look into making that change.

[Oldtimer]

Righty,

I did toggle that on before “New Game” but:

– when loading a save on that game I checked “mod options” ingame and the heroes were untoggled. Are they?

THX for your attn.,

Oldtimer

[Jeffrey]

If you did that, I’m near certain the NPC heroes outside your time period are in the game. You can check by loading your game, then pressing F10. Scroll to the bottom of that list and if there are fewer than 146 (they are named hero_xx), then it worked.

When you load a save game, that option toggle reverts back to the default, Off, but it doesn’t matter anymore to the session you are playing, because the new game process never even created characters outside your time period, and the option value is no longer even checked. It’s only checked right when you click OK for new game, and then it chooses who to create and who to skip. After that, the option value is no longer needed for reference in that particular game.

Anyway, I think it’s better to remove that option from Mod Options, and put it on the character selection for New Games, and I’ve already got that done. It will be in the next update.

[Oldtimer]

Mr. Jeffrey,

used F10 and voilà, there are way less heroes then 146. It works…

Rgds, Oldtimer

[Oldtimer]

Hi all,

why do bermuda sloops and petite luggers not show up for sale at shipyards?

Rgds, Oldtimer

[Filipe]

Is there a way to respawn the dead citizen of the LSC? In the fight against the Casper clan some of them got in trouble when I did too much noise, so in the recruiting part, I just cant end because there’s not enough alive.

[Schiavonna]

@ Oldtimer

Find this line in ERAS\Program\scripts\ShipsUtilites.c

FillShipParamShipyard(NPChar, GenerateStoreShip(SHIP_TARTANE), “ship1”);

…and change to:

FillShipParamShipyard(NPChar, GenerateStoreShip(SHIP_PINK), “ship1”);

Your ‘petite lugger’ will ALWAYS spawn in shipyards now.

NEXT, go to the line under it:

iTest_ship = rand(14);

Dont touch that, but the line immediately after it – this one:

if (iTest_ship == 1) FillShipParamShipyard(NPChar, GenerateStoreShip(SHIP_WAR_TARTANE), “ship2”);

Change that to:

if (iTest_ship == 1) FillShipParamShipyard(NPChar, GenerateStoreShip(SHIP_BERMSLOOP), “ship2”);

Now there is small chance of a bermuda sloop spawning each time at shipyard from level 1.

You can swap them around if you prefer so it looks like this:

FillShipParamShipyard(NPChar, GenerateStoreShip(SHIP_BERMSLOOP), “ship1”);

iTest_ship = rand(14);
if (iTest_ship == 1) FillShipParamShipyard(NPChar, GenerateStoreShip(SHIP_PINK), “ship2”);

– If you’d prefer the sloop to always spawn.

N.B. That very first line in the original code –

FillShipParamShipyard(NPChar, GenerateStoreShip(SHIP_TARTANE), “ship1”);

…Always spawns that ship 100% of the time – or whatever ship’s codename you put in there. Everything else after that line is set to random spawn, so sometimes it spawns, sometimes it doesn’t.

Quicksave when you enter shipyard for the FIRST time and check the ships for sale roster, then reload your save. You’ll notice different ships available after reloading several times. It wont update if you have accessed it before – the game saves the most recently visited shipyard roster/list and will then stick with that particular “load-out” of ships till you visit another port. This process repeats itself with each port and shipyard you visit. Hope that helps

[Oldtimer]

Hi all,

after installing latest updates I noticed that a fully loaded ship with low nav skill is so slow in 3D-mode that fighting becomes almost impossible. World map speed seems to be unaffected.
When I chucked the cargo overboard the speed increased significantly and it was possible to fight.

In ships interface these different speeds showed up so I`d like to know if this is a WAD or not. I can email a save if someone is interested.

AFAIR it wasn`t like that before.

Rgds, Oldtimer

• This reply was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by Oldtimer.

[Oldtimer]

Hi all,

IIRC there is a merchant who acts like a fence and buys off your goods irrespectively of your rep. So no need for Honest Face perk. Do I remember correctly and if so, who is he?

Rgds, Oldtimer

[Marty]

I’m not positive on this, but you might try either bermuda or boddon’s landing. Unless you’re referring to the smugglers, who you can find in taverns. However smugglers only buy goods that are illegal in that particular city.

[Oldtimer]

THX for your attn. Will check this out.
IMO all pirate shopkeepers should be fences and offer lower then normal prices when buying from PC and higher when selling to him.
After all they are a part of a criminal network.

Rgds, Oldtimer

[Oldtimer]

Well, I tested ordinary shops as a Bloody Assassin and there was no service refusal and why should there be? Money does not have a smell, right?
Rgds, Oldtimer

[modernknight1]

There is a new feature here now. If you’re told the shop keeper is too busy which happens when there are other competing captains in port – you will now see an additional dialogue available which allows you to threaten the shop keeper or ask him basically – “do you know who you’re talking to?” If you are a nobody, he will blow you off. If you have a decent level and reputation (low or high – bloody assassin or hero) he will make an exception for you and allow you to trade. If you make the threat as a hero, your reputation will take a ding.

Aaron

[Oldtimer]

Yeah,

I saw that, good feature. BTW another suggestion of mine submitted long ago was to be able to challenge/threaten the merchant when he insults you. How abt. implementing that?

He could then accept the challenge(and maybe hire a stand-in, perfectly acceptable at the time), buy you off or offer an interesting item from his stock.

Rgds, Oldtimer

[Pasquale]

Hi guys, excuse my English, I wanted to tell you that I highly appreciate your work and have made this game wonderful, I was wondering if it were possible to have a translation of the game in Italian, I thank you in advance and again congratulations for the work done.

[Jeffrey]

Unfortunately there are only two people that work on this game and neither of us know Italian language, so we can’t provide a translation. Sorry.

[Oldtimer]

Hi all,

how do I activate an ability? I have quick repair, my ship is badly damaged and I do not see where/how to use that ability.

Rgds, Oldtimer

[modernknight1]

Its in your ship GUI command tab that allows you to give commands to all of the ships in your squadron. So you can quick repair other ships than your own if your captain on that ship has the perk. There is light repair and quick repair. If you have them they will appear as a visual option left to right with others in the tab. For light repair it can only be activated when yours or a companion ship is very damaged to the point its about to sink. For the quick repair you and your carpenter (or on a companion ship the captain you’ve assigned) MUST have that perk before it can be used – in addition, you must have BOTH wood and canvas available or it will not be an available choice in the line up to use.

Aaron

[Oldtimer]

@Modernknight

Looks like my ship was not damaged enough to qualify for light repair, had abt. 70% hull and 50% sail left.

THX for your attn.,

Oldtimer

[Oldtimer]

Bounty Hunters.

Hi all,

bounty hunters at sea, can they or their captains surrender? I have not seen that happen and I REALLY would like them surrendering now and then. So I could throw them overboard now and then…

BTW, the old printed game manual says that bounty will never disappear wholly but can decrease if player does good deeds. What deeds and to whom, if so?

IIRC though, someone stated that if you kill enough bounty hunters they will be scared of you and leave you alone. Is that true?

Rgds, Oldtimer

[PetiteFrigate]

I had a huge bounty before I completely understood the system and even though I killed them and captured their ships, they never quit chasing me. I had to speak with the Pirate Diplomat to finally get rid of my bounty.

I’m wondering, how does Realistic Ships Encounters affect the spawns on the map? I think I noticed the smaller pirate sloop spawns being faster ships instead of lighter frigates.

[Oldtimer]

THX for your attn.,

Oldtimer

[Anton]

Hi all,
Is my fisrt time playing ERAS 2 2.8 and I was surprise when I find out that there is a New portuguese faction in the game, so my question is.
Where I can find the portuguese colonies??

Thanks.

[Jeffrey]

There are not yet any Portuguese colonies. For now, there are just ship encounters/convoys.

[Anton]

Ooh I see.
Thanks for the answer.

[Anton]

Another question that I have is that every time I start a naval battle in the game, I can’t stop seen my crew dying faster than the enemy’s crew ship, even if I use grapes shots and he is using bombs, my crew die faster than his crew and it’s quite frustrating.
Anyone know if there is a way to solve this??

I’m playing ADMIRAL difficult BTW.

[Jeffrey]

Simple…go to Options, uncheck “Show Information about ships at sea” Now, you will no longer see your white bars decrease so rapidly and the enemy white bars stay strong…LOL

OK, serious answer…

Playing on Admiral, your enemies are going to be a bit more savvy. As such, they probably have a few of the ship perks that you will want to acquire yourself:

God of Death – either acquire this perk yourself, or appoint a Gunner that has it; Master Gunner will also help, but God of Death is a prerequisite, so get GoD first.

Medic and Life Saver: either acquire these perks yourself, or appoint a Surgeon that has them.

You can go to the Character screen, click the Ship perks tab, then double-click these perks to see their effects. God of Death increases enemy crew damage by 15%, Medic reduces crew casualties by 10% and Life Saver reduces casualties by 20%.

[Anton]

I see, well is true that I don’t have a Surgeon yet.
Okey, thanks a lot. Now I have a task, get a damn Medic and improve my gunner

Thanks for all

[modernknight1]

We are planning to implement multiple stores in several of the larger colonies. Curacao and New Middleburg Surinam (which is not in the game yet) will each have a Portuguese store and trader that can give Portuguese missions. We will probably put one at Port Royal Jamaica and Cumana as well.

MK/Aaron

[Oldtimer]

Hi,

sounds great. BTW, a big flaw IMO is that PC is attacked by pirates when a pirate himself. It`s really bad for immersion.
Please make a toggle at least where this “feature” can be turned off.

Rgds, Oldtimer

[modernknight1]

Jeff and I will talk about it. We have been talking about some other mod option toggles as well – a couple that have been on our very long list for quite a while now.

Let me also just say that there are known historical examples of both pirate rivalries that turned violent as well as pirates that deliberately attacked and and killed other pirates – especially pirates of a nationality they didn’t like.

There were a good many French corsairs during the War of Spanish Succession that attacked Dutch kapers and vice versa. This would have been fine if they were strictly privateers – but they weren’t – there was a fine line sometimes during our favored era between pirates and privateers.

MK/Aaron

[Oldtimer]

Mr. Knight,

firstly I`m glad that the login issue is solved.

Secondly, you are quite right in your comment. Still, the general rule seems to be that pirates did not routinely attack eachother.

What made me think here is that according to Mr. Jeffrey pirates attacking pirate PC were a std “feature” of COAS. But they did not attack me until a couple of updates ago. How that came to be I do not know.

THX for your attn.,

Oldtimer

[Oldtimer]

Repair statue.

How does it work? When on PC person, on Carpenters person and/or when in ships inventory(chest)?

Rgds, Oldtimer

[Jeffrey]

Unfortunately, when the GOF modders introduced the Skill Books, they took away all the bonus points for nearly all the other bonus items (Teno totems, statues, artifacts). So that statue is now useless for bonus in ERAS too, because ERAS evolved from GOF 1.2.

[Oldtimer]

In that case all useless bonus items should be removed from the game world or have a large monetary value to make the effort needed to acquire them worthwile or have the bonuses readded.

THX for your attn.,

Oldtimer

[Samir]

Has anyone ever gotten this random quest called The golden fleet? I have been playing COAS/ERAS for years and I have never bumped into this quest, but I saw it on a website:

(thanks to 2ndMate from Pirates Ahoy! forum)

The quest start on the 1st day of the Month.
Depending on the Month given by Barkeep or Drunkards.
On the 1st day,
The ship will sail from Town X,
The ship gather their goods.
Now they will transfer the goods to Town Y,
The destination.
This ship can be intercept near Town Y on Sea Mode.
The the ship/convoy has Yellow sails in Map mode.
I have intercept the fleet, All of the fleet are Class 1 Ships.
Manowar, SOTL and Battleships
They carry a full load of goods.

https://sites.google.com/site/skodacoas/home/random-quests/golden-fleet

[modernknight1]

Not to be an ass but this almost seems like Noob question.

Haven’t you seen the many screenshots I’ve posted showing me fight the Spanish treasure fleets. Frankly that is one of my favorite missions and in ERAS2 Jeffrey and I made it so it is possible to face up to 50 ships in the treasure fleet.

There’s even a button on the dev console that can generate it if you are sick of waiting or you missed it (were too late). It is generated numerous times – its not a one time only thing. I LOVE going after the treasure fleets!!!!

MK

[Gnat]

Sorry, no answer on the golden quest… though I found the same reference to it as you.

I have two questions regarding ERAs 2:

1) Does PANQL (play all national quest lines) definitely work? I have the accelerate PANQL option enabled, but after finishing the Dutch quest line and getting a French letter of marque I can’t get the French governor to offer me anything– I get the same conversation about rumors that I’m allied with the Dutch. I tried going back to make sure I finished everything in the Dutch quest line, and I’m quite certain I did. I’ve tried boosting my reputation with the French, but that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

2) Does the Ship of Souls quest definitely work? I was to the point where I was collecting cursed pearls, and I had one governor ask me to defend the port against skeletons. Since then, I have religiously tried and savescummed to try to get another governor to ask me to fight the skeletons after the 20th each month, but no offers.

Thanks,

Gnat

[modernknight1]

Gosh I’m sorry Gnat, there are so few interested in this game these days that we don’t advertise our development often.

To answer you questions. 1) NO – PANQL is not currently active in your version of the game. HOWEVER, its funny that you mention this because Jeffrey and I have been in the process of finishing it to work for the last couple of months. That is what I am doing right NOW!!!

I have successfully done the French and English questlines and am about to start the Spanish. The way we implemented it is that it does not have to be done in any particular order. After you get done with one about a month passes and you will get a notification that everything has gone back to how it was. So any cities that were taken before go back to who they belonged with originally. The reason this has been difficult is that Jeffrey has had to do a lot of fixing her with regards to nation nationality and neutrality with forts, citizens, soldiers and governors. While testing I would go into one of the cities that had been taken before and it would still have its English governor in the Spanish town and even though the soldiers were Spanish the citizens and fort would stay English with no flag. So there was a lot of sorting out to do and Jeffrey only just got it finished. We are not ready to release the update yet until I have successfully got through the Spanish questline with only the Dutch one left.

2) After you fight the skeletons you have to go and talk to the governor of the town and get a reward before you can fight them again somewhere else. I have done that myself and you have to go back to the city where you last fought them and talk to the governor. Its a simple mistake and I’m pretty sure thats whats happening with you.

MK

• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by modernknight1.

[modernknight1]

You have to fight them between the 10th and 20th (not after the 20th).

[Gnat]

Modern Knight,

Thanks for the response, very detailed and helpful– I appreciate the complexity of the task you all have taken on. I’m guessing from your description of testing PANQL that you don’t necessarily have to follow the Dutch, French, English, Spanish sequence of the original mod since you started with the French? Sorry about mentioning the 20th on Ship of Souls… I was just misremembering. I’m sure you’re right I need to check with the governor. Wouldn’t be the first time I missed a trigger in this game.

Somehow I still like COAS/GOF/ERAS best after a few playthroughs. I tried POTC, but the interface and GPU timing problems just made it unsatisfying. TEHO doesn’t look particularly different from ERAS, so I haven’t really considered it.

[modernknight1]

TEHO is worth a playthrough but is very frustrating just starting out – on a closed quest stairstep beginning (although I’ve heard that’s changed since I played last). The main thing I don’t like about TEHO is their very limited ships choices. The ships they have are very nice – but so few.

MK

[Oldtimer]

Ship upgrades.

Hi all,

wanted to upgrade speed of my chaloupe. Exorbitant materials count plus
c. 160 000 gold. How are upgrade cost calculated?

BTW, I upgraded some larger ships with heavier cannon and improved manouverability. Their cost seems acceptable. IMO the effect on manouverability is too high, one gets more than one paid for(sic!), like an improvement of 8-9. Totally unrealistic.

Recalculating upgrade costs per ship type would be too much work I suspect but perhaps classwise(1 – 7)?

Rgds, Oldtimer

[Oldtimer]

Smugglers have bad business sense!

They attack to rob me now and then though I am friends with them. That`s lame… After some successful deals these attacks should terminate.

Rgds, Oldtimer

• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Oldtimer.

[Oldtimer]

Dear devs,

upgraded ERAS yesterday and would like to know if there are new and/or reskinned ships added. I see some I do not recognize and they look gorgeous!

THX awfully for your hard work and dedication!

Rgds, Oldtimer

[Oldtimer]

Winds stop blowing…

After a couple of latest updates wind speed when entering 3D-sailing falls below 3 on next change and stays there no matter what. If that is by design then it is a very bad change. Battles in particular become boring.
Playing on Admiral if that matters.

Rgds, Oldtimer

[Oldtimer]

Hi all,

upgraded Maelstrom today and winds blow again, no freezes either.
But it`s not possible to totally remove foliage any longer. Low foliage density however works and seems sufficient for precious stone searching.

Rgds, Oldtimer

[Jeffrey]

This foliage was modified slightly and I found that I needed to swap two lines in the source for it to properly recognize the scripts wanted it off. I fixed this and uploaded it to Itch.

Nothing related to wind has changed at all, so that may just have been a long string of bad luck during the random weather changes.

[Author]

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