If they're being generated as Raiders, i.e. enemies, then that would explain why they're hostile to you.
No, it wouldn't. The term "Coast Raider" just means "ships generated around islands".
They're not by definition hostile. If they are, it is purely because of national relations and/or false flags, not because they're "Coast Raiders".
It doesn't explain why they're being generated as Raiders, though - shouldn't they be coastal merchant traffic instead?
They're the same thing. Coastal merchant traffic = Coast Raiders.
That's just the name that
@CouchcaptainCharles gave to that feature when he added it many, many years ago.
Likewise, the "random characters in towns" are called the "Vice City" mod. He had a weird sense of humour.
If there are rival nations controlling two colonies on the same island, the AI which places coastal ships doesn't seem to care where it places them, which means you're as likely to encounter British or allied ships next to Nevis Pirate Settlement as you are to encounter pirate ships, which means you can have trouble if you just started a game at Nevis Pirate Settlement.
Perfectly true; their placement is completely random.
The only piece of Personal weirdness I've seen was during the "Assassin" storyline, and that's entirely understandable. France is secretly helping Portugal by sending a disguised warship to reinforce Sao Jorge and you're there to sabotage it. The not-French-honestly warship is flying a Personal flag (not the same one as yours, but Personal anyway). So I'm approaching the port, and notice the fort is firing - but not at me. It's attacking the warship. This is because I'd previously been doing some freelance raiding against Portuguese ships, so Portugal hates me, and that warship is flying a Personal flag, while I'm under a false Portuguese flag which the fort hasn't recognised. So the fort thinks that ship is me.
Ideally we should get PRIVATEER_NATION to work for that so Personal flags can be assigned to NPC ships without that also meaning they get the player's relations.
But that hasn't been done yet.
How high of a priority has this?
Quite high priority to figure out what is going on at least.
Whether anything has to be changed, that can be decided afterwards.
If not so high I want to sugest to move this to brainstorming and first try to find out exactly how the coastal traffic is generated and if this is what we want or if we might want to change this.
You don't need to worry about it anyway.
If anything is done, it'll probably be on the Sea AI Relations side of the code, which I rewrote so probably I can make any tweaks required.
Forgive me for my impatience... next time I should try differnet things, before creating a new thread in forums.
Of all six ships which were sailing around Barbados, all of them had my personal flag. But only two of them were "red" signed.
The reason is, that when I wanted capture Bridgetown, I wanted to do that with a false British flag (Britain was actually my hostile, because I captured Speightstown before).
So these two ships of mine were in the near, when sailing under British flag, so I guess they recognized me as their enemy, even after changing the British into my personal flag. So I leaved the island, stayed one night in Concepcion, came back and all my personal ships were again friendly.
In that case, it sounds like the system may actually be doing
exactly what is it means to do:
- Personal ships have relations based on your own
- If you are flying a false flag hostile to yourself, then those Personal ships will be hostile to you (because they don't know you are you, since you're pretending to be someone else)
- If they remember you as being hostile, then they'll be hostile even if you go to sea again
This is how it works also for non-Personal nations and there are no exceptions in place to prevent it for Personal.
So then the question is: Is this OK like that? Or
should there be some sort of exceptions?
