How nations work?

[STARk7]

Asked on discord but I guess it's dead, so here are some questions I'm interested in.

I was wondering if it's possible to create new nation, put encounterable fleets to be: (fleet one) Flying dutchman, (fleet two) Black Pearl, (fleet three) Queen Anna's Revenge and some other unique ships same way like this and lower the chance of encountering that nation. Is something like this possible?

 

[Grey Roger]

It is possible to create a new nation but it is difficult! There is provision for two "Guest Nations". One of them is already used - Guest Nation 1 is America in "Revolutions" and "Napoleonic" periods, and may be Sweden in earlier periods if you have changed the setting in the "Options" menu to allow Sweden. Guest Nation 2 is currently unused and probably won't work if Guest Nation 1 is not active, which it won't be if you're playing one of the earlier periods and Sweden isn't enabled.

There is also a fake nation, PRIVATEER_NATION, which you could use. However, the "Smuggling for Thomas O'Reily" sidequest uses that for one of the smuggler ships.

The other problem is that no nation has single identifiable fleets. You can randomly encounter fleets belonging to any nation, both on worldmap and in direct sail, and the game will set up the fleet according to what sorts of ships are permitted to that nation in that period. So if you made ship types "CursedDutchman", "BlackPearl" and "QueenAnnesRevenge" available to your nation, you could encounter fleets randomly made up of one or more of each type of ship. You wouldn't encounter a fleet consisting of just the Flying Dutchman, you'd encounter a random fleet which could include Flying Dutchman and Queen Anne's Revenge, or two Black Pearls, for example. And PRIVATEER_NATION never spawns fleets on worldmap or during direct sail.

You might do better to set up a sidequest. Have a look at the code for the "Assassin" storyline ("PROGRAM\Storyline\Assassin\quests\quests_reaction.c"), specifically case "rocheship", in which Roche Brasiliano's ship is placed at a random island. You could probably copy and adapt that to put the Flying Dutchman at a random island. The main snag then is that either you're using character "Davy Jones" as the captain of the Flying Dutchman; or you're giving another Flying Dutchman to some other character. Either way is liable to lead to complications if you then play the "Elizabeth Shaw's Disappearance" sidequest as Davy Jones and the Flying Dutchman are used for the quest.

 

[STARk7]

So no way to make nation use one ship fleet always?

 

[Sinbad the Sailor]

Seems like a pretty cool idea to try out. Why do you want to do it?

 

[STARk7]

Seems like a pretty cool idea to try out. Why do you want to do it?

Because it would be fun to encounter flying dutchman mostly, and fear him, but it would be only cool if it's like 5% chance. Also encountering black pearl or Queen Anna's Revenge would be fun.

 

[Grey Roger]

So no way to make nation use one ship fleet always?

There may be a way, but I can't figure out what it is. Making a new nation is tricky; setting up encounters so that this nation can only use one fleet would also be tricky; making sure it doesn't foul up any existing gameplay such as quests, storylines or regular encounters would be yet another level of trickiness.

And then, if you've once encountered the Black Pearl for example, you'd need to make sure that it never shows up again, unless you want to keep encountering one Pearl after another.

Anyway, you can encounter the Flying Dutchman already. Just play the "Elizabeth Shaw's Disappearance" sidequest. You can't board and capture it, but if you have lots of firepower and lots of ammunition, you can sink it.