Three questions

[Tingyun]

@Levis @Pieter Boelen

Could I request your expertise on two questions? Followup questions to some previous things I've been requesting your advice on.

1) If I switch difficulty level from Sea Dog to Swashbuckler mid-game, and then reinitialize, will everything work correctly for the new difficulty level to take effect, or will there be any compatibility issues or weirdness?

2) Are the ships encountered at sea in any way dependent on the player level or player ship, or are they completely random?

3) When the world uses player level to determine enemy level, does it only use the player's experience level (ie, level 18), or does it also factor in player skills?

So, for example, if a player were level 1 but had all 10s in all skills, would the world generate enemies, items, etc, like normal for a level 1 character?

Not planning on doing that obviously, but I am considering making the experience rate and skill rate in the two settings Levis gave me to be different (SKILL_EXPERIENCE_MULTIPLIER, and EXPERIENCE_MULTIPLIER) , and I want to know how it will affect game balance if I say, make the skill gain rate faster than the level gain rate. That turns on whether the enemies will be responding to player skills, or just player levels.

 

[Joer]

I recall reading a post by Pieter not too long ago where he said that ship encounters at sea are indeed completely random.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

1. You can indeed switch difficulty at any time during the game.

2. On default settings, virtually all encounters are completely random.
Coast Raiders are always a bit on the small side though.
And side quest ships do depend on the player level.

3. It is based purely on the level number; skills are not taken into account.
This is why the Fake Level Up Cheat exists: so you can get better skills without the game world Leveling up at the same time.

 

[Tingyun]

Thanks Pieter!

EDIT: nevermind, was able to answer my own questions with the magical tool of windows search file contents taught by Pieter

 

[Pieter Boelen]

nevermind, was able to answer my own questions with the magical tool of windows search file contents taught by Pieter

Even better! I cannot deny that I really like that trick very much.
It is really powerful. As long as you know a place to start the search, you can pretty much always find what you need.