Piracy Promotion

how would you code the rouges to take over a vessel which then would become pirate?

Hmm, that starts my brainstorming engine :
We have war prices option. How about this be the only way to get the promotion? If you capture a ship there's some chance to it receiving Piracy? No other promotion requirements only the random chance. (Or you could be asked if you wanted the ship to be a pirate ship.)
 
Guys, let's keep it simple. No merging between piracy promotion and war prizes option and no unit limit based on promotions (too hard to code). I think piracy promotion is hard enough to get for AI or humans to abuse it. Moreover it doesn't make ships stronger: a combat 2 or 3 ship would easily defeat a pirate promoted ship. Moreover, while it's true you can attack without declaring war, the opposite is true too and you could be attacked by anyone after any attack that could leave your ship damaged.
 
I understand your point but how would something like that be implemented in this game without adding rogues or some such? and how would you code the rouges to take over a vessel which then would become pirate? Do you see how complicated your idea is? Sure it would be a great addition but I am sure that it is out of the scope of this mod.

@Rezca this comment addresses your first comment.

This is already in base BTS - The Privateer.
I was never 'suggesting' anything though - just imagining what a formal pirate would be in the game in the same way one would be explaining why "Barbarians" are still spawning in the post-industrial (Thinking of them as say rebels, splinter groups, basically less barbarians in the sense of wild savages but more of factions working outside of the law and not answering to any nation)



45°38'N-13°47'E;13588537 said:
Guys, let's keep it simple. No merging between piracy promotion and war prizes option and no unit limit based on promotions (too hard to code). I think piracy promotion is hard enough to get for AI or humans to abuse it. Moreover it doesn't make ships stronger: a combat 2 or 3 ship would easily defeat a pirate promoted ship. Moreover, while it's true you can attack without declaring war, the opposite is true too and you could be attacked by anyone after any attack that could leave your ship damaged.

Right, and I've had that happen to my Privateers so many times xD
Send them out and suddenly they're being attacked by my friends or vassals. Heck, I've had highly promoted privateers that I've wanted to keep safe so I could promote them into Destroyers, but I'd often lose some because the AI would go INTO MY CITIES to sink them since they're considered "barbarians" as far as targeting is concerned. Only way I could truly keep them safe was by hiding them away in a pocket of sea not often visited by ships, but once a ship stumbles upon them....

That's also why I mostly stopped using Privateers in AND unless I had a solid coastal city that could pump out ships quicky AND with high enough promotions. Usually by the time I have access to them, there's multiple AI running around with Frigates, the Privateer's natural predator.
So with this promotion, I could have pirate Frigates instead! They just wouldn't have that nice Sentry promotion :p

Anyway, the promotion requirements seem hard enough to get, so it probably won't be abused much if at all.
 
45°38'N-13°47'E;13588537 said:
I think piracy promotion is hard enough to get for AI or humans to abuse it.

Navigation 1 + 2 and coastal assault? Needs 10xp, or 5xp with Navel Academy? Does not sound that hard to me. Of course we will only find out if it is really abusable when you give us a chance to abuse it, and I for one am looking forward to that chance ;)
 
This is already in base BTS - The Privateer.
I was never 'suggesting' anything though - just imagining what a formal pirate would be in the game in the same way one would be explaining why "Barbarians" are still spawning in the post-industrial (Thinking of them as say rebels, splinter groups, basically less barbarians in the sense of wild savages but more of factions working outside of the law and not answering to any nation)

Privateer comes to late in the game! That's why I started this conversation in the first place. All I would want to see is some sort of pirate activity available Very early in the game so I (I) have a way to intercept seaborne spies.
 
Privateer comes to late in the game!

That's not what I was talking about at all, I was just using the Privateer as an example of what I meant by "hired pirates". They're hired by the state (You, the player) to cause havoc for rival countries without the blame being put on you (Which would otherwise require war)

By trying to explain that, you misinterpreted it as suggesting some strange complex new mechanic, and so I brought up the Privateer to explain that what I was talkign about was NOT me suggesting mechanics changes.


With the promotion requirements it's likely going to take some careful planning to get a city that can produce them out of the gate, which might take a while - or some conflict with other nations to have some Great Generals settled.
 
45°38'N-13°47'E;13588935 said:
OK, I've changed requirements to seafaring and navigation 2 plus coastal attack, let's see how it goes

I agree with this. I think we should at least give this a basic run and see how it goes. I'm really not in favor of overcomplicating mechanics to start; we can always add things if we really need to.
 
...we should at least give this a basic run and see how it goes.

IMHO the current implementation (nav1, nav2, costal attack, then pirate promotion) is easily "exploited" by human players and totally overpowered. In my current game (on emperor difficulty) I'm easily producing pirate man-o-war's (with drill too!) every other 4 turns or so, by simply having settled all my gg (except for a single great commander - another thingy easily "exploited" by human players; i.e. the AI simply can't use them...) in a dedicated costal city.

Pirate Man-o-Wars. Stacks of them (after a bunch of turns; I play on eternal speed :crazyeye:). Starting with drill too! It's insane.

And the crux of the story is this: it's an upward spiral. Once you have a bunch of powerfull pirate ships (you can safely level them, by luring in your cities and picking your fights...), you will get so much points towards your next gg, and then another. All while being pacifist, mind you. You'd think "ok", "that will take a while for the next gg", having to gather 300 points or what not. But with a bunch of pirate stacks of doom, you can literally watch that number drop. AI ships will just go leroy jenkins' and try to kamikaze one or the other of your pirate ships, so you don't even have to actively do much, if properly placed (individually switching between healing and blockade), or then AI certainly will underestimate your pirate ships's reach (having at least nav2). So you can pick stacks of galleys guarded by a terime or what not.

In my opinion this is broken/totally nuts. And then I'll be able to upgrade my pirate ships to non-wooden ships? The AI is so ed. :lol:


I'm really not in favor of overcomplicating mechanics to start; we can always add things if we really need to.

The question is: shall pirates go obsoleted with time, as wooden ships die out? Is it realistic (or maybe just fun, in gameplay terms) to end up with modern, insanely expensive pirate battle cruisers? I'm not sure about that...

And most important: this promotion system does not really allow for early piratery; which is kind of sad. So maybe, the simplest solution would be really to have earlier pirate ships available (without necessary promotions), have an upgrade path to privateer and then end piraterie there, once wooden ships get out of fashion.

Plus: I don't think that AI will ever be able to effectively use piraterie with these promotions. This - somewhat - worked with privateers, as far as I remember, no?
 
In my game I wasn't able to get a from-the-gate Pirate until after Privateers hit the seas. It took... A while to get them all out at once hehe. Most of them didn't last long either, longer than Privateers but still not too long. The AI all over the world were fielding similar tech until I beelined Screw Propeller, but I haven't seen any AI pirates just yet. Plenty of ships floating around with Navigation II/III, but no Coastal Assault ships.

I'd send out a highly promoted ship but be one promotion short of Coastal Assault or the actual Piracy Promotion, but yeah - a savvy player will almost always be able to get the upper hand on the AI in almost any situation imagineable - the Piracy promotion isn't any different. As for great commanders... I don't use those ever for the sole reason the AI just use them as scouts, effectively blowing their hard-earned GG points.
 
Is there a way to have a promotion that gives +x against ships flagged as pirates? Or even, just some ship line starting with that?
 
Eternity speed itself seems unbalanced in so many ways, so Piracy might be working fine on Normal/Epic (it hasn't really left any sort of impact on my current game on Epic Speed) but be totally out of whack on Marathon/Snail and slower.

We had some testing games on Blitz/Quick for a while for tweaking new features, buut... Haven't had one of those in a while ^^;
 
There's a funny event when a piracy-promoted ship captures an enemy workboat.Although the pirate ship has no flag, the captured unit gets the nationality(flag) of the pirate.So, in that case the hidden nationality isn't hidden;).Furthermore this fact has some significance in multiplayer games because humans can realize that but I don't know wether AI can get it.
 
Same with naval war prizes (the chance to capture an enemy ship after killing an enemy ship).
It should probably be disabled for Piracy-promoted ships. Or spawn other Piracy promoted ones.
 
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