Dear Kailric:
Oooooh. I see.
I think there's a bug somewhere, relative to John Paul Jones. I played a long, long game, I defeated Jones about 50 times and he escaped every time. His overall record was 4 successes, 50 failures. The documentation says that he has a 75% chance of escape. He can also have a one-time escape that guarantees survival. But the stats from my long test don't show the game working that way. He should have sunk forever after way less than half his 50 defeats. At the end, he was wandering around like a ghost ship, at 0.1 combat strength, never recovering, still trying to attack ships and being ignominiously defeated. Is this what you wanted?
After my long playtest, I think the mod is "there" and should be made ready for prime time and a 1.0 version. Game balance is workable now.
See, personally I have kind of a problem with Colonization: On the one hand, its a truly great game. Certainly as good as Civ IV, maybe better, though more limited in scope. However, what interests me personally is creating and running a successful colony, not doing what you have to do to win the game.
Seems to me that to win in Colonization, you have to start to build up a successful colony, based on an export economy. Then, about halfway there, you have to abruptly change course. You start buying every weapon, horse and politician you can afford. You have no soldiers, but you have a ton of guys you can turn into dragoons on Big Night 2. You let your economy and your colonies go to seed, while you prepare for revolution. You build newspapers and bring people into the towns, where the politicians can go to work on them. Then, on Big Night 1, you start building revolutionary sentiment, (and start alarming the king.) You build sentiment as fast as you can.
When youre able to declare independence, you hold Big Night 2. You turn everyone into a soldier overnight, and abandon the cities unless they can be one of your few strongholds. You dont even need to farm much any more, except to support weapon, horse and soldier production.
I personally dont like this about base Colonization. More often than not, I forget about revolution entirely and just build my peacetime economy, feud with my neighbors, etc. I just enjoy the game, and set my own standard for what a win constitutes.
The Privateer mod allows me to play Colonization the way I like. I mostly forget about revolution and work on developing The Pirate Republic. This takes longer than the revolution would allow you to spend, but it can be done now. Doing this, I can defeat every local player in the game. I turn islands with lots of adjacent sea tiles into breeder colonies, stock them with fishermen, and start turning out colonists or pirates like crazy. I foster privateers until I can turn them into flotillas, and prepare to completely dominate the sea. The mod will let me stop trading with the King entirely when taxes rise to 50%, and support myself from smuggling.
So, I know you have ambitious plans for the mod, but I suggest you get ready for a 1.0 version with just the Caribbean map, document everything, and release the 1.0 version. I will help by writing doco and helping to polish the game, if you would like.