Emptiness
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- Joined
- Jan 7, 2009
- Messages
- 1,922
Those letters of marque authorized the vessel to prey upon ships belonging to enemies of the state that issued them, not any foreign ship. Of course, the line between Privateer and Pirate was often blurred, with some using their letter of marque essentially as a cover for their not-so-legal maritime raiding.Technically, Privateers were ships that had government issued Letters of Marque, and still flew the flag of the nation that contracted them. It might be more appropriate for Privateers to be AlwaysHostile while Pirates are Hidden Nationality. It would of course require having some Barbarian Pirates in order to make the HN mean much.
I think the Privateer/Pirate distinction is being used in FfH2 more to set apart the special status of the Lanun version of the unit (or in the case of a shift to promotion, the promotion), rather than describing a precise distinction between the legal status of the ships in question. Technically, a 'pirate' ship can raid the shipping of its own nation, so proper implementation of such would require that the ship become a barbarian unit after being built - which unit I doubt would actually see much use (except in xp exploit schemes). Giving both the regular and Lanun-versions of the ship (or promotion) HN makes more sense to me, rather than trying to make some sort of distinction with Always Hostile.
As for Barbarian Pirates, I certainly support that whole-heartedly. And I also like the idea of moving to a promotion (naturally) for the sake of making Lanun pirate ships less identifiably Lanun.