Well, I've been hatching this idea for twenty minutes and am deeply indifferent to its implementation
. But as an abstract argument , there are such considerations
It would also lead to a lot of ahistorical piracy of steam fleets against sailing ones
1. Hmm, the runner would "symbolize" quite real privateers of the North and South. At the same time, even the state raiders of the Southerners are not legally privateers, but pirates in general. The Confederation was recognized only by slave-owning Brazil.
2. As for the absence of steam filibusters on every corner, then…It seems to me that it is worth distinguishing between fundamental and situational factors.
3. At the same time, the final tightening of the screws in relation to privateering was provoked just by the extremely successful raid of the sailing-steam Alabama - and in relation to the by no means defenseless trade of the American North. Worse, in the 1870s, the very successfull "pirat" was... the monitor ("Huascar")
4. That is, the nuance is that there were more technical prerequisites for the heyday of raiding in the second half of the 19th century than in the Golden Age of Piracy. At the same time, the technical prerequisites themselves = the profitability of the enterprise. Plus, cargo turnover has increased "a little".
At the same time
1. The ban on privateering was more or less successfully observed against the background of a long peace between the powers that had at least some maritime capabilities. At the same time, anti-raider maritime law
could not withstand the first "fundamental" conflict between states with serious fleets (WW1). Moreover, the failure was not up to a banal robbery, but much worse. I suspect that the Kaiser's Germans, with their unlimited submarine warfare, were deterred from distributing privateer patents only by the obvious inefficiency of the event.
2. The main an anti-privateer lobbyist was England, which had a rather unique combination of needs and capabilities.
3. And if we consider a purely political (not technical) alternative like "someone with naval ambitions became a hegemon in continental Europe in the 1880s and is at war with England", then the result would be predictable.
which to my knowledge didn't happen much; surprisingly, actually, given European sentiments in the XIX century towards the rest of the world
In addition to the above
1. Well, let's just say that by the second half of the 19th century, Europeans had become strong enough to rely on a centralized racket. Privateers are allowed into the sphere of robbery only if the government does not cope with this favorite function
. At the same time, even disorganized piracy prevented Britain from making profits in the same Hong Kong.
2. The periphery was protected from steam piracy for a long time by a banal shortage of coal. Off the coast of the same China in the middle of the 19th century, it was known in exactly one place – and the nearest alternative sources were in Western India and Canada.
3. At the same time, there were non-steam Europeans, but they were lost in the local pirate serpentarium, and the Portuguese pirates from Macau who became too noticeable were destroyed ... by Chinese pirates ... with the money of the governor of Canton.
4. Then, аgainst the background of decades of unlimited maritime hegemony of one "player", the heyday of piracy would look strange at all. Both piracy and privateering are a consequence of mutual annihilation or at least the employment of "regular" fleets. At the same time, even a very sluggish confrontation in the Pacific Ocean during the Crimean War was enough that Chinese pirates and Europeans who joined them abruptly became impudent.
If the
political history of the second half of the 19th century had been more militant, a second edition of the Alabama and Co. raids would have been almost inevitable.
Also, technically speaking, these tactics were used by countries that were already at war with each other at the time, so in game terms, hidden nationality would have been redundant.
Hmm ... 1. Anyway, the auxiliary cruisers of the 20th century had more technical possibilities for masquerade than ever before. The Germans depicted not even an abstract neutral, but a concrete vessel.
2. At the same time, the proxy wars of the 16th and 18th centuries in fact differed little from the same conflicts in the twentieth century - the Madrid court knew perfectly well who was behind Drake and Co.
3. The fact that aviation massively flew under a false flag in several major wars, and the fleet behaved like a good boy, looks like the result of a rather random combination of circumstances: USA and England totally dominated the sea. But but the situation is different in the air and... there was quite a limited war under the carpet in the style of Elizabeth.
True, rectifying this was on my long-term to-do list.
I'm basically saying that the Liberty is too slow-moving for an auxiliary cruiser
. They were converted from high-speed transports (16 knots and more), up to the owners of the "Blue Ribbon of the Atlantic". And so yes, Liberty already had a high-speed twin - "Victoria." At the same time, after World War II, aviation killed high-speed transoceanic liners - and it was necessary to build equivalents
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algol-class_vehicle_cargo_ship
?
. That way each fish and whale resource from the oceans outside your city radius would give a city +1 food (with the appropriate infrastructure built). It would also effectively allow you to import food from other civs and transfer food from one city to another, and it would make livestock better, since you will now need to balance +1
and +1 
).
