=============================================================================================== AGE OF PIRATES 2 – City of Abandoned Ships developed and published by SewardRU & Akella =============================================================================================== MOD: Gentlemen of Fortune: Historical Eras Module #2; Privateers and Profit - "The Golden Age" Primary Modder: Modernknight1(MK) with support from Pirates Ahoy! and PA modders(credits at end) Readme - GOF Version 1.4.6 DEV Beta2 ------- 11/22/2013 =============================================================================================== CONTENTS: --------- 1. Introduction 2. Content: New Ships, New characters, New weapons, New items, capabilities and added mini mods. 3. Recommended Settings 4. Bugs 5. Disclaimers 6. Credits: Games, Modders, Modellers, Artists, Music, Multimedia 1) INTRODUCTION: ---------------- Welcome me Hearties to GOF Historical Eras Module#2. This mod has been a two year development with the purpose of attempting to simulate the Golden Age of Piracy from roughly 1648-1725.Thousands of hours of my life have been spent on this so a good explanation of my intent and work follows. The Golden Age is the era that epitomizes the pirate genre and contains all the greatest heroes villains and characters from the classic era of piracy and most of the greatest characters of the age of sail. This era is the timeframe originally intended in the vanilla AOP2:COAS, but over time the previous mods pulled in content from the entire timeframe of the Age of Sail. This was largely due to the conflicting interests in favored time periods by the different modders coupled with a lack of historical knowledge. On top of this was a desire to import content from the popular Pirates of the Caribbean movie series (supposedly set in 1750 after the age of pirates)as well as content from the flagship mod of Pirates Ahoy! - the Build mods/New Horizons. So after the dust settled from all of this out of control haphazard modding & importing, the problem became that we had Royal Navy ships with officers men and weapons reflective of the time of the Napoleonic wars 1789-1815 (example: say the USS Constitution with Jack Aubrey aboard) coexisting within the same game space and time as galleons & conquistadors armed with late medieval weaponry from the Age of Discovery and exploration (1450-1620s). This just wouldn't do. The original game start date is 1665 - set during The Golden Age but with all of the cludged fusion of historical inconsistency becoming so bad that gameplay began to resemble a Pippi Longstockings movie. My favorite era has always been the Golden Age as portrayed in the history books & as romanticized in Howard Pyle's books & illustrations - Piracy as seen in the great Hollywood Swashbucklers - Captain Blood, Captain Kidd, Against All Flags, The Black Swan, and Roman Polanski's Pirates. With that in mind, that's why I chose to do module #2 first. I had maintained my own beta of the CMV and GOF1 mods as we tested that I didn't keep fully current with the dev test versions and I began to morph it to my own tastes over time. I called it Frankenstein and it finally turned into what's before you now. I wanted to create different time periods within the game as found in the POTC: Build mods. However, this was too difficult of a task to implement in COAS. So my intention all along has been to build three seperate mods that contain three different eras. Module#1 will be the Age of Discovery and Exploration, Mod#2 is the Golden Age, and Module #3 will be the last half of the 18th century into the early 19th century. That all said I want to warn you that if you are expecting the HMS Victoy and USS Constitution, in this mod, they are not here. There are no late 18th century era ships in this mod as seen in the Hornblower series or Master & Commander. If that's the time you're looking for and want to play in, with flush deck frigates and Royal Navy characters you will have to wait for GOF Eras Mod#3 not yet complete - where we will attempt to simulate that era. GoF Eras Mod2 contains only characters from the Golden Age and 95 percent of the ships, items, & weapons are from the Golden Age. The 5 percent that are not, - visually coexist well and do not appear out of place in the Golden Age. Or - they might be the odd obsolete item or an old ship that could feasibly still be sailing and thus not out of place. There are many historical precedents for this - just look at John Hawkin's ship at the Battle of San Juan de Uloa in 1568. Historians believe the ship was probably built in the 1480s, so she was almost 90 years old. The only other exception to this is in regards to music. I was looking for a classical flavor of music that lends to the turbulence and dissonance of this great era so there are many boroque selections or classical fusion pieces that were composed well after the The Golden Age. For me, the music fits and if you like classical music you will love this mod. If you don't, then you can tolerate it or load music from somewhere else. =============================================================================================== 2) CONTENT: ----------- SHIPS: ====== *New Ships: While many ships will no longer be seen in this mod, 16 new ships were imported. Besides many of the PO:TEHO ships, there are new ship models from SOFS and almost every old ship in COAS has been reskinned by me. Most of the PO:TEHO ships have also been reskinned. Ship encounters will be a completely new experience for you. If you consider also that most ships have three skins that are possible to randomly encounter, its like having well over 400 ships possible to fight, take, or sail. NOTE: There are no flush-deck frigates or ships in the game that would have appeared or been built after 1725. If the ship is very close to that date or visually very much like ships in the same class that would have been around, I make exceptions. Exceptions to this are the Gentlemen of Luck encounters and a few NPC characters. I have not been able to completely prevent the leakage of a few later era ships in these instances, but they are VERY rare. *Pirates, Gentlemen of Luck and Bounty Hunter encounters have been overhauled to reflect more realistic numbers and ships. *Ships encounters and behaviors have been overhauled. You will rarely encounter spinning ships in single positions. Occassionally it will happen but more often they will spin but in a wider circular maneuver. Convoys now look correct with like classes appearing together and only ship types belonging to specific nations appearing in their convoys, patrols and ports. This significantly improves the flavor of the game to a much more historically accurate feel. *More harbor clutter/ships encountered for a hustle and bustle feel as you enter/exit ports - as it really would have been. CHARACTERS: =========== *All uniforms have been redone to match the appearance of the correct nation during this era. *New officers: half of the recruitable officers have been changed to new character models/ textures. Less pirate flavor here and more mercenary/military flavor. * Over two dozen new characters imported and specially modified. Many of these are Metazot PO:TEHO characters with my own changes incorporated to give personality and historical flavor where I desired. *New Pirates and ship captains. Most of the pirate crews and ships captains have been replaced with better more authentic models. No more eye patches or peg legs. *New Brothel characters and brothels will have a better variety of girls available. Most of the Madames have been changed to the old AOP1 whore models. *New and More citizen characters that look realistic for the Golden Age. You will also notice more people walking through the towns than before for a little more hustle and bustle. *Playable character interface allows for 67 different player choices now. Most of these are real historical figures. No more POTC characters although I did keep and modify a few POTC models changing them into actual historical personalities. New detailed portraits and narratives included with each RPC which is not only fun to look at, but also provides an education on the REAL buccaneers and corsairs of the Golden Age. Among these new playable characters are four new females and two new personalities of African descent. Each nation has a balanced group of characters to select from. More than any other COAS mod ever. NEW ITEMS AND WEAPONS: ====================== *While I did get rid of some late era blades and some medieval era blades that just didn't fit into our time period, I did import over 40 new blades. There are now 81 blades in the game (thats over 40 new blades and 40 more than in any other GOF mod) NOTE: There are only a few sabers that meet the pre 1725 cut off and most weapons are cutlasses, military rapiers and the like. The type of weapons you would expect to find during the Golden Age. Module #3 will eliminate most of the rapiers and favor many more varieties of cutlass and sabers. *There are 39 pistols and pistol combinations (pairs and braces of pistols) All other GOF mods only had the standard five pistols in game which means 34 new pistols/pistol combinations *Over 40 new items and 10 existing items revamped or replaced. Many of these new items will enhance certain abilities in realistic ways in the same way that the books/manuals do. Some of the bad items have been replaced with other bad items. From astrolabes, spectacles, and gunner's quadrants to filthy rags and half eaten meat, there are some really neat new items. Among the best items are many new treasures and hoards consisting of different kinds of coins, cobs, bars, jewelry, and sacred items. Some of these items you will see in markets, but most you will not. NEW CAPABILITIES: ================== *New intro movie. *New more realistic period compass taken from original examples. Wind indicator still works but no radar because that's just not realistic at all....sorry. I like this one WAY better. *Lots of new music and sounds overhauled with even better historical music variety germane to the situations encountered. Sound bytes changed for common encounters such as the guards when you come into towns. *New playing card backs, new coins, and over 100 new loading screens incorporated into the game with a wide variety of different screens (mostly germane historical paintings) for towns, forts, taverns, brothels, governors, churches, stores, shipyards, etc. These screens are also different for each nationalities ports. In addition. multiple boarding, cabin, and death loading screens will be seen depending on where you are and how large the encounter. This adds a level of attractive historical immersion never seen before in COAS, rather than the same boring pictures over and over again. *This mod introduces new more realistic Weather and sky/horizon modifications. You will notice less fog except at times when it should be there. The ocean movement, transparency, color, and skies have been overhauled for a bluer, lighter, cleaner and brighter Caribbean look and feel. *Surrender now works again. It is not enabled in mod options so you must toggle it on in the mod options menu when you start your game: for best results in game-play set to "Surrenders Occasionally" *Direct Sail is enabled. You can sail from one side of the map to the other without needing to to go to the world view map. You will rarely encounter any ships in the open sea, but if you come close enough to enemy harbors (long way off but they can still see you), the harbor ships will chase you long distances. There are seams in the map sheets so there will be little one second long transitions from sheet to sheet when you get to the edge, but you will never go to the map. *Saint Ashley's 8 ship max mod is part of the mod so your character can control up to eight ships in his/her fleet. The max ships that can be encountered in an enemy fleet is 10 ships which potentially allows battles of 28 ships to occur if you walk into a battle between two opposing fleets plus your fleet. The most I've encountered thus far in testing is 24 ships. *Hundreds of entries in dialogue and INI description files have been rewritten to correct spelling errors, language flow, and better more comprhensive descriptions of everything from nations, to ships, to items and weapons. This adds a lot more depth to the game. Ship descriptions are no longer names of ships, but what class and/or type the ship is. So instead of seeing "Greyhound" in your telescope, you will see English 6th Rater. ****New Capability Work still being done: Always more to do and I have been working on these all for a while. - Importing new locations. Colony on Dominica working in test version but needs more work. - Lower deck locations enabled for boarding encounters. I want this one done more than any other thing in the game and will pay $500 bucks to someone that can make that happen for me. - Striking flags when enemies surrender. - I am reworking the ballistics, ranges and cannon sizes to period correct...so 3, 4, 9, 12, 16, 24, 32, 36 pounders. I just don't have it ready to go yet. - Waves at shore location instead of just flat sea. - Adding another faction(s). Either a different pirate faction or Danish, Portuguese, Genoese, Etc. If I can add one successfully I can add more. Even if they don't have colonies, their ships would still trade at friendly ports and you could run into them at sea. - Flags and rigging ships to period. I added lateen sails to ships replacing spankers incorrect for the time period. These have no rigging. So they need rigged. Also many of the PO:TEHO ships have no mizzen shrouds/ratlines and one of the sloops has none on the main. Someone who knows how could assist by adding shrouds. 3) RECOMMENDED SETTINGS & CONSIDERATIONS: ------------------------------------------- Because I have modified many of the base files for stability and improved performance, (to include the start/engine and config exe files, these are included in the mod so have wide screen, zooming, camera view, and sounds already set to better defaults than stock COAS. I think you will enjoy these new settings. If you are using a small screen and want fullscreen rather than widescreen you will have to manually set your engine INI file. Simply open with a notepad and change 0 to 1 on the fullscreen default entry. Realistic ship encounters no longer have any real meaning in this mod as it always has realistic ship encounters. In fact some people may not like that they can't get their favorite warship because she's only found in your nation's convoys. If you want one so badly you may have to attack your own nation and ask for forgiveness later. I highly recommend you toggle off the show information about ships in your options so that you don't have the huge ugly health bars cluttering up the screen. I recommend using "In Between" for cannon settings in mod options at the beginning. It makes for more balanced game play initially. Once you feel powerful and levelled up you can try "realistic" which will bring down your cannon lethality and the enemies on you. Keeps you from becoming cannon god. Starting ship: Several of the characters have better starting ships. For example, Laurens de Graff because he was such a huge deal in his time gets a galleon (the San Francisco taken at Cartegena) and a little more coin than usual. Most of the characters do not get a starting ship or much money however and start with the Barco Costero - basically a coastal sailing boat. Check the different characters if you want to start with a little better ship. Remember it will be beyond your skills though so you will have degraded abilities and level up slower until you get something equivalent to your current skill level or level up to the abilities to fully use the ship you have. Remember you start with a little bit of cargo you can sell off for a little extra coin. 4) BUGS: ---------- Up front I'm not going to have as much time very soon which is the reason I'm putting this out now. So I will not be in the business of fixing bugs often. You are on your own. Sorry... Known bugs: - Flag bug. Because GOF Eras is still running on Storm 2.5 but some of the new better files and some ships were made to run on Storm 2.8 there are some problems with flags when you dismast and enemy, you or one of your ships are dismasted, and when ships sink. This won't crash your game and it doesn't happen all the time. You will notice flags floating in the air or above the water where a ship previously was - or floating where a mast should be. Some flags will sometimes look deformed and occassionally will be stuck to your mast. Save and restart the game if it bothers you badly enough. Usually that clears it up. - Mast bug. Some of the PO:TEHO ships masts were designed to shatter in the 2.8 engine and are not compatible with 2.5. So you may occasionally have ships that have a mast floating in the air while the lower part of the mainmast has been shot away. It doesn't cause a crash or instability it just looks bad. - Flickering quarter screen bug. For the same reasons as above, occassionally your screen will glitch and flicker, but it will only be one quarter or one half of your screen. This usually happens during large battles. Saving, restarting, and reloading game will usually clear it up. Not usually a game crasher. ***********As had been done with German Edition I would eventually like to rewrite eras for Storm 2.8....that is if I could get some help. - Occasional CTDs going into Gentlemen of Luck encounters and punitive encounters. Simply reload until it runs. Not that big of a deal. Almost have this one fixed. - Character list mis-match error at sea. No issues with gameplay except that you will see the error message. I need to rebuild the character index and don't have time right now. - New items can be memory intensive on some machines. You may have difficulties seeing all the pictures of the new items all of the time if you have an older PC. - Lighting: Every now and then you may get undesirable lighting effects. I was going for a very Caribbean flavored lighting and color. Some people will like it others will not. If you don't like the lighting at a particular time simply use the enabled bracket keys ][ and change until you like how it looks. - Large battles: What can I say. It's much better than it was but still happens. Still some occasional mast crashing issues, but nothing like in the other GOF mods. I recommend you quicksave F6 often during large scale battles. - Eight ships in inventory sometimes causes a crash at the port controller when you want to give a ship. So ensure you save before doing this. A simple shuffling of your ships around and changing one of the captains will allow you to give a ship even if you have eight in your fleet. - Sound: Still have the sound bug occasionally in ship encounters where more than eight ships are involved. Don't know what's causing this. You can still hear the music and ocean sounds, but the cannon fire is mute. I am still in the process of converting the OGGs over to MP3. I'm sure it will be better when I do that and it will be in the first patch I share. - Horsepower/RAM: Should be obvious, but with all of the new content this game requires a decent computer to run quickly. If you don't have a good computer the game sometimes lags - especially between location setting transitions. 5) DISCLAIMERS: --------------- IAW USC 107 no part of the media content contained here is to be used for profit. Much of this content belongs to third parties used with their permission where able to contact them and obtain it. None of this content is legal to use for profit and it is offered here for educational purposes. Of any game mod that has ever existed, I think I have done more to provide an educational experience of this period in history than any other game. All media is provided to enhance that education experience and historical ambience. WARNING: There are some depictions of mild nudity in the game as seen in historical paintings. All nudity is classically tasteful, but for kids or parents that do not want this exposure I felt it was necessary to bring this out. This nudity appears in brothel transition screens and in some paintings on the walls in various locations. Again it is very mild and artistically tasteful. 6) CREDITS and Ackowledgements: ----------------------------------- Games: The following games and/or mods were used for content. - Pirates Oddysey: To Each His Own (ships, characters, weapons, and a few loading screens) - Secrets of the Far Seas (ships, characters, weapons *most of the new weapons) - Medieval Total War II (music & sounds) - Sid Meier's Pirates (a couple of loading screens) - Pirates of the Caribbean (characters and weapons) - New Horizons, POTC Build mods (ships, characters, weapons, and some code files) - AOP2: MOTCS - German Edition (a few weapons and English soldier uniforms) - Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales (Characters, weapons, and some code files) - Pirates of the Burning Sea......some ship models made by POTBS modders and converted for use in the Storm engine by PA! modelers and used with their permission. Developers and publishers: - Akella - SeawardRU - Playlogic - Bethesda - Blackmark Studios - Gamer Studios - Ubisoft - Firaxis - The Creative Assembly - Activision Modders and Modelers: - Modernknight1 - Pieter Boelen - Couldn't have done this mod without Pieter's help - Johnathan Aldridge(Belthorne) - much of the core mod code work is due to JA. What great work! - Saint Ashley - The 8 ship max mod is his doing. Awesome enhancement! - Luke159 - Responsible for most of the damage and cannon behavior numbers. - Officerpuppy - Craiggo - Nixarass - Firebat - Darkhymn - Jan Marten - Phillipe - Pgargon - Many of the fine newer models in the GOF mods are Pgargon's fine creations. - Rider88 - Remus77 - Remus77 is responsible for the fine POTBS imports such as Poseidon and Trinity. - Bava - Most of my reskinned ships look so good due to Bava's excellent wood plank textures. - Armada - SeaNorris - Nightwatcher - KrisWood - Yo Ho Ho(Rese) - Many of his models are older but still excellent models.(The Dutch warships) - Hylie Pistoff - Damski - GhostofDeath - Metazot: though not a PA modder he must be mentioned. This fine character and texture modeller/artist is responsible for most of the detailed character models produced in the Corsairs/Seadogs games/sequels. ARTISTS: Most of the artists whose work is seen (primarily in loading transition screens) have long passed and their paintings sit in museums. However, both the living and the dead must still be acknowledged for their beautiful and inspiring work which is a large reason I spent so much time on this game and mod... I wanted it to look like a living and moving painting....and it sometimes does! All of these images were acquired from free sources online. - William Van de Velde (Elder and Younger) - Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom - Ludolf Backhuysen - Isaac Sailmaker - Aart van Antum - Samuel Drummond - Richard Endsor - Charles de Lacy - Claude Joseph Vernet - Simon de Vlieger - Peter Monamy - Leslie Arthur Wilcox - Bonaventura Peeters - Jan van Beecq - Abraham Storck - Reinier Nooms - Gregory Manchess - Angus McBride - Franz Van Mieris - Gerard ter Bosch - Larry Vincent - Jan Horemans - Giuseppe Rava - August Laux - William Gilkerson - Olaf Rahardt - Montague Dawson - AA Orlinksi - Lazerman - Thanks to Lazerman425 for his fine cave paintings seen in the transitions. Look him up on DeviantArt If I've left out anyone I am truly sorry and glad to include anyone I've missed. I must acknowledge the National Maritime Museum, Greewich, UK, The Nederlandische Scheepvaart Museum, Amsterdam, NL, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., USA. Also many of the new textures that appear on the reskins of English ships came directly from photos I personally took of models in the US Naval Academy Museum collection at Preble Hall, Annapolis, MD USA. MUSIC: The music is mostly classical but there are a few odd movie music clips and classical fusion pieces. I would like to thank Freddie Hangoler and Dante Amerisi for allowing me to use their creative modern classical fusion pieces in the game and would encourage those interested to look up their names on google and find their videos...very creative and interesting. I would also like to thank Xavier diaz-latorre for allowing me to use his fine lute renditions of Bach's music. Please look up his YouTube videos, they are brilliant! I highly recommend you take a listen to Alison Balsom's videos on YouTube. Her EMI recordings are unbelieveable and I own them all. She is a very talented musician that has done some really original things with pieces not arranged for trumpet. Last if you haven't listened to Collegium 1704 you're missing out. Collegium 1704 conducted by Vaclav Luks offers some of the most perfect baroque music available today. Their renderings of Zelenka's works are superb and without equal. I tried to use music that was fitting for the locations. Where possible I used ethnically germane composers... so Wassenauer for Dutch towns, Purcell, Avison and Handel for English, Lully for French, Nebra for Spain... I would also be remiss if I did not give Sedulius credit for the base music mod that I built this one on top of. Only about one fifth of his original music is still in the current music modpack however. - Antonio Vivaldi - I would estimate that a third of the music in the game is Vivaldi - Johann Sebastian Bach - Giuseppi Torelli - Georg Phillip Tellemann - Johann Baptist Vanhal - Jan Dismass Zelenka - Johan Adoloph Haas - the opening video music is by Hass - Charles Avison - Sylvius Leopold Weiss - Unico Van Wassanuer - music heard in the Dutch towns - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - George Frederic Handel - Henry Purcell - Jean-Baptiste Lully - Tomaso Albinoni - Johan Fredrich Fasch - José Blasco de Nebra - John E. Keane - the Hornblower track - Christopher Gordon - Master and Commander - Jeff Van Dyck - MTWII - James Vincent - MTWII - Richard Vaughan - MTWII - Karl Jenkins - Adiemus - Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou (also known as Vangelis) - Dies Irae theme heard while fighting and the Conquest of Paradise track in Spanish towns and at sea. Groups and individual musical artists: - Collegium 1704 - Vaclav Luks - Alison Balsom - Adiemus - Karl Jenkins - Izhak Perlman - Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields - Sir Neville Mariner - I Solisti di Veneti - Claidio Scimone - Academy of Ancient Music - Christopher Hogwood (AWESOME!) - Trevor Pinnock - Phillipe Jarousski - Nigel North ================================================================================================ MULTIMEDIA: I would like to acknowledge Docema and the Movie docu-drama "Broadside" for entertainment, education and the little film snipets I clipped out of the movie as part of my opening introductory film clip. I would also like to acknowledge the films Broadside, Master and Commander, Cutthroat Island, and Against All Flags for still shots I took for boarding and boat transport transition loading screens. ================================================================================================ If I've left anyone out I'm truly sorry. Last and not least are thanks to my family and their patience with my tinkering with this game. And....my beta testers. Thanks to Hammerman777, 44MAG, Hatchet, Kipper, and Sedulius ================================================================================================ If anyone would like to get a hold of me contact me at modernknight1@hotmail.com or PM me on the Pirates Ahoy! website. Pirates Ahoy! RULES!!! END of Read Me file 11/22/2013