Notice [WIP] Enhancement Mod 1.0

SD:TEHO said:

Thanks for that interesting news. Can you tell me what is exactly balanced in the "The Final Lesson" DLC? This is actually very important for me because i didn´t like the timing at all.

"The Final Lesson" quests are badly placed because it is impossible to play them together with the really good quests "A Chief of Redskins" and "False Trace". You simply don´t have enough time for everything in the same moment. That´s the reason why i prefer to skip "The Final Lesson" and play the the other two. Looks like the devs didn´t think well enough about that fact. If they changed that with Patch 1.5 i would give it another try.

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It seems like all quests just simplified in case of fights and financial part. And some bugs were fixed. Personally, If I have had no difficulties with these quests except the last fight in "resin dog"

A.H said:

I'm not sure about the achievements part; but what I meant is.. if I downloaded the mod from this forum and installed on my Steam folder; will it affect achievements in any way?
Or is the mod only applicable for people who downloaded pirated vanilla version of SD?

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I already answered - if you don't modify code which handle them - they should work as usual. If you mean you don't want to corrupt them while testing, set bSteamAchievements to false in file _LSC_on_off.h
Take note that it's not enough to just move PROGRAM folder in game directory, I explained above how to make them work

Some other devs info from the hotfix patch description for RUS version(about a month ago):

We are adapting English translation and starting to make new content. We want to make a nice end to the history of Charles and start a new one. And the game lacks a single important modern thing, which is incredibly difficult in the develepmont, but has deuced demand in the market.

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Idk what does it mean, but I hope they don't deceive us =)

@A.H I've got 800 hours in TEHO and 200 in COAS so far, and what I've discovered is that COAS just feels empty and dead compared to TEHO. Don't get me wrong, I like both games, but COAS is just lacking a lot that's in TEHO. And I just recently realized that I wasn't finding much to do in COAS. I've documented all this elsewhere. I'm playing COAS rather than TEHO only because I can mod it. Looks like I can now mod TEHO as well, so I'll be switching back at some point.

I don't play the same way you do. For me, the games are sailing simulators, with quests giving a reason to sail somewhere. I avoid the world map except for island region transitions. I also avoid combat as a merchant trader. I briefly started the Dutch Gambit once, then abandoned it for a previously saved game because it just wasn't the game I wanted to play. I will do naval combat, but only after I have a ship that will hold its own. The sailing model in TEHO puts me off, so I prefer to just avoid combat completely in that game.

From what I've seen of the world map in both games, they're about the same. The COAS jungles and towns are basically empty compared to TEHO. Yeah, there are people in both, but only in TEHO do they actually do much. TEHO has a large variety of Damsel in the jungle quests, wandering native merchants, lighthouse keepers who sometimes have goods that have washed ashore, and I've found a few valuable treasures on the beaches there. In COAS? The occasional citizen who has wandered out of town, and brigands that will attack, with or without Damsel, who never does anything. That's just the jungle. The towns are similar. The interesting side quests just don't exist in COAS. I found myself with no reason to talk to anyone or explore the jungle in COAS, preferring to just hit the tavern, while in TEHO I felt like I was missing something if I was on a tight schedule and couldn't take the time to explore.

Shopkeepers have a variety of quests that aren't in COAS and most of them are quite good. Even the church has a good variety of quests. Courier missions for the harbormaster are really good, to the point that in the last game I started, harbormaster courier missions were about all I was doing.

All this makes the TEHO world more alive. It's not that COAS is a bad game, it's not. It's just that TEHO has a lot of better stuff.

That's not to say everything is better. In TEHO I had to save a lot just to keep from getting unwanted quests. The tutorial is a real pain. The sailing model is bizarre. There's no good free play start, but after the tutorial it's all free play if you want.

I'm 3.5 months into COAS and I've got about 800,000. By this time in any given TEHO game I'd have 5 to 8 million. It's not that everything paid more, it was that there was more of everything that paid. It's not the amounts that are impressive, but the difference between them. The amounts are just numbers. Also, I doubt many people ever made as much as I do in the TEHO. I've documented a lot of this on the Steam forums.

The hate speech is unwarranted, and making veiled accusations against anyone is definitely wrong.

Hook

I have seen enough pointless hate speech against TEHO to last me a lifetime.
It got so bad before that we had to make specific mention of it in the forum rules.
So whatever you guys decide to do here, let's NOT start that all over again.
Been there, done that. It's boring.

@Pieter Boelen, I couldn't agree more. Which is why, for many games, I try to gently explain the positive aspects for people who think there are none. Accusing anyone who likes a game of being paid to like it, that's inappropriate.

I say that TEHO has more and better content. The best way I could illustrate this is that I wrote a Steam guide with a checklist for what to do when you arrived at a new island. There is a lot to do (the guide has 22 items), and some of it has to be done in order or you won't be able to do some of the later things. I wrote it so I could refer to it in-game. It's had 220 unique visitors and 2 people marked it as a favorite.

On a recent visit to a COAS island, I realized that there was no point in doing more than visiting the store to get a cargo quest (there are few profitable trade runs), visiting the ship yard to see if he has anything good (he hasn't in a long time), and visiting the tavern to see if there's a passenger quest. Then, even if it's still only 1400, spend the night in the tavern and check all three again before sailing to the next island, because if I sailed at 1400 I'd usually arrive at night after the shops closed.

None of this makes COAS a bad game. It's a very good game. Because it could be modded, so I could fix things that annoyed me in TEHO, I preferred playing it. If I can now mod TEHO, I'll be playing that instead.

Hook

I think to really compare 2 games, one should have more or less played all main and side quests. It looks like you are a sandbox player and that your opinions are more or less about that, aren´t they?

I played both games completely through a lot of times and personaly think that COAS has more potential than TEHO till now, especially with all the mods.

Damn right they are. I'll let someone else compare the main story quests. That's just not a game I want to play.

From reports from friends, the TEHO main story quests are very good, and very in-depth. I've never talked to anyone about the COAS Peter Blood story, so I have no idea how that compares. I've read some walkthroughs, so I know there are a lot of additional quests in COAS, and I've even done a few. But for pure sandbox play, it's lacking a bit compared to TEHO.

Given that TEHO has a 3 month sandbox period before you can start the Dutch Gambit main story line, then the sandbox play is just as important as the story line.

So there are actually three different games there. The tutorial, which shows you an example of everything you'll be doing in the rest of the game; the sandbox where you build up your character and skills, get a good ship and officers, and hopefully find some useful goodies; and the main story. All three of these are different. The main story even has three paths you can take, so we're up to 5 games total.

Hook

OK!!!!

Actually, the process is a lot simpler than he describes. All you need to do is downl0ad the source from his link, and put it in your main program folder. You'll have a PROGRAM folder beside your RESOURCE folder, and it will have a bunch of subfolders and a few files in it.

When the game finds a PROGRAM folder, it reads that instead of the precompiled stuff.

Hook

Yea there are a lot of differences; but my main issue is the free play start... I don't like playing as french and that is what I was always hoping for to change, but I don't think it's coming soon.

With regards to money; after you have a significant ship then it's pretty easy to make money. In my first month I had about 30+ million stored in several banks, as well as 35,000+ dubloons, making the game for me focused on ranking higher and getting a first class ship which only 1 was available; I don't know what new ships there are in recent patches (if there are any)

LarryHookins said:

OK!!!!

Actually, the process is a lot simpler than he describes. All you need to do is downl0ad the source from his link, and put it in your main program folder. You'll have a PROGRAM folder beside your RESOURCE folder, and it will have a bunch of subfolders and a few files in it.

When the game finds a PROGRAM folder, it reads that instead of the precompiled stuff.

Hook

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Are you sure about this? It doesn't work for me for the reasons I described in pm... Maybe this is because my patch?

Well, it turns out that I had two exe's in the same folder, but with different names, and no matter which one I started Steam would run the right one. This meant that I was using his patched version. Too bad, it would have been really nice to just stick a program folder in the game and have the game read it.

I forgot a few goodies in my list above.

There are sailors on shore and some of them are looking for work. Usually 7 to 15 sailors join in a group, and they have some good skills and don't bring down your ship's morale. They're more expensive than sailors hired in taverns, but well worth it.

Townspeople include monks, who sometimes have quests, can bless your ship, and eventually one will offer to join your crew (for 50k pesos) but gives a permanent blessing... keeps morale up and generally makes more crew available to hire. The gypsy can tell fortunes or sell you rat poison.

While the storekeeper only sells cargo now and not merchant goods, there are different specialties of merchant. Potions, junk (for crafting, mostly), weapons, magic items and a monk merchant who sells various things like candles or other crafting stuff. All can have amulets occasionally. A specialist pays more for merchandise in his specialty.

There is one port in each country (Spain has two) that buy goods to export to the old world, and pay higher prices for them. Once yo have a purser with all three trade abilities, there are a lot of profitable trades.

I've heard that TEHO is missing the pirate shipyard at Bermuda, where you could buy a variety of ship upgrades. I haven't been there to check it out, but it's too bad if it's gone.

TEHO has made all the loading screens and interface screens have the proper aspect ratio, usually with wood grain borders to fill the empty areas to the side on wide screen monitors. After looking at the stretched screens in COAS they look odd, and too small. The compass is round by default: they already implemented the aspectratio = 1.0 in their code.

The first major difference I noticed when I went back to TEHO was that they'd done away with most of the fog that's in COAS, to the point that your ship's deck looks a lot more vibrant, and you can see all the nearby islands most of the time. They also fixed the problem with other ships being basically over-fogged to the point of being mostly white early in the mornings.

Hook

I'm a bit over 40 hours into my modded TEHO.

The biggest change to game play is the addition of 10 knots to the wind speed (need to do this two places in WhrWeather.c). I do all my sailing on deck, without time compression, and I only go to the world map for island transitions or occasionally to find a quest ship. In the stock game I always did a sail-to to get to the closest beach to the destination island, then used sail-to as soon as I could (5000 yards, about 15 nautical miles) at the destination. With higher wind speeds I'm finding I almost never use sail-to for anything, and I'm even sailing around Curacao to get to the port there... and enjoying it. This also requires setting fKint to 1.0 in AIShip.c or you'll end up sailing slower as wind increases above 15 knots, which is the normal maximum wind you'll see. The fKint variable is apparently used to implement drag at higher speeds, but they base it on wind power and it's no great loss: you don't need the faster sailing in lower winds because there are no lower winds with the +10 knot change.

Normally winds would be 4-15 knots, with a couple of instances above and below that. This becomes 14-25 knots. Sailing at the highest wind speed is like a 1.7x time compression, and at the lowest wind speed is like a 3.5x time compression, but without the funny animations.

If you feel your ship is too fast with 10 knots added, then add 5 knots instead. Or sail at 2-6 knots with stock winds and use time compression.

Check Windytv, wind forecast to see what the winds are doing in the Caribbean right now. Typically you won't see wind speeds much below 15 knots.

Hook

Still no sailors on deck when in deck view ?

actos said:

Still no sailors on deck when in deck view ?

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Assuming TEHO is similar to PotC, that is probably a quick fix in PROGRAM\SEA_AI\AICameras.c .

I've got sailors on deck. The normal code we'd change in COAS had already been changed, but I found where the variable was used elsewhere. It was set to a global, and that global was read from your save game, so just changing the initialization of it didn't make a difference.

This is how it's fixed:


Hook

Did you check out my screenshot in Hook's Mod | PiratesAhoy! ? It shows crew on deck.

LarryHookins said:

I've got sailors on deck. The normal code we'd change in COAS had already been changed, but I found where the variable was used elsewhere. It was set to a global, and that global was read from your save game, so just changing the initialization of it didn't make a difference.

This is how it's fixed:

Code:

//    Sailors.IsOnDeck = !bSeePeoplesOnDeck;
      Sailors.IsOnDeck = 0;       // LDH 15Jan17 show crew on deck

Hook

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Thank you a lot .
I ll look forward to your mod.

Judging by the developer's big screwup of current unreleased update; I'd say everyone's flocking towards the mod

but still can't find out whether the mod can be played from Steam and if achievements can be obtained

Why not? Did you try it?

@A.H if you're asking if Steam achievements can be cheated with the mod, the answer is no.

Other than that, @kb31 has answered it twice already.

Hook