NOTE (I have quoted this from Storm Coding - Age of Pirates II: PiratesAhoy! Edition topic)
Why not to start a whole new game from scratch? Neither POTC nor COAS but a step further. If there is a working sea modelling engine with beutiful graphics, if we got plenty of nice ship and character models, awesome scenaries, a scripting utility and a good fighting system, interesting quests and rich lore why not to make a new game?
I mean, not from scratch, but now there are a lot of patches, tweaks and enhancers both for POTC and COAS which while they are helping to improve the game, they are an added complexity when someone wants to understand what can be done and what can't. Let's say we start designing new concepts, and with the help of a few experienced programmers the structure of the future game is being assembled step by step. Can we strip all but the essential code off the engine? (i guess that's what pirate_kk is working on now) Then can we make the engine to render a ship in the sea? Then what could we change about the models and the way the engine works with them? Is it possible to change the way sails and cannons and cannon balls are handled by the game? Is it possible to simulate a damage system based on the parts of the ship affected by cannon balls, different critic effects, range dependent damage, different cannon types, different sail configurations etc? Then what parts of previous games can we take? Most of the work is already done, it just needs to be assembled with a clear objective.
For instance, the rpg system of COAS and the concept of the game can be reworked. Instead of an arcade oriented game and insanely difficult quests just a game focused on realism and believable adventure. I like the idea of hardcore game experience , when you can save the game only inside a church (although game crashes made it impossible some years ago). It's like that concept of tough guy in the Fallout series, if you are playing a rpg then you have to take risks and live with consequences. Noone should expect to fight a frigate with a lugger and win. In real Caribbean small ships ran from big ones, always. Someone who is doing a merchant mission to get some money will run from any sail sighted in the horizon, that's the adventure. It isn't easy to get money, it is real hard to get a powerfull ship (perhaps some risky smuggler runs would do it), that's the fun. But for this concept to work, it's necessary to make the game possible first. Difficult and hard yes, but not impossible. Not hundreds of save & reloads to end a quest, not impossible duels, not nasty ambushes right in the beginning. Some warnings for new characters (to stay away from that place-character-quest) and lots of common sense should be enough to play it.
No level dependent NPCs anymore. Right now there is no sense of progress in the game. When you are at level 1-20 so are your enemies. When you are at level 40-50 (100% skills) so are your enemies too. Not only unrealistic but depressing, the more you develope your character the harder are your opponents (common fault in most RPGs). But in a tough guy game (no saves), most NPCs would have 40-60% skills, a few would have 20-40% and a few 60-80% like in real life. And there would be some 80-100% unique characters in the special quests. So in the beginning it would be hard to do just about any thing. In the middle game it would be possible at last to fight most NPCs with good chances, but still there would be some easier ones and some harder ones. And in the late game your character would be awesome most of the time, so it would be the right time to do some feared quests. If it isn't so, what would be the point of levelling up?
The same about ship encounters. No more MoW fleets, devastator governor squads and omega pirate teams. Every colony should have some local trade ships and a small fleet of light warships to patrol the coast checking merchant traffic to prevent piracy and smuggling. Every nation should have a few frigates or corvettes (just 2-3) to patrol sea lines and a small transatlantic merchant fleet which arrives and leaves once a year in escorted convoys, and sometimes, a war squadron detached from Europe in response to an attack or threat. Every minor island or hidden location should have a small smuggler colony with a few ships. And lastly, there would be a few pirates and a few corsairs or privateers here and there, so the chance of encounter one of them would be very low. The strategic map could be designed to reflect that traffic, local areas, sea lines between islands and special areas where traffic from Europe arrives. And somehow the traffic could be tracked and checked to find if there are encounters ( with player or others) and derived changes applied. Lost small ships could be replaced in a month or two, while bigger ships would delay 6 or more. Unique ships would be unique, that is, one ship, one name, no replacement.
What i want to say is that all we need is to define some teams and start drawing the game we want, because to sail one needs to decide a course . There are many great modellers here, so if some model adjustments were needed that could be done. There are some experienced coders who could write the code on their own way, because sometimes it's easier to write a new version than to adapt a previous one. And there is some people who knows how to organize the different parts of a game, like pirate_kk from POTC or buho from COAS mods. So it's the right moment to design the game we'd love to play. Not just a few ideas but the whole game mechanics.
