• New Horizons on Maelstrom
    Maelstrom New Horizons


    Visit our website www.piratehorizons.com to quickly find download links for the newest versions of our New Horizons mods Beyond New Horizons and Maelstrom New Horizons!

Solved Nation Relations: FINAL(!) Request for Suggestions on a Simplified Mode

You and I are going to have to " agree to disagree" about this.

As far as I am concerned this is a game ( played for enjoyment & escapism ) - NOT real life or a simulation of it. And that is my very strongly held opinion.
It is not meant to become as tedious as real life is, of course. What I am trying to do is to get to the heart of "ROLE playing".
While I know that RPG generally means "developing your character with stats in interfaces", I think that completely bypasses the true power of an RPG.
What I would hope for is that players can step into another world and play the life of a person who never existed.
But that can never truly work when the world doesn't seem real or at least believable in the first place.

That being said, I know fully well that there are many different ways of playing a game and I'm not trying to exclude one in favour of the other.
This is the reason why I AM fully willing to add an "Arcade" option for this.
If only I knew HOW to make that Arcade option in such a way that it serves the purpose for the players who want it.

Normally I work on features that I would like*. Because I can think of how I'd like them, so while working on them, I know what end result I am after.
And if I can, I try to think of how other people would like them too and, if necessary, tweak things to accommodate as many wishes as possible.
Ideally without toggles, because I don't believe in those. If a way of playing the game can be made to work through ingame choices, that would be my preferred option.
That is hard, doesn't always work and sometimes I have to eat my wishes and add toggles/extra choices anyway.

But in this case, what I already did so far IS what I like. Not as advanced as it ideally should be, but for me a steady base to work from at some point in the future.
I personally wouldn't ever want to play a more simplified mode and am having a hard time imagining what such a "simplified mode" should be like to be enjoyed by those who do want it.
So that is why I need you guys to tell me. Ideally as clearly as possible.

* = That is not technically true. Easily more than 75% of my modding efforts end up being spent on troubleshooting, fixing problems and finishing other people's work.
With 10% spent on combining the work from other modders and making the installers. That leaves at best 15% (probably much, much less) on actual stuff of my own.

I would dispute that these are "noticably missing" - in that they do not cause the game to play badly or be unplayable. Therefore I do not think they need to be messed around with in Beta 5.:no
Indeed in their current state, they don't break the game. So NOT adding them would not actually do any harm.
In fact, adding them obviously will require some sort of "evolutionary process" in that the first attempt will not be good enough.
Any development always goes through several iterations before it is good enough.

So I agree they don't need to be done. But I want them done anyway! And I am willing to do the majority of the work myself.
I have by now quite a good idea for myself on how to handle them; it is just a matter of actually doing what I've got in mind.
They should be not too huge projects, but COULD have a worthwhile impact on the game and I am very curious to find out!

There is functionality already in the game that basically suggests to me that these features should really also exist.
But they don't. Not yet. Which makes them in my book a missed opportunity that I would want to rectify.

But if their implementation causes anything like the problems encountered with Beta 3.5/Beta 4 I am going to be very depressed :( - because the situation could heave been so easily avoided.
You and me both! For all intents and purposes, I almost had Beta 3.5 ready to go around the Autumn holidays.
It wasn't as advanced as what we have now, but it was one helluva lot better than Beta 3.4 was!

But that is when major issues with brand new complicated features started dragging out the development pretty much until now.
If you think that was annoying for you and the other players, I can absolutely guarantee you that it was easily just as annoying (and probably more-so!) for myself.
I have been wanting to actually PLAY the game for YEARS now. But I can't when the game isn't quite playable enough.

I feel like I've been fixing and finishing other people's work for 10 years straight.
And now that I have a different job, I do exactly that both during my paid working hours AND during my spare time.
Which is rather a bit much.

Not only has this delay prevented me from playing the game for another 5 months,
I cannot in good conscience start work on these new features I actually WANT to do until the game actually IS in a proper steady state again.
Which means that I have been deliberately holding off on doing what I want to and instead have been continuing with the old "fixing and finishing" routine.

This is demoralizing in the extreme, I can assure you. Especially when mostly all I hear on the forums are comments on what isn't right yet.
And sometimes amazingly complex ideas on how to make things better. But while they're good ideas for sure, all I read between the lines is "Great, yet more work for me!"
I do believe that my efforts are making the game better and that they're mostly appreciated.
But it can get quite tough when all I actually see are comments along the lines of "this is not good enough".

So there you have it. Once Beta 4 is finally at long last bloody released, it will be a huge relief for me.
Because it means I WON'T have the responsibility to get the game in a functioning state again for a while.
And I AM going to be doing some stuff I actually want to do then. Because I can't keep doing "have to" jobs until every bug is fixed.
This is meant to be fun, after all.
 
Pieter, can you explain me what do you mean by saying that the game is "player-centric" at the moment?
If you go back to the original game, it becomes especially obvious:

- The size of ships appearing at sea are in relation to the level of the player; this way all battles are approximately "winnable".
You'd never have to flee for your life because you are vastly outnumbered.

- Better items appear in the game as the player gains levels. This is still the case and I'd prefer if it didn't need to be.
Because why would a sextant effectively not exist until the player becomes good enough to use it properly?
And how can there be a huge difference in damage done by different swords? It should depend on the hand that wields the sword, no?

- HP of enemies is also in many spots of the game still in relation to the player level.
So if the player becomes stronger, so do the enemies. This maintains some sort of balance throughout the game.
But it effectively also means that despite gaining levels, you never truly "gain the upper hand" because so do your enemies!
What if the difference between a low and high level character was not so huge? So a high level character could be unlucky and get killed by a low level one.
But the low level character may be vastly outnumbered and have to flee rather than fight, because NOT all fights are by definition winnable.

- When it comes to Nation Relations, again the original game didn't even show the relations between different nations.
It was all "nation vs. player" and that was it. As if the player effectively is his own nation.

Build 14 Beta 3.4 was the first version that had a simple "player relations are tied to the chosen nationality" feature.
That applied exclusively for the new "Commissioned Naval Officer" player type and it didn't at all work as I had in mind.
Now it applies to ALL players and does work correctly, even with Changing Nation Relations.
You will only be "your own nation" as in the unmodded game IF you choose "Personal Nation" at game start OR get multiple Letters of Marque.

Additionally, the False Flags functionality has been fixed so it actually works after having been half-functional, but really unusable in the game for 5+ years.
Doing that required a complete rewrite of the underlying Nation Relations code and I cleaned out a LOT of messy code there.
As part of that project, I also found out several terrible bugs with it that nobody ever seemed to have noticed before, but were there anyway.
Those are all solved now.

This is where it gets to the actual functionality that affects gameplay, which is pretty much limited to one code function (UpdateRMRelation in nations.c, to be exact).
I never understood when you would/wouldn't gain points with nations and how many points.
When I finally looked into it, I found out that basically you would ALWAYS gain points with ALL nations.
You'd get maximum points if you had a LoM, 50% points for Friendly nations and 25% for Neutral ones. (I can't remember the exact numbers)
The only negative points you would ever get are with the nation you attacked.

So after a lot of discussing on the forum, I completely reworked all logic dealing with this.
Now there is actually a difference between nations being Neutral to each other and them being Allied. That was never the case before.
You can now slide into piracy from your attacks on ships, unless you get a Letter of Marque,
which gives LoMs their actual historical purpose of making your attacks legal and not acts of piracy.

Gaining points with the pirates was impossible. Officially joining the pirates just made all other nations hostile and did nothing else.
In other words: It was quite a pointless feature at that time.
Now you finally CAN join the pirates and gain points with them, which begins to actually make it a viable career path.

A lot more was done, of course, but this post has already become quite long, so I do believe it is time to find an end for it. ;)
 
Last edited:
Back
Top