Here's some more for ya then:
1. What else do you want? The game engine doesn't exactly support building the way this mod does.
Will you believe those buildings are actually blades and guns? Those are the crazy lengths we had to go to to make that work.
If you know of a better way to do it, I'd quite like to know. I once tried something "better" and that didn't work.
2. Can't do everything at once. Especially not if the main coder at the moment (apparently me) is NOT a programmer at all.
I'm a seafarer, for crying out loud! And I find I'm cleaning up rather a lot of messy things that we all keep running into left, right and centre.
But we've been fixing problems at a higher rate these past two months than for a long, long time in the past several years.
3. Let me put it this way: If they
wouldn't fight you, that defeats the purpose of those forts being there in the first place.
You can talk to those rich citizens there for all sorts of loot, but that that NEEDS to be a challenge, no?
Only "sensible" solution I can think of is to lock the forts altogether once gain a LoM.
4. What else should the steamships consume? Ideally coal, yes. But who is going to add that into the game?
As with so many other things, nothing happens if nobody does it. And I can't do everything.
I already got near-perfect wind-independent steamships working in a game that wasn't even remotely made for that.
Good enough for me. Until such time that everything
else is up to speed.
5. We did that for simplicity's sake. Making things change during the game is a LOT more work and you'd have a hard time even noticing it unless you play for a REALLY long time.
6. As said: In progress. For some reason, that code is doing stuff that we don't quite understand.
For example, today I find myself trying to fix the Quest Ship classes. That tries to generate Tier 1 pirate ships, which is NOT supposed to happen!
8. What would you want to do there? We could open them up, but there'd be nothing there.
There will only be something if somebody adds it.
9. I'm already WELL impressed by how well we managed to make those special abilities work at all.
Adding them into AI code is going several steps further in making things complicated.
I like the idea, sure enough. But as much as I'd like to add new stuff, I can't do so while the old stuff doesn't do what we want it to.
Long story short: VERY few modders + lots of work to be done = not easy. If more people join in, we can get more done.
We're not lacking for ideas, that's for certain. But moving from ideas to reality is a big, big step.
(And just in case the above sounds a bit annoyed, be assured that is not annoyance at you.
But it IS annoyance at the fact that all I seem to do is to fix stuff these days.
I don't WANT to do that; it's FRUSTRATING. But who ELSE is going to do it???
)
Most modders are really short tempered and cant stand such questions.
