Since creating my Iron-man Mod for Sid Meier's Pirates! (2004), I've finished another five mods and I'm releasing all six together. I call this The Challenge Pack because all but one of the mods serve to make the game more challenging. The current release of the challenge pack contains the following mods:
- Iron-man Mod - This mod prevents the player from simply reloading a saved game after making a mistake.
- Minor Relations / Useless Items Mod - This mod fleshes out the relationships with the minor powers (pirates, Indians, and Jesuits), which were never implemented in the original game, and gives use to the Indian and Jesuit artifacts, which were therefore useless in the original game. It also makes disguises more useful and fixes the Dutch rutter so it works correctly according to its description.
- Realistic Cannonball Speed - This mod increases the cannonballs to a realistic speed, giving a very different and more challenging combat experience.
- Reformulated Crew Happiness - This mod changes the crew happiness formulas to eliminate the exploit that allowed players to sail indefinitely without ever paying the crew. It also makes the crew take into account the length of the voyage when dividing the plunder, makes the musical instruments a bit more effective, and fixes a minor bug in the game's calculation of crew morale. This mod is balanced for the harder difficulty levels (Adventurer, Rogue, and Swashbuckler), and might make the easy difficulty levels easier.
- Slower Aging - This mod reduces the effects of aging by 25%. This is the only mod that makes the game easier, but the result is more realistic and it helps with finishing the more difficult game that results from applying the other mods.
- Tenacious Top Pirates - This mod makes the top pirates never surrender, in the same way that the main quest villains never surrender, meaning that you have to duel them aboard their ships to beat them. Unlike the main quest villains, however, top pirate ships can still be sunk.
- Miscellaneous fixes - This mod simply fixes minor grammatical errors in the game text. It is always enabled when you use the challenge pack.
Download: ChallengePack.zip (version 1.2.3)
To use it, replace your game executable (Pirates!.exe) with the one generated by the program. (You may want to make a backup first.)
Contact me if you have any trouble!
As a bonus, if you don't select any mods, you'll get a clean, unencrypted executable that's suitable for creating mods and applying other people's mods. (The Steam version supports no exe mods. The retail version supports exe data mods but not code mods. This version supports both code and data mods.)
Comments
Second I would like to ask if the 25% less aging is moddable into higher values
Thx
Thank you so much for all your effort, you'll make King's Advisor for this!
Sail ho! :D
Also, the voice clip for taunts during duels doesn't play.
Can you take a look into that, please? I love the soundtrack in the Pirates! game and it's annoying that I have to play it on mute.
I especially like the way Indians and Abbots now require artifacts before helping- this definitely adds to the game.
Since you are clearly an expert programmer I was hoping you can help me with some problems I'm having with this game, maybe you can tell me how to modify certain things:
1) Duels and dancing are slow, 1 FPS. How can this be increased?
2) Montalban on the Quest map, the fat abbot, and the surrendering Ducth captain all have that "Terminator Guy" look. This is with patch V1.02.
3) The BINK videos do not work except with Swiftshader, which is too slow for overall gameplay (the laptop is a 2001 Intel Pentium 3 XP- I have reasons for using it). The images are of strange and dark, weirdly-colored and aligned quality. The RAD Video app cannot play them although the VLC Player, Windows Media Player, and Media Player Lite all can.
Thank you- by the way, where can one learn how to modify and create applications? I have website programming experience.
Creating and modifying applications are two different things. For creating applications, I'd recommend looking into some C# tutorials. As for modifying applications, it depends on how the application was written, including which language it was written in. If you have the source code for the application, that's the easiest way to modify it. Trying to modify an application whose source code you don't have is known as reverse engineering and is a much more difficult task, especially if the application was written in an older language like C++. It may take years to develop the knowledge to reverse engineer such applications, and then months to reverse engineer any particular application. Nonetheless if you want to start down that path, you can begin to learn "assembly language" and see how languages like C and C++ get converted into assembly language.
I think it's already the case - although I could be misremembering - that the severity of an attack depends on how much they dislike you. It would be possible to change the game so that they also hunt you down when you're far from their territory, but it would not be a simple change.
I'm playing on version 1.0 and using only the Minor Relations mod.
About the relations: is there a way to win back good relations? I seem able to anger pirate ports, but I can't figure out how restore good relations with them. Once I defeat a major pirate, they seem to hate me till the end of times.
Thanks.
As for audio issues, I've never experienced it. Does it happen if you uncheck all the boxes and generate a new executable with all mods disabled?
I tested with a no-mod executable.
· Sound effects during boarding battles seem inconsistent: some sounds play twice, some seem out of place, some are missing (e.g: taunt sfx doesn't play at all). It's not a big concern in this case, it just feels weird if you're paying attention to the sound.
When testing with the mod, battles seemed much more noisy and the noise carried on through the victory screen.
· While anchored in a port, the occasional sword clanging sound is heard. This seems to happen anywhere, be it tavern, merchant, shipwright or even the port menu. It's no big deal, the clanging can even follow the music.
When testing with the mod, the sword clanging in this situation was noisier and bothersome.
Hope this helps.
Now that I had some time to play with your mods, I get the feeling that these rapid cannon shots are not nearly as destructive as in vanilla. Maybe it's just a graphic thing, but most shots don't seem to even hit the ship.
In spite of these reports I'm quite pleased I found this Challenge Pack. Great work here.
The areas it might conflict with would seem to me to be crew morale, since it can be set to lock your crew to happy, and aging, since it can be set to lock your age to 18 either permanently (which locks the game year to the starting year, or it can be set to change your age to 18 only in sword fights.
I typically do not use those settings, so I think I'll give your Challenge Pack a shot!
I just came across it and will install to yet again enjoy this game. I first played the C64 version and have loved it ever since! It sure brings back memories, to revisit it.
The only aspect I definitely do not enjoy about the 2004 version, is the game speed. I feel it is way too fast, and makes the experience more arcadey than I appreciate. I was a fan of the original's game speed + that of the gold version.
Is there any way to slow down game speed by way of the config, mod, console command or otherwise? (Apologies, if this has been requested before)
Best P/W
Sorry - I should have been more clear on this. I meant slowing down game speed in the sense of ship movement (and time scale) on the world map and in combat.
Thanks.
Any way to have an option that makes them at 3X or 5X speed? Might be a lot better.
I'm just not sure about a thing. I was looking for one of the lost cities near Campeche (it's always near Campeche, whyyyyy). My ship got stuck near a Jesuit mission. I tried to sail away... And ended up in the Pacific, though I couldn't sail around (or I'd try my hand at sacking Panama City through the ocean). Luckily I could reload from autosave.
I think it's an innate glitch in the game, but I was wondering if it could be fixed somehow.
A thousand thanks, and I hope these past days have been kind to you.
I'd recommend asking in the Customizations & Modding section of the Hooked on Pirates forum: http://www.hookedonpirates.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=11
It would be simple enough to reduce the speed back down to 5x or 3x but you also have to simultaneously adjust the aim of the AI and I don't remember the right values for that. If you'd like, send me an email and I can try to create a 5x or 3x mod for you, but it'll only have the speed adjustment and not the aim adjustment. Nonetheless, you might enjoy it better.
It always crashes right after the cutscene of the crossing to the Caribbean. Just before you're supposed to enter the game proper and sail into the random city of the country you chose.
This happens on a completely unmodded .exe, an .exe with mods selected, and an .exe with none of your mods selected but a bit of homebrew modding done to alter the stats of a ship, which I've heard people have done no issues whatsoever.
So I'm completely stumped.
I would suggest doing a clean uninstallation / reinstallation of the game. Then check if it works. If it works "out of the box", then try replacing the .exe... If it fails, maybe check the "Data Execution Prevention (DEP)" settings in Windows. (I have no idea if that's related, and my guess would be no, but you can still try disabling it and see if it helps.)
With the relations did you alter the menu so that areas are greyed out (like "divide plunder" sometimes is)? or maybe just skipped the whole procedures? I'm particularly interested in pirate tavern, shipwright and trade restrictions.
Any help would be appreciated..Thanks
When I start a new game it does not offer the Experience/Skill/Start date options and does not save the game when save is activated. Have they sold me a trial version? Can your mods resolve my problem?
Thanks in advance.
I know that you can somewhat view the contents by using an hexadecimal-to-text converter, but most of the text you get just looks like random characters, and what is readable is not useful.
By IDA database, you mean a list of the places in the disassembled execuatable where the most useful parts of the code are located ?
If yes, then I'm interested.
I put the database at www.adammil.net/tmp/pirates.idb, but I can't guarantee it'll stay there forever.
Anyway just wanted to check in and let you know there are still lots of us appreciating and using your work! Great to see the community still going strong.