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That ship is very fast.  I think you have to get a fast ship, but also with somewhat long range cannons, in decent quantity so you can slow it down and allow you to catch it and board.  In ERAS, a decent option is a VOC Escort.  It is not as fast, but has a decent quantity of decent cannons, and you will have to pepper the sails with chainshot to slow it down, before it gets out of range.  There are other options, but the VOC is a fairly common ship to be found, with good speed and decent number/caliber cannons and is only a 5th rater, so can be sailed by a lower level character.  Also, try to get your crew experience in gunnery up, with a good Gunner officer to boost your stats; that improves accuracy of your shots.

I think the only way to get a cat is from looting the bodies of enemy crew during boarding, as a random item and it looks like the rarity is fairly high, meaning it is not a common reward.  I looked through the ERAS scripts and I don't see it as an item that can be purchased from store and I don't think it is a sellable option for street vendors either.

While probably not ideal for what you want, because it's more general, than actual specs, this is probably the closest you can get:

RESOURCE\INI\texts\english\ShipsDescribe.txt

I don't work much with GOF 2.5, because that mod is unfinished and still buggy.  I offer it because people asked for it, but I did not guarantee its viability, given its unfinished state.  GOF 1.2 and ERAS are more polished and GOF 2.0 and 2.5 were abandoned before completion.  However, if you can save while you are at sea with the Dutchman enemy nearby, I can try to board it and maybe troubleshoot the process to see what might be disabling the boarding icon.  Email:  chezjfrey@hotmail.com

I don't see a difference.  I compared the function GetCharacterExpRate(ref _chref, string _skill), in file Program\characters\RPGUtilite.c from COAS and ERAS, and the logic within both are the same.

The SPECIAL_S, SPECIAL_P , SPECIAL_E, SPECIAL_C , SPECIAL_I, SPECIAL_A , SPECIAL_L correspond to the PIRATES scores, and are allocated as seen in Program\characters\characters.h file:

#define SPECIAL_S    "Strength"
#define SPECIAL_P    "Perception"
#define SPECIAL_E    "Endurance"
#define SPECIAL_C    "Charisma"
#define SPECIAL_I    "Intellect"
#define SPECIAL_A    "Agility"
#define SPECIAL_L    "Luck"

They correspond to the PIRATES descriptions, as seen in file RESOURCE\INI\texts\english\common.ini:

string = Strength,"Power"
string = Perception,"Insight"
string = Endurance,"Endurance"
string = Charisma,"Authority"
string = Intellect,"Talent"
string = Agility,"Reaction"

string = Luck,"Success"

That system was developed by the original City of Abandoned Ships.  It is explained in the included manual, Age_of_Pirates_2_-_City_of_Abandoned_Ships_-_UK_Manual_-_PC.pdf, page 12.

That system was developed by the original City of Abandoned Ships.  It is explained in the included manual, Age_of_Pirates_2_-_City_of_Abandoned_Ships_-_UK_Manual_-_PC.pdf, page 12.

Send me the boarding save and I'll check it out.

1. That's because I am an idiot. About a month ago, someone asked for some help to modify ERAS so it would stop auto-selecting officer weapons and to enable the button to manually assign them. It requires a bunch of modifications, so I gave them example code of all the files. However, my idiocy is that I apparently actually saved one of those file changes that skips assigning officer weapons entirely, and uploaded that to Itch. I am uploading the reverted file right now. But in the meantime, go to Program\characters\CaracterUtilite.c, line number 3161 and you will see this: void CharacterCheckEquipAll(ref refCharacter) { return;//Add this line if(!CheckAttribute(refCharacter, "id")) return; ...
2. [8:31 AM]Get rid of this line: return;//Add this line So it looks like this: void CharacterCheckEquipAll(ref refCharacter) { if(!CheckAttribute(refCharacter, "id")) return; ... ...

Both ERAS and GOF 2.5 started with GOF 1.2 as the basis and GOF derives from COAS.  ERAS has been continually updated through 2023 and would be the latest, most current mod based on COAS right now.

ERAS removed much of the fantasy and historically inaccurate ships from GOF, but added many more other ships and characters, one new Pirate colony and other features that don't exist in any other COAS mod.  GOF 2.5 removed many ships and much of the AI and other improvements from GOF in an attempt to fix bugs they thought were created by the GOF mod itself.  However, the bugs were mostly due to a buggy original engine, so both 2.0 and 2.5 remain a shadow of what the original GOF provided and I believe actually still have their own bugs; I do not update GOF 2.0 or 2.5 and leave them as they stood, but offer them because for some reason, people still want them.

In my opinion, if you want to try GOF, version 1.2 is the best, and 2.0 and 2.5 removed too much of what made GOF "good."  But to answer your question, ERAS would be considered the latest and solid COAS mod right now.

Ah, I had forgotten that for officers, I had put the new "Exchange" button in the same place and "Equip" never becomes visible.  The quickest way would be to disable "Exchange" and you won't be able to use that feature and would have to exchange equipment the "old" original way by speaking face to face.

In items.c, also disable "Exchange", then you should be able to remove/equip individual pieces for the officers:

else

    {

        SetNodeUsing("EQUIP_BUTTON" , true);
        SetNodeUsing("EXCHANGE_BUTTON" , false); // bExchg);

    }

I think browser downloads can sometimes fail.  I don't deal with that, because that is the Itch platform, that I have no control.  However, I do believe if you use their free client for the download, it does not have the problems that browsers sometimes have.  You don't have to use it to launch the game, but their client my provide a better download experience.  Try that.  If it doesn't download everything properly, you may have to raise a support issue with Itch.

I will check Blaze

There is a formula used for your companions to select their own weapons.  The formula takes into account damage, accuracy, reload speed...several factors and most single barrels will lose out to multi-barreled guns, though not in all cases; there are some single barrels that will "win" and get selected by a character, but they are probably few.

You can disable the characters auto-selecting, and you will need to manually equip them.  Requires both enabling the Equip button and disabling the function the characters will use to select their own.

Program\INTERFACE\items.c, change line 175 to:

SetNodeUsing("EQUIP_BUTTON" , true);

Program\characters\CharacterUtilite.c, change line 3162:

void CharacterCheckEquipAll(ref refCharacter)

{
    return; //Add this line
    if(!CheckAttribute(refCharacter, "id")) return;

...

...

...

MK drives decisions of how ERAS will look/feel, and Mirsaneli makes decisions on the NH mod; they have widely divergent tastes and I highly doubt MK would agree with the sea/ambient changes to make ERAS look/feel like NH.

I also have no intention of trying to document all the differences between ERAS and NH, because I have never played NH and do not intend to devote time to do so just to document how it might differ from ERAS.  ERAS is based on COAS and NH is based on POTC, which are quite different from each other, and that is as far as I'm currently able to describe.

COAS was based on the 2.8 version of the engine, which handled particle effects for cannon smoke much differently than POTC and the 2.0 version of the engine.  I did obtain the 2.0 version of particle effects and allowed NH to keep that older way of doing them.  Similar for the character dialogs, with 2.8 removing the "head animation" vs. the 2.0 dialog which contained a head portrait of the NPC.

It is possible to change anything in ERAS to match NH, but it is not trivial and I can guarantee that ERAS will not be changed by us to match NH; they will remain different.

I apologize for the delay, but I did finally get a chance to check into this and I did eventually discover the problem.  I just uploaded an update for POTC today that should solve the problem.  Please update the POTC mod and you should be able to load a saved game and proximate islands on worldmap should load once you exit to sea.

Included is the COAS manual:  Age_of_Pirates2_-_City_of_Abandoned_Ships-UK_Manual_-PC.pdf

Page 24 describes what is needed on the ship for your crew:  Food, Medicine, Rum, Weapons

Changing the grates on a ship requires altering the model, which requires a modeler.

There is no water displacement in the game; all water clips through ship hulls and land.  For land, the solution is to make sure that land mass models always have a topographical height that stays above the water level.  Some low profile ships will have the water waves become visible above the actual deck because of this, and in the case with a ship that has an actual see-through grate, instead of a fake grate that is just a texture, then you will be able to see water like that.

Yes, I tried a new Pitt game and I see the problem.  I uploaded a fix for Maelstrom just now.

OK, I understand better.

The game was originally designed for 600x800 and some people complained that the stretching and small icons/fonts at newer, wider resolutions was too small to read so I hardcoded a factor into the scripts for the land/sea displays.  For better treatment, I copied an option from ERAS to this version that will allow you to rescale those, separate from the screen resolution where you can choose the scaling factor with a slider.

Update the COAS scripts from the Itch update, load your saved game, go to Options, click HUD button lower right, and slide left to a value closer to 1.0 (you can go lower if you want).  It does not take effect immediately, but if you are at sea, just enter your ship cabin, then exit.

Here is .77

I'm not sure why that happens for you.  Here is what COAS at 1920x1080 looks like on my screen:

I think it is supposed to be random item locator 2.

When you moor at the shore, go left and the spot is the bubble area seen behind the rock, inside the pink/purple sphere you see straight ahead in this image:

If it is the Atill, that is not ERAS, but probably COAS or GOF.

I do not zip the file, but rather upload all the individual files and Itch provides a .zip of the content if downloaded from a browser.  This is a question for Itch support.

The mod for loyalty is included, in program/scripts/officers.c.  You can see all the adjustments compared to stock COAS and there are many.  It depends on several factors, including how loyal they are currently, and "neutral" officers should only adjust their loyalty if the majority of other non-neutral officers react negatively/positively.  And it also depends on whether the reputation of the other officers is similar or differently than yours.  This mod has been used in ERAS since 2017 and is fairly vetted at this point.

I have no intention of adding the rum management to COAS since it involves changing some dialog and adding functions that are not in a single code file, but spread throughout dialog files, text for dialogs with DLG_TEXT_BASE array index matching, companions, food and with COAS, the dialog files for each language would have to be changed, so I would rather not.

Files include:
DIALOGS/...<language>.../MainHero_dialog.c
TEXT\...<language>...\DIALOGS\MainHero_dialog.h
characters/LSC_Q2Utilite.c
scripts/companions.c
scripts/food.c

I figured out a way to get those to display without need to edit the model.  It involves a minor locator addition and a render state change for zero width texture display.  Both Maelstrom and ERAS were updated and that ship type now displays properly.

Always have at least as weapons as total ship crew.  If you have fewer weapons than crew, those crew members above the weapon count automatically die in a boarding action.  Medicine is a bit more forgiving, because then it depends on the luck of whether a crew member needs it due to illness/injury, so you don't always need the exact amount of crew members, but it's better to have as much as you can and it doesn't take much cargo space.

That was an element added to ERAS that will occasionally happen if you've been tangling with waitresses or street encounters...you've got an STD.  If you have Fast Healing Herbs or Pox Healing Herbs in your character's inventory, you should get better faster, each day.

It looks like you've identified all the available locations.  ERAS only added the one on Cayman.  There were plans to add a few more, but I don't know when or if that might occur.

I don't see it.  The Pink is already a valid ship, the Shark is nowhere to be found.  No entry in ships_init and no model.  See below:

I do not see a Shark in ERAS.  Though I do see one in GOF.  As for missing elements, I have no ability to fix models and if a GOF one is messed up, it will likely stay that way.

That is the latest

OK, so it is not actually crashing, but somehow exiting.  I will need to make some special logs to see launch progress that will write to system.log to figure out where this is happening.  Send me an email to chezjfrey@hotmail.com.  I will add that logging to the .exe, then send you a direct message to obtain it and you will run it and send me the system.logs.

OK, let's see if this is an actual crash, or exit.  Launch the game, wait for the disappearance, then check Windows Event Viewer, Application for an error:

Those look fine so far.  First make sure that a file named, "Buccaneer's Reef" with no extension is present in the same directory that Maelstrom.exe is, and also in the root ERAS mod folder, if that is a different directory than where Maelstrom is.

Post system.log, compile.log and if it exists, error.log files

Unfortunately no, they are not compatible.  Every mod has its own set of what they call "global variables" and the engine reads the saved values of those variables when you load the save.  To make New Horizons work with a newer version of the engine, many of the global variables had to be either removed because they no longer work (like for the sea and weather) and replaced with different ones.  So those global variables no longer match the original order or type of value.

However, nothing had to change with COAS or GOF mod, so if someone had old saves, with the original engine, for those games, they are compatible and can be played.  But POTC, Caribbean Tales, and New Horizons were built around a different game, where the weather and sea conformed to an older version of Storm and they had to be altered in that manner of global variables I described.

GOF 1.2 is available.

Only some character models have the necessary animations to support carrying a musket.  Since you claim that the "Equip" button was enabled for your character, but it doesn't work, I checked the scripts and it looks like there may be an error in the function to determine eligibility.  Can you tell me the character you are playing?

Also, it may be better if you can send me a save file with that musket in inventory, because if an officer did equip it, but doesn't show the correct item equipped, that may be bugged too, so I will need to investigate an eligible character too.

In ERAS, once you give equipment to an officer, you don't get to decide whether they unequip it, so if you have a gun or sword or cuirass that you may want to use at some point, do not give it away.  They decide their equipment from their inventory and for guns, they will choose based on weighted factors of accuracy, damage output and reload speed.  If that calculation favors one gun over another, they will equip it and won't unequip unless they get another gun in their inventory that favors a different one.

I will look into how Bribery is supposed to work...I only checked a few like the Grappling one I demonstrated.