Total War: WARHAMMER III

Total War: WARHAMMER III

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Piratical Encounters (with Southern Realms & High Elf Sea Patrol support) UPDATED for 6.2.2
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7 Jul, 2023 @ 6:57pm
16 Aug @ 12:52am
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Piratical Encounters (with Southern Realms & High Elf Sea Patrol support) UPDATED for 6.2.2

Description
In the beginning... there was Anyndel's Varied Encounters at Sea for game 2.

Then... there was piercebuster's Pirates of the World for game 2.

Now... I bring you Piratical Encounters: a reimagining and rewrite of these excellent mods.

Piratical Encounters brings you much more varied challenges when exploring those mysterious islands and wrecked merchant vessels dotting the world's oceans.

Originally posted by Optional:
To encounter Estalian, Tilean and Border Prince pirates, you must have Cataph's Southern Realms. This is optional.
https://steamproxy.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=2927296206

To encounter a renegade High Elf Sea Patrol, you must have Cataph's High Elf Sea Patrol. This is optional.
https://steamproxy.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=2968330247

You can have one, the other, or both, and Piratical Encounters will dynamically deal with whatever you're using. Making it work this way was hell. I came close to tears several times. Enjoy.


How it works
All vanilla factions can be encountered at differing frequencies, as follows.

On a 98-sided dice:
40 chances bring you into contact with one of four different Vampire Coast armies.

13 chances assail you with Dark Elf slavers intent on filling their slave holds with your crew.

13 chances pit you against Norscan raiders (presumably from their longships).

3 chances each for the following factions:
Hungry ogres looking for a little meat to go with their seafood diet.
Skaven looking to search your holds for hidden warpstone.
Greenskins who just want a scrap.
High Elves who don't appreciate your interference with their affairs.
Empire freebooters looking to take your ships and weapons.
A Chaos warband sailing to the dark gods know where.
If you are unlucky enough to roll the Chaos Warband, a further d6 is rolled, choosing between: 2 different undivided warbands, and four warbands each dedicated to one of the dark gods.

1 chance each for the following factions:
Cathayan pirates looking to acquire a little extra funds for jade.
Dwarfs who are sure you must be responsible for at least one nautical grudge.
Khornate warriors looking for salty blood.
Kislevite rebels who will shoot first and ask questions later.
Lizardmen who are quite sure that you shouldn't be sailing here.
Nurglish warriors who are looking for sea beasts to infect (but you'll do just as well).
Slaaneshi warriors tired of trying to torment torpid turtles.
Tzeenthian warriors with their own mysterious agenda.
Vampire Counts who didn't get the message about arming their zombies with guns before sailing the high seas.
Wood Elves protecting the kelp forests.
Beastmen taking a beach holiday between slaughtering villages.
Chaos Dwarfs making arms shipments.
Tomb Kings angry no one will serve them rum. Why is the rum always gone?
Bretonnians who made a vow to win a battle at sea... and here you are!

If you have Cataph's Southern Realms installed, the dice roll range is expanded by +15 with the following results:

10 chances of Estalian privateers looking to make money off your corpses.
3 chances of Colonists looking to colonise your stuff,
1 chance of Tilean mercenaries hired to take your heads.
1 chance of a Border Prince patrol that drank too much last night, and now you're being too noisy.

If you have Cataph's High Elf Sea Patrol installed, the dice roll range is expanded by +3 with the following results:

3 chances of a renegade sea patrol who spotted you sailing in a protected Merwyrm sanctuary.


Design Notes
The vanilla encounter was based around a core of 8 cheap Vampire Coast units totalling a (multiplayer) cost of 2,900 gold, and seven assorted additional units averaging 1,150 gold each. 2 for smaller encounters (totalling ten units), and eight for skull reefs (totalling sixteen units). This means that a minor encounter averages a multiplayer cost of 5,200 gold, and a skull reef averages a cost of 12,100 gold.

After rewriting the script extensively, I've retained the rough multiplayer gold value of each encounter, but the armies themselves may vary considerably in size depending on their composition. Some armies are small but strong, others are much larger, but with few if any powerful units.

Compatibility
Piratical Encounters should be very compatible. It will conflict with any mod that makes changes to wh2_campaign_encounters_at_sea.lua, and maybe some other stuff, but most mods shouldn't interfere.

Mod-added units will not appear unless support is specifically built into Piratical Encounters.

Fair warning
I've not been able to replicate this behaviour thus far since rewriting the mod for v6.2.2.
This was my first attempt at a script-based mod, ever. It works, but occasionally armies don't spawn properly. I personally always make a quicksave before an encounter and I've never had an army fail to spawn twice in a row, but it does occasionally fail to spawn on a first try. If anyone with scripting expertise would care to offer advice, I'd be most appreciative. It's also possible I broke other things in my ignorance, but hopefully not.

Future plans
Using the new technical features I've created, I'll go through the army compositions for Dwarfs, Khorne, Kislev, Lizardmen, Nurgle, Slaanesh, and Tzeentch to make them better.

Future improvements that I am considering implementing:
Easy to do:
  • At present, all encounters with a given race will only ever be led by one type of lord, for example, a Khornate encounter will always be led by a Bloodspeaker. More variety can be added.
  • At present, most encounters for a race are based on a single army composition. Additional army composition sets can be added.
  • Add support for a couple more mods I use.
  • Increase frequency of encounter spawns. Not sure I actually want to do this, but it would be extremely easy to do.
  • Add support for The Old World mod (it may need to be separate Workshop item). I'm going to play it anyway at some point, so adding support is just a matter of time.

Difficult to do:
  • Generate additional tiers of difficulty. At present there are only two encounter difficulties, but a third intermediate tier would be fun at a minimum. Rewards would need to be of intermediate quality as well, which would be even more work. This is not technically difficult, just maybe a lot of work.
102 Comments
opuntia 9 hours ago 
Super!
Thank you for all of the effort on this excellent mod.
:steamthumbsup:
Vacuity  [author] 16 hours ago 
Update: Kinda worked myself ahead of my intended schedule, and that's the last of the encounters rewritten and rebalanced for the new functionality. Daemon armies are sooooo much better now in particular.
I'm going to try and step away from adding/changing stuff for a bit and hope there are enough people still using the mod to find and report any problems.
Vacuity  [author] 21 hours ago 
No worries! Spread the word that it's back and even better than before! I should have an update tonight with rewrites and rebalances for the remaining encounters. Being able to adjust encounter army sizes on the fly was an absolute game changer.
Dragon32 15 Aug @ 10:34am 
Thanks for all these recent enhancements and updates, Vacuity.
Vacuity  [author] 15 Aug @ 9:27am 
Update: Too long to fit here. Check the Change Notes for details.
Vacuity  [author] 14 Aug @ 6:13am 
Update: Rewrote the backend for choosing factions, and generating armies in order to have better performance.
Added direct support for factions to be able to draw on different army sets (previously, I used a hacky method. Actually, all my methods are probably pretty hacky, but whatever...).
Added support for different army sets to generate different size armies.
Rebalanced Vampire Count, Wood Elf, Beastmen, Chaos Dwarf, Tomb King, Bretonnian armies using the above new technical features.
Added a new Colonies encounter to Cataph's Souther Realms support, replacing three sides of the die for Estalian encounters. Rebalanced the Tilean, Estalian,a nd Border Prince encounters using the above new technical features.
Rebalanced the encounter for Cataph's Sea Patrol using the above new technical features.
Fixed a bug where a Chaos Dwarf encounter might generate an army that wouldn't attack the player.
Vacuity  [author] 13 Aug @ 9:03am 
No worries!
Arawwn 13 Aug @ 8:53am 
Thanks for your reply!
Vacuity  [author] 13 Aug @ 8:47am 
The mod description says it modifies the spawn rates of points of interest at sea, which means it's almost certainly modifying the same script, so not compatible
Arawwn 13 Aug @ 7:50am 
Seems really cool mod! What are the chance that this modis compatible with yours: Encounters at Derp - Double treasure, Amanar, Etc : https://steamproxy.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=2853661885