Developing a mod for realistic naval boarding - can anyone help?

[Alwyn]

Would anyone be interested in developing or testing a mod for more realistic naval boarding?

Inspired by the discussion here (which explains why naval boarding usually ends in defeat for the attacker), I edited a copy of my Fourth Rate Frigate Unlock mod with Pack File Manager (PFM) 3.2.1, editing the unit_stats_naval_crew table. This changes the statistics of naval crews, doubling their melee attack scores. (This crude adjustment is just intended as a starting point to begin testing.)

One challenge is how to test such a mod, since the naval crew statistics are invisible in the game. My idea was to drastically reduce the scores for Barbary States naval crew, since they have separate entries in the table. They normally have plenty of ships, so it should be possible to test the mod by boarding their ships and seeing what happens. If the mod works, then boarding Barbary ships should be easy.

The edited scores are below – these reflect the crude adjustments to naval crew statistics which are explained above.




One problem is that, when I use PFM 3.2.1 to make/edit a mod, the saved file almost always includes a tiny ‘padlock’ icon. It looks like this:



I can remove the icon (right-click and ‘share with’). However, such mods almost never have any effect in the game, even when they are ‘movie’ mods (which should work automatically) or if they are activated by a script file in the User/scripts folder. (That’s why I use PFM 1.5.3 for modding things like unit statistics. PFM 1.5.3 crashes when I try to extract any folder except for unit_stats_land and unit_stats_naval, which seriously limits what I can do with modding). If anyone know how to overcome these difficulties, I’d really like to know how. (I tried DB Editor, but the result was a disaster – I needed to re-install the game).

If you would like to test this crude mod, download and unzip the file and put it in your data folder. (However, as I said above, it almost certainly won’t work.) Instead of testing this crude mod, I wonder if anyone who has better luck than me with making mods would like to use this information to develop a realistic naval boarding mod?

[Quintus Hortensius Hortalus]

Alwyn if I'm right the problem is directly related to the different versions of the PFM. SOmewhere if read the some things ae simply not compatibly because of a extra "Space" in the header or something like that.
But I'm not sure about this. Anyway you should always use only 1 version of the PFM to edit the db-tables (or the DB-Editor, as you like; I prefer the latter because large scale changes with a lot of rows are easier to made.).

[Alwyn]

Thank you for trying to help. I can make a mod pack with PFM 3.2.1. I can edit the database tables using the same version of PFM. When I save the mod file, however, the saved file has a padlock icon and has no effect on the game. So the problem does not appear to be caused by using different PFMs to edit database tables in the same mod pack.

Currently, I use PFM 1.5.9 to create mod packs and PFM 1.5.3 to edit the database tables. (When I try to use PFM 1.5.3 to create mod packs, it crashes when extracting any table except for unit_stats_land or unit_stats_naval. When I try to use PFM 1.5.9 to edit database tables, it crashes when trying edit unit_stats_land).