shipwright or shipwrong: mod 'em if you can

[caravel]

You need to understand from the start that ships are a special type of agent and don't really have much in common with army stacks.

Ships function almost exactly like agents, have a specific mission and specific targets, with the same valour stat (called "command" for ships). Ships differ in their ability to be grouped and in their Range, Attack, Defence and Speed stats. The stats are fairly simple to understand - range should need no explanation - if a ship attacks, it uses it's attack stat, if it's being attacked it uses it's defence stat. If while being attacked, it moves to another province, it uses it's speed stat to determine it's chances of escaping. The last one is more useful to the AI as it sees your moves when you click "end turn" and can react to them... this all involves the usual seed number, "dice roll", with the "command" stat improving the chances, etc.

Sea regions are like another set of land regions (provinces) in a completely different "zone" to the land regions. Nothing can access sea regions apart from ships - which only appear there via being produced from a shipwright in the adjoining province. Definitions in the startpos file determine which sea region is used for a particular coastal province to spawn it's ships. This is how ships get into the "sea zone" and there is no way for them to move out of it (it's hard-coded).

There has been a lot of discussion in the past as to exactly how ship/fleet vs ship/fleet engagements work. We still don't know exactly, but due to the random nature of some battles (who hasn't lost a whole stack of Baggalas to a solitary Galley?), it's not clear exactly what stacks do or if stacks vs individuals are better.

In most campaigns in the vanilla game I usually achieve naval superiority early on (far too early) by grouping ships in twos or threes (solitary ships are too tempting for the AI to attack and mean that in the event of a storm your shipping lanes are broken). When attacking I usually break the fleets into individual ships - grouping them back together the following year.

All ships are specific to major or minor factions, so if you want "pirates" then you need to add FN_REBEL to the faction association column for the ships you want the pirates to use. I would advise against this as the AI is hopeless at shipping as it is and most AI factions will be at war with the rebel faction meaning they will have even more difficulty establishing trade routes.

As for mercenaries, I've never tried it - nor mercenary agents for that matter... I doubt it would work - but perhaps try it.

[Gilrandir]

You need to understand from the start that ships are a special type of agent and don't really have much in common with army stacks.

Ships function almost exactly like agents, have a specific mission and specific targets, with the same valour stat (called "command" for ships). Ships differ in their ability to be grouped and in their Range, Attack, Defence and Speed stats.

Does it mean that they are unmoddable? So modding amounts to introducing new units, new factions and new provinces, does it not?

[drone]

Does it mean that they are unmoddable? So modding amounts to introducing new units, new factions and new provinces, does it not?

Depends on what you mean by "unmoddable". You can't alter the skills/limitations of the "Ship" agent type, but you can create new ships or modify the stats and prereqs of existing ones.

[Gilrandir]

You can't alter the skills/limitations of the "Ship" agent type, but you can create new ships

So, you can create new agents? Muslem princesses? Mendicant monks? Leprous beggars? Individual Holy Grail seekers? Peripatetic troubadours? Any other legendary characters who purport to have filled medieval roads? If so the campaign map can really become way too overcrowded.

[caravel]

There are set agent types with set abilities. You can create an agent called a "leprous beggar" and base it on the assassin, but it will still function as an assassin...

Muslim princesses are kind of possible but you have to set a building up to train them as the game won't spawn them automatically. This is what I did with agents in my mod ( as far as I can remember ):

1) Harem women (muslim princesses)

2) Experimented with spies/assassins who spread heresy (you can change the faith propagation for all units and buildings)... (this was interesting as it forced the player to use bishops to counter it and made the abuse of spies more difficult - it was only a small percentage and I think churches/mosques were enough to reverse it).

3) Invisible Papal Inquisitors (these were interesting because they removed the Inquisitor agents from the player and turned them papacy only - an unplayable AI only faction by default - thus making them more of an uncontrollable natural disaster - but more importantly because they're invisible counterspying keeps them under control - I can't remember how well it worked...).

So you could have your "leprous beggar" spread heresy and add a support cost (alms), but he would still be an assassin or whatever agent you based him upon...

//edit: The most versatile agent type is the "priest" types. With these you can create some rebel only pagan priests, rabbis, etc, to add flavour and a bit of randomness if nothing else.