[RPG Mod/Guide] Preserving Scrapped Ships/DIY Museum Ships
Sept 17, 2020 0:35:38 GMT -6
tornado1555, seawolf, and 2 more like this
Post by dia on Sept 17, 2020 0:35:38 GMT -6
This "mod" is meant to serve as a role-playing guide for preserving scrapped ships and creating your own museum ships. As such, it involves file editing of your saved game. Always backup your save files prior to any editing.
To be frank, I don't like to scrap ships. One of the reasons is that many ships can serve a secondary purpose since in this game, hulls don't deteriorate and crews are expendable. However capital ships, B's especially, are not always so useful. Unfortunately the game does not treat scrapping ships very well. If a ship isn't sunk, in service, or a museum it essentially never existed as far as the game is concerned. For someone like me who enjoys role-playing while I play, that's not an acceptable fate for my capital ships. A recent discussion on Discord has given me an idea on how to mitigate this grievance.
What we will be doing is editing your save game to "sink" the ship you would like to scrap. When all is said and done, your scrapped ships will appear in the ships sunk tab. As such you will be able to access the ship info in the state it was scrapped in. There are some caveats though. First, you will not receive any scrapping value for scrapping your ships via this method. Second, you will not be given the possibility of getting the "use scrapped ship for gunnery practice" event. I think both are acceptable losses considering you are editing your game. Likewise you will not get the museum ship event either, but my method can also be used to mitigate that. Finally, this method isn't really suitable for mass scrapping of ships. Personally, I won't scrap anything smaller than a CA, even with this method, but if you play on very large fleet sizes it could be an issue.
Prior to editing your game, you should do the following:
1.) Find out which ship(s) you wish to scrap. Take note of the exact names of the ships, (optional: their build dates), and the current month and year of the game.
2.) It is highly recommended you move these ships to your home/build area if they aren't already. Otherwise the game will report their location of disposal to be their current location. A capital ship is most likely to be scrapped at home.
3.) Save and exit your game. It is possible to edit the game while you have it open so you can view your ship list easier, however make sure you first backup your game with it closed and also to close the game prior to saving any edits.
Here are the steps for editing your files:
1.) Go into your RtW2 installation folder, open the Save folder, and find the corresponding folder for your saved game (Game1, Game2, Game3...). Copy this entire folder and place it somewhere as a backup. You can simply make a copy and rename it GameX - Copy.
2.) Find and open RTWGame[X].bcs using a text editing program. I use Sublime Text.
3.) Use ctrl+f to search for your ship's name to find the ship(s) you wish to scrap. You will likely first find an entry labeled Ship[n]Name="your ship name" with n being a number that represents your ship.
4.) Confirm it is indeed the ship you are looking for.
5.) Take note of the number referenced in Ship[n]Name="your ship name". All entries with the matching Ship[n] will correspond to the ship you wish to scrap.
6.) Find the line Ship[n]RepairTime=. This value should be set to 0 unless you are at war and the ship is damaged. If it is set to 1, 2, 3, etc it means the ship is damaged and has X many months left. Coincidentally this can be used to lengthen or extend a repair time if you so wish for whatever reason. There is nothing wrong with scrapping a damaged ship if you do not wish to pay for the extra upkeep of having it repaired.
7.) Set Ship[n]RepairTime=100. This will place the ship into the Ships Sunk tab
8.) Find the line Ship[n]Reinforcement=0. I honestly do not know what purpose this line serves for active ships, but for sunk ships it represents that date sunk, or scrapped in this case. If you keep this value, the date sunk/scrapped will read as 12/30/1899.
9.) We will now figure out the value to replace in the line above. First some information. The game figures out the date by measuring days since 12/30/1899 with that date being 0. (You can check this by finding a known sunk ship by searching RepairTime=100, just make sure it was yours. Note the value listed in that ships Ship[n]Reinforcement= entry, take that value and Google/duckduckgo "12/30/1899 plus x days" with x being the value. You should get a date that matches the date in the Ships Sunk tab.)
Using the current month and year of your game, choose an individual day to have your ship be scrapped. The exact day doesn't matter, but think of it as the day she's decommissioned. Now go to Google or DuckDuckGo and search the following: "number of days between Day/Month/Year and 12/30/1899" using your chosen date. There are online calculators that do this, but I know DuckDuckGo displays the answer in the search results. Set Ship[n]Reinforcement= to the value you get. This isn't something game breaking (I think) and if you get it wrong you can always go back to fix it.
10.) Find Ship[n]Fate=XXX. "XXX" can be replaced with any text you like. This will show in the "Description" column of the Ships Sunk tab. Personally, I use "Scrapped (Comm: month/year)" to note the month/year commissioned (I do keep track of the month my capital ships are commissioned, but the game keeps track of the year.) I recommend putting at least the year in the description because the Ships Sunk tab does not display this. I do not know what the character limit is for this entry.
11.) Save your file and continue to the next ship, if there are more. Once you saved and exited the text editor, you can reopen your game and continue playing.
For DIY Museum Ships:
The steps are the exact same, but during step 10, in the Ship[n]Fate= line just put that it's a Museum ship. However keep in mind that Museum ships are supposed to cost upkeep, you are essentially getting a museum ship for free. Or you can role play that it's a privately run museum ship.
Other thoughts on editing the Ship[n]Fate=XXX line:
You may have noticed many of the descriptions listed for sunk ships suck. It's obvious these descriptions are created by a crappy template, but thankfully they are stored in the Ship[n]Fate= as text. As such you can easily edit this line for an actual sunk ship to give it a better description. For example, you can add more detail to how a ship was lost, who it was fighting, or the name of the actual battle it was lost in. Just keep in mind there may be a character limit and extra long descriptions may mess up the display.
I've attached a screenshot of what a scrapped ship would look like during file editing and in the Ships Sunk tab.
To be frank, I don't like to scrap ships. One of the reasons is that many ships can serve a secondary purpose since in this game, hulls don't deteriorate and crews are expendable. However capital ships, B's especially, are not always so useful. Unfortunately the game does not treat scrapping ships very well. If a ship isn't sunk, in service, or a museum it essentially never existed as far as the game is concerned. For someone like me who enjoys role-playing while I play, that's not an acceptable fate for my capital ships. A recent discussion on Discord has given me an idea on how to mitigate this grievance.
What we will be doing is editing your save game to "sink" the ship you would like to scrap. When all is said and done, your scrapped ships will appear in the ships sunk tab. As such you will be able to access the ship info in the state it was scrapped in. There are some caveats though. First, you will not receive any scrapping value for scrapping your ships via this method. Second, you will not be given the possibility of getting the "use scrapped ship for gunnery practice" event. I think both are acceptable losses considering you are editing your game. Likewise you will not get the museum ship event either, but my method can also be used to mitigate that. Finally, this method isn't really suitable for mass scrapping of ships. Personally, I won't scrap anything smaller than a CA, even with this method, but if you play on very large fleet sizes it could be an issue.
Prior to editing your game, you should do the following:
1.) Find out which ship(s) you wish to scrap. Take note of the exact names of the ships, (optional: their build dates), and the current month and year of the game.
2.) It is highly recommended you move these ships to your home/build area if they aren't already. Otherwise the game will report their location of disposal to be their current location. A capital ship is most likely to be scrapped at home.
3.) Save and exit your game. It is possible to edit the game while you have it open so you can view your ship list easier, however make sure you first backup your game with it closed and also to close the game prior to saving any edits.
Here are the steps for editing your files:
1.) Go into your RtW2 installation folder, open the Save folder, and find the corresponding folder for your saved game (Game1, Game2, Game3...). Copy this entire folder and place it somewhere as a backup. You can simply make a copy and rename it GameX - Copy.
2.) Find and open RTWGame[X].bcs using a text editing program. I use Sublime Text.
3.) Use ctrl+f to search for your ship's name to find the ship(s) you wish to scrap. You will likely first find an entry labeled Ship[n]Name="your ship name" with n being a number that represents your ship.
4.) Confirm it is indeed the ship you are looking for.
5.) Take note of the number referenced in Ship[n]Name="your ship name". All entries with the matching Ship[n] will correspond to the ship you wish to scrap.
6.) Find the line Ship[n]RepairTime=. This value should be set to 0 unless you are at war and the ship is damaged. If it is set to 1, 2, 3, etc it means the ship is damaged and has X many months left. Coincidentally this can be used to lengthen or extend a repair time if you so wish for whatever reason. There is nothing wrong with scrapping a damaged ship if you do not wish to pay for the extra upkeep of having it repaired.
7.) Set Ship[n]RepairTime=100. This will place the ship into the Ships Sunk tab
8.) Find the line Ship[n]Reinforcement=0. I honestly do not know what purpose this line serves for active ships, but for sunk ships it represents that date sunk, or scrapped in this case. If you keep this value, the date sunk/scrapped will read as 12/30/1899.
9.) We will now figure out the value to replace in the line above. First some information. The game figures out the date by measuring days since 12/30/1899 with that date being 0. (You can check this by finding a known sunk ship by searching RepairTime=100, just make sure it was yours. Note the value listed in that ships Ship[n]Reinforcement= entry, take that value and Google/duckduckgo "12/30/1899 plus x days" with x being the value. You should get a date that matches the date in the Ships Sunk tab.)
Using the current month and year of your game, choose an individual day to have your ship be scrapped. The exact day doesn't matter, but think of it as the day she's decommissioned. Now go to Google or DuckDuckGo and search the following: "number of days between Day/Month/Year and 12/30/1899" using your chosen date. There are online calculators that do this, but I know DuckDuckGo displays the answer in the search results. Set Ship[n]Reinforcement= to the value you get. This isn't something game breaking (I think) and if you get it wrong you can always go back to fix it.
10.) Find Ship[n]Fate=XXX. "XXX" can be replaced with any text you like. This will show in the "Description" column of the Ships Sunk tab. Personally, I use "Scrapped (Comm: month/year)" to note the month/year commissioned (I do keep track of the month my capital ships are commissioned, but the game keeps track of the year.) I recommend putting at least the year in the description because the Ships Sunk tab does not display this. I do not know what the character limit is for this entry.
11.) Save your file and continue to the next ship, if there are more. Once you saved and exited the text editor, you can reopen your game and continue playing.
For DIY Museum Ships:
The steps are the exact same, but during step 10, in the Ship[n]Fate= line just put that it's a Museum ship. However keep in mind that Museum ships are supposed to cost upkeep, you are essentially getting a museum ship for free. Or you can role play that it's a privately run museum ship.
Other thoughts on editing the Ship[n]Fate=XXX line:
You may have noticed many of the descriptions listed for sunk ships suck. It's obvious these descriptions are created by a crappy template, but thankfully they are stored in the Ship[n]Fate= as text. As such you can easily edit this line for an actual sunk ship to give it a better description. For example, you can add more detail to how a ship was lost, who it was fighting, or the name of the actual battle it was lost in. Just keep in mind there may be a character limit and extra long descriptions may mess up the display.
I've attached a screenshot of what a scrapped ship would look like during file editing and in the Ships Sunk tab.
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