A little Privateers Bounty advice

I have found that assembling Privateers Bounty scenarios to be very satisfying. It is also very time-consuming, so it has been over a year since I did scenario building. Especially since I was using Dutch ships, I built a spreadsheet for doing calculations needed for Privateers Bounty. I needed to compute their English dimensions, with "length on the keel", "beam outside of the planking", and the "depth in hold" meatured at the center. The last requires estimating deck camber.

Privateers Bounty stores ship information in a text file that is formatted for easy parsing by their program. That means curly brackets and plenty of commas, with quotes, as I recall. The file that comes with Privateers Bounty should be backed up so that it can be restored. A feature of Privateers Bounty is that the real data is captured in the binary scenario file, and just a little of the database file is read, if at all, when running the game.

Ideally, you would add all your ships in a single scenario, even though they will not be used in the scenario. This simplifies adding further scenarios. Ships are assigned IDs and this is a potential source of problems as you add scenarios with more ships. I stress the importance of keeping a copy of your ship database so that you can restore it when something goes contrary to your expectations.

If you want to edit an old scenario and change the ships, the best way is to remove all the ships from the scenario, and then add them back, adding any new ships at that time. I generally try to fix the area size, land, and fortifications prior to adding ships. I am not really sure what all the effects are.If anyone is more current on the process than I am, I would welcome advice about how to improve or correct what I have written.