Privateer 0.9.8

Privateer 0.9.8

This release includes all updates since 0.9.4: a read-only Submarine Manager, expanded budget estimates, a monthly-balance planning range, and the completed game-data research handoff.

Budget calculator: estimates and a ±10% range

The final monthly balance now includes a ±10% planning range alongside the central estimate, rather than presenting that estimate as an exact result. The underlying budget calculations are still under review. This is a chosen planning allowance, not a measured confidence interval or a guarantee that actual costs fall inside it.

For example, an estimated balance of -3,795 displays a range of -4,174.5 to -3,415.5. Negative balances keep correctly ordered bounds; zero displays 0.0 to 0.0. The range does not change the underlying income or expense calculations.

Every calculator row now displays a numeric estimate, including total expenses and monthly balance. Changes since 0.9.4 include:

• Provisional income now accounts for saved budget modifier and fleet size instead of the original fixed resource multiplier. Research uses the resulting monthly-income estimate.
• Historical and museum ships are excluded from surface maintenance and construction.
• Reserve and mothball maintenance reductions use nearest-even rounding; observed class-2 search-radar charges are included for destroyers, light cruisers and carriers.
• Surface construction handles normal, accelerated and halted charges, with halted construction taking precedence.
• Normal unfinished fortification construction uses saved monthly cost; completed installations are kept out of construction.
• Player intelligence uses the confirmed rate of 80 per level per target, summed across targets.
• Installation maintenance and missing submarine, aircraft, academy, training and dock costs now have explicitly documented reference estimates.
• An Estimate assumptions… dialog lets you adjust the fallback rates and income factor for the current calculator window.
• A scrollable explanation identifies the inputs, assumptions and unresolved components. A separate all-active maintenance estimate is informational and is not added again to expenses.
• Calculator changes and assumptions do not write projected costs to game saves. Existing Funds, Base Resources and Unrest editing remains separate.

Accuracy limitations: several fallback rates are calibrated to the Game3 example and are not verified across nations, eras or submarine/aircraft types. Annual income, aircraft/pilot costs, submarine pricing, academy/training timing, missile-storage accounting and other maintenance modifiers remain unresolved. Some missing inputs use disclosed zero fallbacks. The Game3 ship-maintenance aggregate still differs from the displayed ship rows by 21; no arbitrary correction was added.

Submarine Manager

Right-click a nation and choose Submarine Manager.

• Search the submarine roster and sort its columns.
• Filter in-service boats, boats under construction, halted construction, sunk/history records and unknown states.
• Inspect every saved field for the selected record.
• Keep repeated names as separate roster entries and retain missing locations explicitly.
• Check sunk/final-fate state before ordinary service/construction flags.
• Show unverified type codes and statistics as raw values rather than guessing labels.
• Report missing rosters, inconsistent counts and ambiguous duplicate fields.

This is the read-only inventory phase. Submarine creation, editing, transfer and removal are not implemented. Save-slot numbers are not permanent submarine IDs. No in-game turn-progression validation of submarine edits is claimed.

Research and documentation

• Added the nine-save budget comparison and controlled Game3 experiment findings.
• Documented maintenance-tooltip, construction, training and aircraft reconciliations.
• Added the feature implementation guide, field catalog, research checkpoints, readiness matrix and final source-audit handoff.
• Documented the current calculator assumptions and submarine-manager implementation boundaries.
• Updated roadmap/milestone planning, including the future AAR Logger; these plans are not shipped features.

Validation

132 automated tests passed before release preparation. Read-only checks covered 2,506 submarine records across nine save slots. GUI checks covered submarine search, duplicate names, filtering, details and sorting, plus calculator assumptions and positive/negative/zero balance ranges. The local Windows build was opened successfully. No live save files were modified by these checks.

Installation

Download Privateer-0.9.8-Windows-x64.zip, extract the entire archive and run Privateer.exe. Keep the accompanying runtime folder beside the executable. Python is not required.

Close RTW3 before saving edits. Use Save As for the first edited copy and retain a known-good backup.