When I originally thought up the idea of the Naval Monarchy it was almost entirely built on this idea of generating some additional government RNG to the map. With the exception of the few isolated scripted Pirate Republics and the rare White Buffalo formables, you almost never see any other Pirate Republics around the world. While stable, organized pirate confederations were rare and fleeting in real life, I wanted to add some extra coals to the fire and see what could happen.

So, I created this idea of Naval Monarchies slowly spreading across islands, developing these prosperous ports. Eventually, the ports grow too large and the Monarch has to either crack down to keep them in the empire or they slip the way of Carthage - branching out to form their own identity as Free Ports and eventually, perhaps breaking free altogether. As most government reforms can trigger the conditions for the Changing Tides event tree that leads to becoming a Free Port, I have begun seeing random small coastal nations becoming Free Ports.

When the AI Free Port is especially prosperous within their Trade Node they will trigger the Trading Port path and the AI heading towards Plutocracy. When they are especially privateer aggressive they end up triggering the Raiding path and the AI heads towards Pirate Republic. Otherwise, by default they will lean towards becoming Naval Monarchies and begin spreading out as normal across coasts, starting the whole process again.

This creates this dynamic system where a single Free Port being created can theoretically propagate an unlimited number of additional Free Ports (assuming the conditions are met) and overall increasing the probability of Pirate Republics forming when the conditions for privateering are profitable (at least in an ideal scenario). Further, because many of the new Pirate mechanics generate high AE, lower Diplo reputation, and generally make them more likely to be attacked/attack others via their auto-CB on coastal Centers of Trade, it creates the necessary conditions to theoretically manage the increased chance of them forming.

Finally, as Naval Monarchies are expanding out, the Free Port Event chain has the opportunity to spawn additional Centers of Trade in provinces over 20 Dev, which in theory is creating high value pirate targets which both benefit their owners and place a bullseye on them. Eventually, if a Pirate Republic is able to service long enough to reach the middle of their Reform path, they will potentially gain access to the ability to create Pirate Coves, which act much as a Naval Pirate March for their overlord, or Fencing Posts, which are a special type of Free City created via the Trading City interaction. If they stay within the Cartel (Trade League) they will stick as Fencing Ports, but if they break away for whatever reason (normally rivaling each other...ffs) then they have the potential to eventually become a Naval Monarchy and again, kicking the whole process off again.

While this entire system needs a lot of TLC, from my testing thus far I have begun to see some really interesting results. Within the north coast of Europe it is less likely to see them form due to competing for Trade Power dominance (something I would like to tweak in the future), but all across the Indian and Chinese seas, I have begun noticing a few sporadic Free Ports in higher dev provinces popping out. As noted above, these most often result in Naval Monarchies, but due to the current limitation of an existing non-alive Core within the target province, it seems fairly rare for this ecosystem to fully kick off without player intervention. In a players hands on the other hand...perhaps in Ceylon or Palembang...you can establish a rather terrifying network of Pirate Coves all mustering a true wooden wall.

In the future, I would like to tweak this a bit to further exaggerate some of these features a bit. In particular, the dynamic of taking more aggressive choices through the Free Port reforms while heading towards a proper Pirate Republic leading to further hostility from the outside world and increasing the chance of your provisional government being snuffed out before you can really get up and running.

Also, I would like to investigate methods for tuning the AI to ignore inland tiles when they have these reforms. This would make it more feasible to increase the spawn rates a bit - otherwise I suspect the whole map would end up as various Naval powers. Not that I would be heart broken to see a coast of pirates in 1700s :)