Uncharted Waters New Horizons

UWNH was one of my favorite games growing up. I have recently re-installed the game to work on DosBox. Reading through the walkthroughs, I forgot how scripted this game is in terms of players following their quests. I am looking for suggestions on how to make UWNH more open-ended.

For example if I defect to another country, can I do missions for my new king to rise to duke?

Is there any other ways to escape from the players storyline?

If the game cannot be won without completing a players main quest, what are some other goals to have for the game by the time it ends in 1554?

Thanks;)

There are some games that defecting have no effect on the story. The story is always fame driven and characters like Pietro (adventure fame) or Catalina (piracy fame) can complete their story from almost any country. Catalina can become a Spanish Duke, but there is a twist when the last event in her story is triggered (you can avoid triggering this by avoiding the South American ports). I won't reveal the twist in case you want to try her as a Spanish Duke and trigger the last event. She will need to visit the ruler in Seville (and it may cost you 80% of your gold on hand) after she gets the second story related mate and "defect" back to Spain.

You can escape the story on most of the other characters by avoiding increases in the fame that triggers their story events. Avoiding the story events that are triggered by adventure fame this way(Joao, Pietro, and Ernst)can be difficult, so defecting may be an option in those cases. You can avoid Ali's story events by avoiding trade fame, but that probably also means avoiding Istanbul. I haven't tried a complete game with Ali defecting to another country, so you might give that one a try.