I was in the beta for PotBS for over a year. I’m kind of burned out on the game now actually, though it was fun for most of the time I played. It’s just that starting over from scratch 6 times in 15 months tends to make you loathe doing it one more time once retail hits. Such is the price we pay for playing in beta.
Anyway, here’s a little rundown I wrote for some friends of mine who were interested in the game now that it’s on retail shelves: (I would second Marcus’ recommendation of try before you buy!)
Be warned, this is not Pirates of the Caribbean Online. PotBS is much more mental of a game, requiring a lot of planning and foresight to succeed, especially in the economy. Calling it “Eve with Sails” is fairly accurate, though you’ll spend far less time grinding in the economy because raw materials are produced in abstract even when you are offline.
Basically the game revolves around three major aspects:
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Your ship.
While you have an avatar in game, and some missions do require avatar combat, it’s really your ship that is your “character” in game. Avatars can be equipped with a small range of weapons, armor and equipment that helps boost their effectiveness in swashbuckling combat, but ships can be equipped with a dizzying array of upgrades, add-ons and boosters to make them customized for a variety of purposes. Add to that the fact that there are literally dozens of ships you can choose from, and the combinations are endless. Your ship is how you travel, it’s how you fight 80% of the time, and it’s where you will spend the vast majority of your game time. Custom colors, flags and sails can give ships unique personalities or tie guilds together through uniform appearances. This is not WoW or Everquest, if you were hoping for a pirate that you could customize with epic armor and a flaming cutlass, this is not your game.
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The economy
The economy in PotBS is based on “lots” located in ports. You have 10 lots you can manage, and they can be spread throughout as many ports as you like. Every port has specific resources tied to it, and those resources influence what sort of structures can be built there. Structures can either harvest raw materials, refine raw materials into components, and/or fashion components into finished goods.
A perfect example of the PotBS economy at work is shipbuilding. To build even the smallest and simplest of ships you will need wood, iron, cloth, stone, leather and provisions. You will need a lumber camp in a port with oak forests to harvest logs. Then you will need a mill to process the logs into boards, masts, keels, etc… You will need an iron mine to produce iron, then a forge to smelt the iron (using limestone from a quarry) into ingots, nails and other components. You will need leather made in a tannery from hides gained from farms or hunting lodges. You will need cloth for the sails, gained from textiles mills that produce it from raw materials from plantations. You will need provisions, which are made form things like beans, wine, cheese, rum, meat and fish, all of which come from various raw materials sources. You will need guns, forged at a Weaponsmith from iron and wood. Finally you need to tie all this together into a ship with masts, sails, hull, guns and whatnot, which requires a shipyard. Shipyards can be small, medium or large, with each being able to produce larger ships but taking more lots. The larger yards can only be built in ports with deep harbors.
So you can see how building a single ship is a monumental effort that requires a robust economy to support it. In fact, it’s nearly impossible to build a ship all by yourself, you simply can’t build enough structures to do it solo. However, the economy is entirely player based, so while you may be able to crank out 75% of your ship parts yourself, you can sell or trade your overflow production to other people for the other 25% of the pieces you need. I was able to build my own ships in beta, forging trading alliances with other ship builders to support one another with pieces each of our economies could not produce on their own. You can also trade looted and/or manufactured goods to European Trader NPSc for some components like cannon, wine and other hard to find goods. There is a lot of room within the economy for people to get very wealthy with only modest production. I never wanted for income during beta, even with the limited player base I was making hundreds of thousands of doubloons once I got the hang of production.
- Combat
Here is the real star of the game. Naval combat is a mix of Sid Meier’s “Pirates!” and something more strategically complex. Sailing your ship in combat you must account for factors such as wind speed and direction, location, range and number of both your guns and your opponents, ammunition type used, hull strength and even number of crewmen if you want to initiate boarding combat. It takes a bit to get used to the sailing model, but it’s easy once you’re used to it. Just as in real life, a broadsides is recommended, with being able to do so against another ship who is angled away from you being the ideal situation to minimize return fire. Smaller, faster ships have the maneuverability advantage, but woe be to those who sail into the broadsides of a 50+ (or even 100+) gun ship of the line. Ships that close to within 40 yards or so can attempt to grapple and board, where the outcome is then determined by avatar combat on the deck of the ship.
Fighting the NPCs is fun and exciting. I got to where I was good enough with the smaller faster ships that I could often close on a larger vessel, soften it with some grapeshot to reduce the number of crew, and board it, fighting the captain and his crew to take the prize mostly undamaged. Larger ships just blow stuff out of the water, often employing chain shot and other sail reducing ammo to slow faster ships and make getting a devastating broadsides easier.
PvP is the crux of the game. Ports are assigned to a faction at the start of the game, but can be put into contention by attacking ships sailing in the waters around them. Once enough contention points are built up, a battle will ensue where ships from both sides can get invited to participate. Winning that battle either captures the port or saves it. It’s important to control ports as it makes the economy much easier if you own the ports where the resources you need are located. While it is possible to build up reputation with the other factions so that you can trade in their ports, you do so at a distinct disadvantage (heavy taxes on all production) that make it undesirable to do so. Also, only the “merchant” character class can effectively trade in other factions ports.
So basically the jist of the game is: Explore the map, fight NPCs and do missions for loot and levels, build up your level/economy/wealth to afford bigger and better ships and outfitting, and then use those ships to explore further, complete more missions and eventually join in the PvP port contention end-game.
