Caribbean! Content update, Second video devblog!

[Thagarr]

‘Caribbean!’, an early access title on Steam, receives a huge update that includes new options for city management, new economy and trading systems, brand new ship models for boarding fights and the first changes to naval and land battles.

To highlight the most important additions and changes in detail, the studio prepared a new video development blog:

Full changelog is available on the official site: http://snowbirdgames.com/?p=1143&lang=en

'Caribbean!' will also be available for purchase at the discounted price (-35%) on Steam throughout the week: http://store.steampowered.com/app/293010

Developed by Snowbird Games and based on Mount & Blade: Warband's engine, ‘Caribbean!’ is a sandbox pirate RPG that blends the most engaging melee system and firearm combat with naval battles, detailed crew and fleet management.
Set in 17th century Caribbean, where unspeakable riches drew many European powers and pirates into a great fight, the game lets players decide their own role and create their own pirate adventure.
You can help shape ‘Caribbean!’ for the better, as it is in continuous development and available at a discounted price until the game's release.
Head to the game's Steam hub for more info: http://steamcommunity.com/app/293010/discussions/

Official website: http://www.snowbirdgames.com

 

[Captain Murphy]

I really wish they hadn't sped up the ship combat play. It just kills the game. You take so much damage that it becomes too expensive to own large ships.

Edit: played about 20 minutes of it. Lost 4 ships, almost every crewman I had (outnumbered the enemy 3:1 with elite troops) and had to rebuild my ships many, many times. So far the game feels much more like a 'lets speed things up so we can debug' than a polished game. The fighting mechanics are not nearly as smooth as the M&B versions and even with high skills in fighting with high strength you get your ass kicked. So, my rating for now:

 

[Red Back Dude]

Shame to hear that i was thinking of picking this up but i probably wont untill its released guess these things happen like with 7 days to die there is no point whatsoever playing the game right now because they added some broken mechanics but its in "alpha" for whatever that means these days i guess theyll fix it up sooner or later.

 

[Captain Murphy]

I played some more after the first debacle. I spent an hour running around attacking bandits, smugglers, and the like. Started with $22,000, by the time I got done capturing all the ships (probably 20-30 total), repairing all the damage, hiring all new crew and soldiers, and selling off all the booty (ships, cargo), I had a whopping $16,000. In ship combat, the gun reload in a couple seconds so a single pass ends up with 3-4 volleys exchanging. I accidentally sank about half the enemy ships because they were taking damage so fast from my AI ships. If a ship catches fire, it burns for about 10-30 seconds and you can expect to lose half your hull, a large portion of your sails, and at least 30% of your crew (sometimes less, sometimes more). Boarding combat is slightly improved with the swinging to other ships mechanic and the climbing to the rigging points (not sure what to call that position since it doesn't exist in real ships). One downside is that melee is simply a game of 'who has the most people' and it doesn't balance well. If you were like me and in Warband had a small cadre of elite troops that were gaining 25:1 kill rates, well be prepared to see the opposite. In half an hour, none of my troops advanced to the next level in their tree so I bought all new Elite troops. They were getting at BEST a 1.5:1 rate of against the base sailor class. Which means an untrained sailor on the enemy side is as good as an elite troop on the player team. On the other side, a single elite troop on the enemy ship can cause mass devastation on your ship, so watch out for them. Oh, and buying a gunner for your team is outrageously expensive. Those troops can cause mass damage to the enemy in most battles, except now on ship battles the enemy specifically targets them at the start of the battle. So with 4 gunners on my boat with a 52:10 troop rate, I lost ALL 4 gunners in the first 10 seconds. The enemy AI specifically sacrificed themselves to kill those gunners.

I never got into larger ship battles, mostly because I couldn't take on anything more than 20-30 enemy which left me to taking out the bandit type units. The ships they sail (2-3 at a time) were bringing in $400-500 if they weren't damaged badly. Sometimes they would have cargo worth $50-100. So with 3 ships the total haul could be around $2k. Then to repair your ships, rearm them, and get sailors to replace the lost ones (and soldiers too) you ended up spending $2500-3000. The money they give in the beginning is there to give you a slow attrition until you can get leveled up significantly to take on higher level enemies. Except in 1 hour of constant fighting I went up 2 levels.

I m honestly not sure what to think of the game right now. I am very disappointed, that is for sure. I SO want to like it but they are making it more difficult every time they update. If they keep it up then they will lose any M&B fans they had in the start and will not pick up any new ones.

 

[Thagarr]

That is unfortunate, I had high hopes for this one when I heard about it a few years ago. Mount & Blade is a great game to build off of, although there are certain things it can't do well, such as waves. Small things like that are overlookable though if the game play is good, which doesn't seem to be the case here.

Speeding up game play is one of the biggest gripes we have had with Pirate games lately, Age of Sail combat encounters took hours, if not days. Translating that kind of combat to a PC game is certainly not easy, but turning the combat into speedboats with machine guns and rocket launchers is certainly not the answer!

It is really unfortunate that they decided to tweak the combat system, that is the one thing that made M&B stand out! It's decisions like these that led us to the conclusion that of we wanted a realistic game, we would have to make it ourselves!

 

[Captain Murphy]

I do have to revise my review as I am getting my versions mixed up. The previous release had the gunners on the vessels and they were getting sniped, the latest version takes the gunners out completely from the ship battles. Their reasoning was 'they were OP' but in reality they were just getting sniped and people were getting pissed.

The level progression has slowed to a crawl because it is almost a guarantee that a player in melee will get their ass handed to them, thus making it hard to level up in order to get good at melee so you can level up.... a terrible progression of events in the game. The battles in the previous version were nearly as bad as this version. The only way I have been able to survive multi-ship battles is to use grape shot and devastate the other crews, but taking massive losses on my side as well. No matter how it works out, you lose most of your crew until you are maxed out on your doctor skills/healing and even then you randomly lose crew to a random formula at the end of a battle.

I have 44 hours (according to steam) so getting it on sale right now is a decent idea (I think it is around $10) and hopefully it will crawl out of the hole it is in, or someone will start modding it to fix the balance issues.

 

[Red Back Dude]

I got the game for $9.98 on today's "talk like a pirate" sale , even if its horrific it should still be worth the price of admission i downed two Irish stouts the other night and those cost more

 

[Red Back Dude]

just an update from my end of the things , yeah captain Murphy is right no matter what you do say goodbye to your crew for no apparent reason that said i am chugging along a few hours in and i am rely rely rely happy i can start out the battle with my musket which is one of the things that bugged me with AC black flag was that the musket was awesome but you allways had to pick it up and couldn't keep it.