We continue with Age of Booty Tips & Tricks.

Team Gambit 1:  Speed Ship, Siege Ship

Waiting in the lobby, before the game starts, you can see a mini-map.  Looking at the below mini-map you can see there is a 3 hex wide choke point, and all of the towns you need to capture are on the other side. From your volcano lair you have to sail around a cape to reach the towns (all of which generate gold resources only).  Since you will need Rum and Wood to upgrade ships, it may be difficult in general to gain these resources on this particular map. 

It’s a big map, and will take a long time to traverse.  When you are far away attacking the towns, or other pirates, and your ship sinks, you will be forced to re-spawn back at the lair a long ways away from the action.  This is pretty inconvenient.

Loosing ships uses time, resources, and takes you away from your victory conditions (capturing towns).  When you get to the towns in the south, you need to establish a foothold town to keep attacking from that side of the map and be able to repair at a friendly port.  The speed ship, siege ship gambit could help a team dominate this kind of map.

In a situation like this one below, you might start with a single mast pirate ship and only one cannon (marked by the dot under your alias (Gamertag/GameSpyID)).  See below picture.

At this point, if you have enough resources to spend, the world is your oyster.  You can choose to buy upgrades for your ship in any order you want. There are strong advantages to having a balanced ship; this gambit uses none of them.  The point of this gambit is to specialize one ship speed, and the other ship cannons.   

Begin the gambit by telling your team mate about this plan.  Have one team member buy all canons, while the other goes all speed.  Remember you have to share resources when upgrading the ships, so you might need to withhold upgrading to maximum immediately.

In the case where there are important resources like Rum and Wood not being generated at towns, it is important to attack small coastal villages, and also collect the random crates that appear.

These crates randomly give you 1 gold, wood, or rum.  Not taking these crates leaves them for the enemy to retrieve.

You must still capture towns to win the game.  And since ship upgrade resources may be slim pickings (very little Rum or Wood) then the only way to stay competitive might be to use a mixed team strategy like this gambit and rely on grabbing crates, and coordinating attacks with your unbalanced fleet.

As you upgrade make sure you stay focused on your specialty, and you will start to notice the results.  The speed ship collects needed resources easier, can perform feint attacks or harasses the enemy, and get away.  Then the siege ship arrives to reinforce any attack on a town, and soon you will be taking over.

One person keeps buying cannons every upgrade chance they get, and the other player buys up speed at every chance.  This allows the successful team to upgrade their ships, and concentrate their powerful attacks on towns.

Think of it as a strategy where one player does some finesse hit and run & stealing crates under the other team’s nose, while the other ship with all cannons plods along, sinking frigates, and lays siege to any close towns. 

The speed ship is vulnerable if trapped, mainly because it has one canon and usually very little armor.  It is also incapable of taking anything but the weakest towns by itself.  (This three mast yellow speedster above has no chance of taking Aberdeen by itself).

His partner can eventually show up to assist on this attack on Aberdeen.  As a seige ship bristling with cannons, he is slow, but dangerous.  So you really need to coordinate the hammer and anvil for attacks on towns.  And once the town is taken it can begin repairing the battle damage.  The siege ship can defend from a friendly town port much easier than sailing back to its lair to heal. The automatic repair heals the ship while at port, and also helps make up the deficit of Armor. 

 

Lastly, it’s good to know the speedy ship that retrieves crates is also often cruising around the far side of the map.  This ship can take advantage of “targets of opportunity” the slower siege ship cannot get to in time.  A speed ship is often a good candidate to cherry pick a town (like the above image). 

Eventually, as the battle moves on, you will continue to gain resource crates and capture towns.  You can then consider balancing your ships with speed and cannons, and adding needed armor, to create a more powerful well rounded force.

Of course there is a counter to this gambit.  That is to concentrate on the slow gunship and prevent it from winning any battles over towns.  The other team may not be able to catch the speed ship, but the siege ship will need help from the speed ship if outnumbered.  A balanced enemy team of ships could double team a siege ship by itself, and drive it into the icy depths.

 

Tip #2:  Choke Point: Traffic Control Pirate Style

 In some cases there are maps with areas that are open, contract down to one hex, and open up again.  This is a choke point that you can use to cut off or bottle up enemies. 

This means IF the enemy is foolish enough to sail into there, you can then bottle up the enemy into a small section they cannot get out of, and cost them either time or resources.  Now if the team has no resources yet, they will not drop a crate when you sink them.  So killing them is a waste of time if you win or loose.   But usually players (and in this case AI) tend to go into little coves like this looking for crates, so odds are good you will at least get a resource crate dropped for your effort.

 

Also wasting the other enemies times is sometimes a good move.  Especially if you are trying to stall by winning with the clock (say you need 5 towns to win, but only have 3, and the enemy teams has 2.  You can always wait for the time to run out and win by score).

 

Now sometimes you might see a situation with two sea hexes making up the entrance to the town.  By attacking this town (picture below) you can tell it would be easy for someone to come in behind me, and pinch me between the town and the enemy ship (both firing at me, and myself firing back but splitting my fire between them).  That is often a loosing battle.

So instead, I helped out my partner (Pegleg Pete) by placing a Whirlpool Curse right behind him.   So now Ol’ Double Patch with his superior three cannon ship won’t run up to Pegleg and his measly one cannon ship, and sink him and take the town with little resistance.  (Notice Salem has no health at this point, and even Pegleg can take them).   Ol’d Double Patch will have to wait for the whirlpool to go away before fighting Pegleg.  By that time, Pegleg should have captured the town and will be able to repair and fire back at his leisure. 

 

 

Tip #1:  Blocking the weak town with a whirlpool

 

As you might guess capturing towns is pretty important (since it is how you win).  But what may not be immediately obvious is there are ways to block the town (especially in multiplayer) so enemies cannot attack those ports and retake the town.

 

[Generally you want to keep towns because while in port they repair your ship (healing) and if you are interrupted while re-capturing a town you could loose your town to a superior or lucky enemy.  So, for the sake of argument, let’s assume your trying to keep your town.]  

 

The key to blocking is to either have a team mate available by your side at all times, or have the Whirlpool Curse card ready.  The easiest method is to simply have two ships in port blocking the town from being attacked.  Neither ships move, both are being repaired while in port next to the town.  All is good. 

 

But what if you are alone?  Let’s just say your “pirate teammate” is busy on the other side of the map. You have almost no health left on your town, and the enemy is coming.

 

It is a lot easier to block an enemy attack with a whirlpool curse card.  You get curse cards randomly by sinking frigates, and your odds of getting a whirlpool is only about 1 in 6.  So you will have to sink several ships to get one.  But you might consider the Whirlpool curse a very important tactical card, and worth finding and saving for special moments like capturing or defending towns.

 

In this picture you can see that the town has almost no health at all left.  (I was attacked, and barely fought off the enemy).  The next cannon shot by any ship (enemy pirate ship, neutral frigate) will drop this town back to the uncaptured state, and then I would have to recapture it. 

 

So, when you see the enemy coming place the whirlpool next to you in the only other open space available for someone to dock into port. 

Keep in mind it doesn’t last a long time, but hopefully if the enemy does sail into it they will only get 1 or two shots at your town before being flushed away, and randomly relocated on the map away from your town.  Your town will also slowly regenerate health, so if you can simply delay them by a few seconds you might regain some of that needed health bar.

 

Lastly, this situation shows a town with only 1 cannon defending.  It might be argued by some that this is a waste of a good Curse Card defening a 1 canon town with no health bar.  Well, they could be right.  If you let them shoot the town once, and you recapture quickly with the Whirlpool preventing any interruption by the enemy, then the town will return with 1/2 health (which is way better than waiting for it to regenerate back from zero).  

The problem remains, if that town is critical to what you need to win (you have 5 towns you need to win, and that is number 4), then holding onto it may be better than giving it up.  No single tactic will always work, so you have to think about the goals in play (how many towns the other team has, who is in the lead, how much time is left.)  Age of Booty may be easy to learn, but the result of any tactic like this one depends on the situation and a tiny bit of luck.

Hmmm, I hear a new game mode is coming this weekend.

The first two modes at launch each had two teams.  Makes you wonder how many teams this next mode will support...

 

P.S. - It's looking like Battle Royale (2v2v2v2) will hit Monday morning.

Bad News: Many of you were looking forward to today being launch day. 

Early reviews on the XBL version's multiplayer have been extremely positive.  We want to ensure the online experience for PSN users is as smooth, fun, and addicting.  We also want to ensure all those who dive into the map editor and generate new content for the Age of Booty community have a great time sharing their maps with friends.  As a result, we had a little more work to do.

Look for the release to be sometime around mid November.  Yes, Europe, we're aiming for your release to be the same day as the US.  We'll announce a more specific date when we lock one down with Sony.

 

Good News: To soften the blow for our PSN fans I'm pleased to anounce to you all something I've only teased about in previous posts.

I'm sure you've already guessed it by the image.  Yes, Age of Booty will support Trophies!  We'll have a patch available within the first couple of months upgrading the SDK and bringing with it the XMB enhancements and other cool features such as Trophies.