Age of Booty for PC has recently ended the Open Beta.  We are now working on the installer and variations for our eDistribution partners.  Things are coming along nicely, and pieces are in place for us to distribute Age of Booty on Steam, Direct2Drive, and Digital River.   

Thanks for all your help on the Beta.  We will give an update again, as soon as our helper monkey puts down the weapons and gets back to the keyboard where we need him.

So we are proud to say Capcom has had it's revenge on NooBTooB.  Their claim to Age of Booty domination is over.

NooBTooB came back into the Capcom house for a rematch on Age of Booty.  It was a piratey battle of honor, revenge, grudgematch, or some such madness.  They came, they played against us, and they recorded it for their pod cast. (Click the image to jump to it - we start at 42 minutes.  Yarrr!)

The glowing reviews of Age of Booty was expected, but these gamers also had a good time.  We got to play with some of their community, they played the Dev's in a glorious clash of piratey action.  And they enjoyed our massage chairs.  Not surprising.  We have so many cool things at Capcom to share.

They'll be back... for the chairs... and more top notch gaming.

We have covered a several Tips and Tricks to help you compete a little better when playing Age of Booty online.  Some of these ideas have been complicated; this one isn’t.  This is simple and intuitive, but you may not have realized it, so let’s take a moment and discuss whether you want to “Go Down with the Ship.”

For argument sake, let’s assume your in a battle, you might not win, and the idea of escape crosses your mind.  Do you flee now, or fight to the end and see who gets lucky?  The answer to that question might be “What do your resources tell you to do?”   So let’s look at the resource tracking in Age of Booty.

This graphic below shows the resource counter.  If you don’t start with upgrades, or if you spent them all, this is what you will see; a bunch of zero’s and some sketch looking icons on the left and right that track your requirements for Town and Ship upgrades.  It shows symbols for Gold, Wood, and Rum. Notice that you have zero resources, and there are no dials active showing those resources being generated.

To execute this Tip you need to know how the interface works.  Once you get a sense of the timing involved with gaining resources, you can anticipate when the next Ship or Town upgrade is going to occur. 

You can then move your Ship, or Pointer (that sword in the first picture, with blue “X” underneath), ahead of time to where you will be upgrading your Ship or Town.  When the upgrade is available, your ready, and bam!  You pick an upgrade quickly without delay.

Now compare that previous resource counter graphic to the below graphic taken mid-gameplay.  Can you see the dials?

You can clearly see that you have dials moving on Wood and Rum, and you have the total resource count of 1 Gold, 2 Wood, and 3 Rum.  This means you have 2 Wood needed for either a Town or a Ship upgrade (tree sketch is colored on left and right side).  But you have only 1 Gold, and 3 Rum, which can’t buy you anything right now.  You need 3 more Gold to upgrade a captured Town, but there is no dial, so that means you are not generating that resource.  You may be able to find and get Gold, but it will not be generating over time.  However, the 3 Rum is looking promising, the dial generating, and it’s about 3/4th of the way around to generate 1 more Rum.

The dials show how much time it will take until your towns generate another Wood or Rum.  Given the position of the moving dials (the Rum approaching 9 o’clock) it is safe to say that you will be able to upgrade your ship soon. When that Rum dial gets to the 12 o’clock position, and you have 4 Rum, it would be best if you were ready for it. 

You need to send your ship back to your Pirate Lair for an upgrade.  That could be a long journey, so head back and get that critical upgrade now, before more time passes.   If too much time passes, not only are you delaying improving your pirate ship, but you then give the enemy team a longer window to use a Pilfer Curse that could steal up to 2 of your needed Wood or Rum resources.

Now there are times when anticipating your upgrade is important during a battle.  In the below graphic you can see two forces (a Town and a Ship) battling it out.  [By the way - That green glow is from the Ghost Ship curse wearing off.  Captain Smack was trying to be sneaky.] 

Yet, the question remains: What do you do?  Do you retreat and sail back to your pirate Lair, or risk getting sunk and instantly transported back to your pirate Lair?  

If you notice the resource counter has 5’s across the board.  In this situation, no matter what happens (win or lose), you will still be able to upgrade your ship.  In this case, you might as well go down with the ship (take the battle to the end) without any fear. The consequences for the Town are all bad, but for you … it’s all good.

If your ship sinks, you will loose one resource randomly, and still be able to upgrade your new ship the second you respawn at your Pirate Lair. 

If you win the battle and capture the Town, you won’t lose any resources, and can even upgrade the Town, and upgrade your pirate Ship when you sail back to your Lair. A win-win situation, with very little downside.

So the tip here is hopefully pretty clear:

If you know how many resources you have and need for an upgrade, you can choose to go down with the ship with a smile.

If, on the other hand, loosing a ship in battle (and a random resource) would be detrimental to your upgrades, then you might want to flee.

Therefore, you should anticipate your upgrades so you can decide if  “going down with the ship” is a good or bad thing. 

And remember when you say “Strike me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine” ... use pirate speak.  That will really drive them nuts.

This trick for Age of Booty is indeed tricky to execute.

This is a really dangerous tactic, since it relies on one very important fact and one very important assumption.  The fact is the town you are fighting over is a 1 cannon town, and the assumption is that you can defeat the enemy ship trying to conquer it by interrupting its capture.  I find this trick often involves a bit of luck.  But if you have a good feel for how the battle is going, and how to time the attack, you might give it a shot.

First of all this trick is a complete waste of time if the enemy team is near winning the game.  If they need 1 or 2 more towns to win, you should think hard about using this trick.  If for any reason your plan fails you will be giving up a town to the enemy, and possibly giving up the game.

Take for example the above pictured town.  When you first captured it the health bar was automatically set at ½ health and started to regenerate towards full.  But after taking some damage from fights you can’t see any health, and the next cannon shot destroys it (i.e., becomes Neutral – not captured).

Since the town has only one cannon, and has not been upgraded, you might consider it disposable to some extent.  [The only benefit being the usual bonus to your score, and repairing your damaged ships.  These are still important factors to consider.]  But since the ship in the picture is at full health, this town might benefit from this trick.

This town does need to regenerate health, but that could take a long time, especially if it’s nearly all gone.  Upgraded towns cost gold and wood, and don’t immediately increase the baseline health (although it does increase the maximum health).  On the other hand, a one cannon town is free anytime you capture a town.  You will not be loosing gold or wood if a one cannon town is lost, retaken, lost, and retaken again.  And that is where the Trick gets tricky.

If you see a situation where the town could be attacked by a very weak enemy ship, something you can easily sink when the town becomes contested, then let the enemy try to capture the town.  Let it be attacked.  And stay near while the attack is happening.  Once the town has been defeated, sail over to make sure it is not captured, and interrupt the capture of the town as the “capture” percentage count is happening.

When you show up during capture the town percentage stops and it becomes contested.  The town will not heal either side.  Capture and control goes to the last ship left floating.  So now you just have to win the battle. 

 
If you can, sink that weak enemy, and you can recapture the town yourself, the trick will have worked.  The health of the town will again be set instantly at ½ health.

The only real advantage to this trick is time (you do not have to wait around for the town’s health to regenerate back to ½ way).  But you had better be sure about timing your attack and interrupting the town being captured, because if you show up late it will become part of the enemies controlled towns.

A fun counter to this trick is to occasionally use a Ghost Ship Curse Card, and anytime a player seems a bit overconfident, surprise him with a coordinated attack by invisible ships.  If the player thought he could retake the town easily, he will be quickly proved wrong.

The best counter is not to take the bait. If you see an enemy town is nearly destroyed, but enemy team has a powerful ship nearby that would defeat you in battle, you should consider just leaving the town alone.  Don’t do the enemy a favor by letting them recapture a weakened town. 

Finally, an important exception to all of this depends on if the enemy upgrades the town at all.  Always destroy weakened towns that have purchased defenses!   It takes time to build up those resources and now you can easily destroy them.  It will take only a few cannon shots to tear it all down.

Again, this is a trick, so good luck.

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.