Hi everyone,

This past week has been very busy and intense for our studio. We released a free DLC for our turn-based strategy game, ‘Eador’ and launched ‘Caribbean!’ onto Early Access. But that didn’t stop us from reading through all the feedback on our pirate RPG. A ton of questions were asked, but as it’s difficult to answer to each and every one, we decided to lay our thoughts and plans in this one post.

The main question — “Why would I pay for a mod that’s not even complete?”. The answer is obvious, because ‘Caribbean!’ is not a mod. Just the scope of code work that went into the engine changes we requested has been tremendous.



You can look at screenshots of Crusader Kings 2 and say it’s merely a mod of Europa Universalis 4. Both games do share a lot in common — provinces, map, menus. But they remain very different projects, and their audiences aren’t necessarily the same. In the case of our Caribbean project we rely on M&B Warband’s engine but at the same time build a game that’s going to be very different. We don’t want to simply change the character models, we want to create another system for this game’s world.

As many of you noticed, earning gold in the game is currently not very fun. Honestly, we intentionally simplified the game’s economy to this ‘bare bones’ state. A new production system and new trading system are our main development goals for the upcoming month. You probably remember the old city-building strategy games. A lumberjack goes to the forest, chops trees, and brings wood to the storage. Then a carpenter takes it from there, makes a chair and so on. Goods are physically produced and moved around the game world. In our case, we have a game in the era of plantations, West-Indian campaigns and the origins of capitalism. So the medieval economic system of attacking enemy troops, looting 40 pairs of boots and then selling them in the nearest town doesn’t really suit us. We won’t go into detail at the moment until we have working code for this part of the game, but the plans for economy are very ambitious.



Another important part is monotonous naval battles. This is a very difficult aspect of the game and community feedback on this would be very much appreciated. The current implementation of naval battles is a compromise between simple arcade fun and something more realistic. We tried experimenting with turbo-ships at the beginning, but thought it contrasted way too much with the rest of the game. We also have a few ideas for adding strategic elements, to let players interact with his fleet. However, we don’t want to overdo it and turn the game to a simulation of Horace Nelson’s workday. If you have any ideas on this yourself, please don’t hesitate to share them with us.

Speaking of the boarding; as we mentioned in the devblog video, current boarding locations are more like placeholders and are not final. They will be replaced with new models, updated with quality textures and those sudden deaths from a random bullet in the first second of a fight will be dealt with as well. Pre-battle troop management for boarding fights has also crossed our minds.

Lastly, ‘walking around the towns’ and land locations. To be honest, we can’t really provide the content to a proper standard in this regard at the moment. This aspect needs some financial help, and that is one of the Early Access stage’s goals. We want to complete the game the way we see it.

We haven’t addressed many of the other matters — like multiplayer, interaction with native Americans, a meta-goal system and so on. These would need their own separate posts. For now we’d like to note that Warband’s engine allows us to create the best conditions for roleplaying — a chance to be a hero that changes the game’s world, not just a set of attack and defense attributes. We hope ‘Caribbean!’ will become a fine example of that.