Hi everyone,

It's time for a new status update. Right now we're preparing the biggest update we've ever released till this point, so you can expect a lot of changes. For this reason, we decided to shift the update's release to January to give us a little more time to make it even better.

First, we added a new renown system. Now it's split into military renown for soldiers and trading (or administrative) renown for entrepreneurs. It's becoming a very important part of the game and it defies what you can acquire: which troops, ship upgrades and building types will be available to you.

Military renown should be pretty clear, it didn't change much from what there was before. Trading renown can be considered as a total amount of all your assets: your ships, your money, goods in your cargo hold, value of your property and so on. If you are a billionaire, you're a celebrity of Caribbean.

So things will get a little tougher. Some troops will be harder to get, cannons will disappear from free market, and you'll need to pay taxes for your property and goods in your cargo hold.



Another addition comes out of this — players will generally have to pay more. You'll need to pay port charges for every stop in a port, and the amount of pay will depend on the value of your cargo. If you won't have enough money, customs officials will confiscate a part of your goods. Although, if you don't wish to pay anything at all, you can always contact smugglers.

Smuggling is the third addition. If you want to sell your goods in a city, but don't want to pay for port charges, smugglers are your best choice. Of course,when you set a meeting with smugglers, you also run the risk of stumbling into customs patrol. Depending on your skills, this situation could end in different ways. Some will manage to persuade the patrol that there's no goods on the ship, others will have to take a fight.

The fourth direction of our current development is the new quest system. We removed quest distribution through 'talking heads' — now they are given out in a separate panel in cities. You will also be able to hire mercenaries there, in case your battle rank doesn't let you hire troops in garrison.



New strategic map is something we announced a long time ago and right now it takes 60% of our efforts. We changed the scale of the game world, increased the amount of settlements and also completely reworked the map's visualization. By the way, the settlement concept was changed and now there's no villages in the game. From now on, the world consists of cities only.

Finally, the updated naval battles. We heard enough feedback on how boring and monotonous current naval warfare is. We have some new gameplay elements in the works which we'll tell you about once we're ready to ship the update.

That's it for now. See you next year and happy holidays!