Welcome to the Republic of Pirates!
Today, as the first part of our regular community update series, we’ll be talking you through how to create your very own pirate utopia in our upcoming pirate-themed city builder and real-time strategy game Republic of Pirates! So that you can hit the ground running and watch your settlements flourish when the game releases, we’ll be giving a summary of the story so far, your main objectives in Campaign mode, an overview of the archipelago map, and a first look at freeplay mode! The Story So Far: What is the Republic of Pirates? At the heart of the Caribbean during the Golden Age of Piracy sat a powerful league of pirate clans, collectively known as the Republic of Pirates. Bound together by a shared ideology and code of honour the early years of the confederacy were prosperous. However, greed and jealousy soon took hold amongst its more ‘ambitious’ members, leading to a vicious mutiny and final bloody breakup. In campaign mode, this is where your story begins as you set out to reclaim your murdered father’s legacy by reforging a new republic, subjugating your rivals, and bringing justice to the traitors who wronged you.
Sand, blood, and gold: An Overview of Campaign Mode
Campaign mode is your gateway into the world of Republic of Pirates and the very first place you should start, providing helpful tutorials for all the major game mechanics, while also setting you on a narrative-driven mission to grow your humble settlement into a sprawling, archipelago-spanning utopia!
Your main objectives will be centred around creating a self-sustaining economy, growing your population, and expanding your influence across a number of key islands:
Creating a self-sustaining economy: By constructing production buildings and setting up production chains you’ll be able to produce and refine resources, which in turn can be distributed via couriers amongst your pirate citizenry through a network of carefully planned storage warehouses, docks, and black markets. As your economy develops, you’ll discover increasingly more advanced buildings with ever more complex chains, so careful city planning will be key to ensuring that buildings receive adequate resource supplies.
Growing your population: The citizens of your burgeoning republic will act as both your main source of income, and your workforce. Provide housing for your citizens and supply them with resources to fulfil their basic and luxury needs. Accommodating basic needs will increase population per residence and allow you to upgrade your citizens to the next tier. If you’re also able to fulfil luxury needs you’ll gain more income per citizen so try to make sure that you’re giving your pirates the very best quality of life! More advanced buildings will require increasingly skilled workers, be mindful of this when planning out your residential areas.
Expanding your influence: Each island in the archipelago will have unique production conditions which give bonuses and penalties for the production of certain resources, while also providing limited access to rare materials. This essentially means that to keep growing you’ll need to discover and bring new islands under your control. Construct vessels for your fledgling fleet at the Shipyard, and visit the Captain’s Meeting Spot to recruit heroic captains to crew your ships, before taking to the waves in the name of conquest!
Trouble in paradise: Exploring the Archipelago
The main way that you will be exploring the archipelago in campaign mode will be through the tactical map, a view that gives a real-time snapshot of the major and minor islands that you have discovered, as well as the live positions of allied, neutral, and rival faction ships and bases.
From this view you can scout out islands by mousing over them to reveal their production conditions, available rare resources, and the faction currently in control.
Most importantly your fleet can be given commands in this view with ship movement tracking in real-time, enabling you to plan your raids effectively and pre-empt or respond to enemy attacks.
While conquering minor islands will provide access to new resources and staging posts for launching the next phase of your expansion, major islands will act as key milestones in your mission to reunite the archipelago under a single black flag.
Be warned though as no action will go unnoticed, and your decisions will influence the attitudes of rival pirate clans and national superpower factions to your benefit and detriment. You’ll therefore need to navigate and actively manage complex diplomatic relationships in order to keep expanding!
The fate of the Republic of Pirates is yours to shape!
Writing your own legend: Freeplay Mode
For those looking for a more relaxing experience, at launch, the strategy city builder will also feature a freeplay mode with two additional maps to explore. Stay tuned for more updates on this new gameplay mode in later Steam posts!
That’s it for today, pirates. We hope that’s been helpful for giving you a good overview of how you will be establishing your pirate utopia. Over the coming months, we’ll be releasing a regular series of posts taking a closer look at specific mechanics and features!
Republic of Pirates is coming to Steam in 2024, so wishlist and follow now and be the first in the know.
Until next time!
Crazy Goat Games & PQube
