Blood and Gold: Caribbean

[ArizonaTank]

"Blood and Gold: Caribbean" was recently released, and is being given free on Steam to anyone who had the original "Caribbean" game.  Just check your inventory, you will see it there.

For those who may have missed the original, game is a huge, complex pirate and seafaring mod for "Mount and Blade, With Fire and Sword"

Played around with it a bit...  So far a significantly improved pirate experience....  Sea battles are actually pretty good now.

[Jarhead0331]

I was thinking about reinstalling and giving it a go. The trailer looks pretty decent.

[Oche]

Did they fix the crashes?

[Ian C]

Played around with it a bit...  So far a significantly improved pirate experience....  Sea battles are actually pretty good now.

Agreed. This is looking very interesting. I've always wanted something a bit deeper than Sid Meier's Pirates and this looks like a contender.


Manual: store.steampowered.com/manual/413710

[AchillesLastStand]

Noticed it was 10% off but thinking maybe it may be more discounted during the upcoming sale. On the wishlist though and probably will get either way.

[Philippe]

I suspect that this game is following the same development arc as Mount & Blade Viking Conquest, but isn't quite as far up the curve.

VC is a great game that I am very fond of, but its initial release was an unholy mess.  They eventually came out with VC Reforged, and that is getting patched into fairly decent shape.  I haven't had a chance to play the latest beta patch (which covers less than I had hoped), but the game is getting pretty close to a final product.  I've spent a fair amount of time watching their bug and support forums, and most of the posts you see these days come from people who have aberrant systems and/or aren't particularly computer savvy and seem fairly clueless about how native Mount & Blade works (and by extension can't distinguish between a bug and their ignorance of the game engine).

B&G:C seems to have started from a much worse place than VC so has a lot more ground to cover.  From what I've heard it's still trying to catch up to the point that VC got to when they rebranded as VC Reforged.  I haven't followed the B&G:C boards at all, but I wonder if they have the same commitment to beating the game into shape as the VC crowd.  The VC crowd also has the advantage of having produced a full-blown mod (Brytenwalda) that covers similar material long before they went commercial, so they probably had a better sense of what they were getting themselves into. 

In theory I should love the idea of B&G:C, and when I'm sure my frustration level from playing it won't go through the roof I'll probably get it.  I very much like the fact that it uses a real map of the Caribbean, rather than a made-up fantasy map.  But I very much dislike the fact that you can't stand on the deck of your ship and sail around that world. 

I'm a big fan of Age of Pirates 2.  The world map is not exactly what I would like, but it's real enough.  The ship physics are not up to flight sim standards and can lead to occasional teeth-gnashing, but they're close enough and you can walk around the deck of a pitching and tossing ship while you're tacking out of a harbor against a strong wind.  And once you've cleared the harbor, you can lay in a course to your next destination and probably get within sight of land by the time you've finished having dinner with your girlfriend.  Ship combat, whether one-on-one or in groups can be very exciting and satisfying, though once again there is room for improvement.  Hand-to-hand combat is fun and can be very challenging, and if you're playing with a somewhat realistic setting and you're alone and in the open and get into a fight with several opponents, you're probably dead.   I could do without the psychotic break episodes where you think you're fighting skeletons,  but I'm assuming that's Michael Eisner's fault.  I also find the lack of variation in town layout and architecture annoying (if you've seen one French caribbean port, apart from undetectable minor variations you've seen them all). And I'm very fond of the brothels.

I'm guessing that the world map in B&G:C is better than the world map in AoP2.  The towns are probably better looking, but probably not much more varied.  Ship simulation is probably non-existant (a big turn-off), and though personal combat is probably good as well as colorful, it is probably way too linear because it's derived from the M&B engine.  Personal interaction in AoP2 is nowhere near as good as in Age of Decadence, for example, but social encounters are probably not as predictable and manageable as in B&G:C (I'm only guessing -- somebody fill me in on this).

The pirate game of my dreams would be set in the mid-17th century on a world map that ran from Providence R.I. in the north to the river Plate in the south (though you'd have next to no reason to go there), and though you could get nowhere near Gibraltar let alone Europe, you could sail across the Atlantic to the Gold Coast and south to the Cape of Good Hope and into the Indian Ocean (confer Captain Kidd). 

[Toonces]

Hmmm....I'd never heard of Age of Pirates 2.  Any digital versions of it?  I'm not keen on ordering disks anymore, and it's not showing on GoG or Steam.

[Philippe]

I think this is one of the games you have to get from Amazon.  And I rather doubt that anyone is selling it digitally, but I don't know. 

If you do find it be aware that it is no longer supported (I think the company that made may be defunct).  It has several bugs, one of them particularly nasty, but there's an unofficial patch that fixes it.  I seem to recall that it's fairly easy to do yourself without the unofficial patch once you know what the problem is: there's a logic string error (I think that's what it's called) that is fairly glaring and easy to fix once you know where to look.  If you don't fix it all hell breaks loose if you try to land at a certain location (it's called something like the Tenochtitlan or Montezuma quest).

One of the things I really like about it is that though it's very difficult or even pointless to grind, all skills are earned individually by exercising them.  The skill management side of this game is unusual and a lot of fun. If you sail around a lot you'll eventually notice that your navigation skill has gone up slightly.  You could spend the next twenty years sailing in circles to grind navigation (your crew will starve and mutiny long before that gets you anywhere), but the simplest thing is to just hire a navigator and let him do it for you.

[JasonPratt]

Not on Gamersgate either. (I own a disc, still not used, but bought on the recommendations and discussions of Grogs long ago.)

Yeah, the undead hallucination pirates are a holdover from the series being attached to Pirates of the Carribbean 2 iterations previously.

[Toonces]

Yeah, when you guys started talking about this I was thinking maybe you meant Pirates of the Caribbean.  I have that (on disk).  Sadly I spent very little time playing it...it may be a very good game.  I don't know if it will even install on my computer at this point.  Probably not worth the effort.

At any rate, I'm not going to buy an old game on disk so AoP2 is out.

[Philippe]

I haven't played in a while so I no longer remember the tricks for taking elegant screenshots from inside the game engine.  I don't remember the exact command, but I'm pretty sure you can make the user interface vanish temporarily.

I think these screenshots will illustrate my other two complaints about the game: 1) it's very old so getting it to conform to a modern aspect ratio is difficult to impossible (I think there was a partial fix for this); and 2) the Spanish flag is so wrong for the 17th century I don't even want to talk about it.













Two views of the same ship, one from third person and one from first person. 

[jomni]

Old video I made using the old version:

I would be cool if they made something like Napoleon but set in Renaissance Europe.
Oh the Tercios!  All the troop types are present for a pike and shot setting.

[Philippe]

What do they use for a Spanish flag, and do they use more than one?