Establishing your own Tortuga for an army of pirates sounds like a recipe for a municipal planning nightmare, but Republic of Pirates makes the job look like a sea-breeze. Republic of Pirates was revealed during the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted today with a trailer showcasing seafaring city-building, management, and ship combat. While there’s a long pedigree of pirates in the history of PC gaming, this reveal is more like Anno 1800 than contemporary swashbuckling like Sea of Thieves or classics like Sid Meier’s Pirates.
Instead of dueling other pirate captains or committing pirate war crimes, Republic of Pirates wants you to build a pirate empire by keeping the loot trains running on time for your fellow scallywags. Following the standard for the city builder genre, you’ll be planning civic layouts, optimizing resource pickups, managing the assignment of your workers, and trying to meet the needs of a growing citizenry. You’ll also be expanding to new islands and taking over settlements for resources.
In true buccaneering fashion, Republic has you taking on rival factions and building up your own fleet of ships to raid and conquer your corner of the seas. Expanding your personal free pirate state in Republic of Pirates means utilizing the most important tool of every good scoundrel: aggressive negotiations. You’ll have to take on enemy fleets and bombard their port defenses to conquer other islands in the open ocean. It’s not all sandbox play either. You can accept orders to collect bounties or attack certain settlements as part of your expansion in the campaign mode.
By emphasizing the creation and utilization of your own fleet, Republic leaves the door open to a lot of fun gameplay opportunities. Optimizing supply chains and keeping your population happy and growing feels a lot more like a proper high-seas venture when it’s fueling your shipbuilding and raiding, after all. We’ve only seen just a bit of ship building and combat in Republic of Pirates’ reveal trailer: Different ship classes have stats like speed, range, health, and firepower which all come into play during real-time strategy assaults.
Solid methods of expanding your empire and taking on your rivals with broadsides of cannonade will be the opening for Republic to challenge our other favorite city builders when it launches on Steam and the Epic Games Store sometime in 2024.