Age of Sail 2 Preview

AT: How big will the naval battles be and how many ships can participate in one?

Akella: The battles can be really massive, up to 60 ships in one location (there also could be forts and even cities). And it won't be difficult to control every ship because of the AI help and the player can regulate the game speed (even pause it or accelerate up to 32 times as normal). Difficult to predict the time every battle can take, everything depends on your tactics and.may be talent, we guess.

AT: Could you tell us anything about the AI?

Akella: We approached the problem of making a competitive AI with all the seriousness such a game can require. There are lot's specific moments (like changes of the environment and landscape) we have to think of, while coding the AI. The algorithm of enemy's behavior will be similar to real players. It'll never attack you first if not sure in the result of the battle. It plans the battle in complex first, and than adjust the scheme during the combat. As the polishing of the AI is still in process, we, unfortunately, can't tell you much, but soon we'll reveal some very exiting features we developed for AoS2.

AT: I know you guys are all crazy about pirates and sea, but 2000 historical warships and over 100 historically accurate scenarios... How difficult was it to gather that much information, and how much time did it take?

Akella: It really took a lot of time to gather all the old drawings, maps, pictures and other stuff, but we think it was worth doing. Now we have a kind of interactive naval encyclopedia of that period within the game. We used different sources of information, from some naval libraries and private collections to the Internet fan sites. Some data had also been taken from the first game.

AT: As we're (hopefully) closing in on the release date, could you reveal how many campaigns will there be in the retail version of the game?

Akella: So, there'll be two historical (English-French and English-American) and one custom campaign included into the final release. The difference between a custom and a historical campaign is that in custom the skill level of your crew can be increased for a certain sum of money during the briefings. You can also repair ships and buy new. In historical campaign, everything is kept to historical realities (the quantity of ships and crew quality).

AT: If you had to compare AoS2 and Sea Dogs, which one of those games would you like better? What is it that would attract players to the first and what to the second game?

Akella: It's really hard to compare these games. Though they both seem to be based on naval theme and all this pirate-adventures romantics, but in fact they really differs from each other. While Sea Dogs is a pirate adventuring role-playing game, head for a wide category of players, AoS2 is a more complicated product, demanding some knowledge or at least interest in naval history and other backgrounds from the player.

Update:

And finally, a few words from the Akella team about the new interface. We've received this info shortly after the interview was done.

So, we're getting closer and closer to the release, and we wanted to share with AT readers a few words about our experience with the new interface.

It looks very similar to the previous, but the goal was to make it more ergonomic and functional. In that way, we added some actions (reloading, changing the type of ammunition etc.) to the primary game screen, so now it takes just one step (click) to perform these actions. We also added a game speed regulater bar to the main screen.

Another update by the Akella team:

First, we must say, that the project wouldn't even be started without TalonSoft's great initiation and help. This legendary company being one of the leaders of historical wargame making had kindly shared the idea of the game and supplied us with all the historical information and materials for scenarios and campaigns.

Second, the final version will include six(!) campaigns ("A Nest of Pirates", "Don't Give Up the Ship", "Nelson's Blood", "Tars of Old England", "The Great Fleets" and "Black Sea Battles") and more than 100 historical scenarios.

We've launched a new site and a discussion forum a few days ago at http://www.akella.com/aos2, where some visitors had already given links to the interview on Actiontrip.