Age of Booty

For those of you that don't know, Age of Booty is an xbox 360 arcade game by Capcom and Certain Affinity. It plays on a hexagonal grid and you command a single ship, alone or on a team, against up to seven other teams. The purpose is to capture and hold more towns than the other team(s) until the timer runs out, or be the first to capture a specific amount at once. You collect rum, wood, and gold to purchase upgrades for your ship, increasing speed, max health, or cannon fire speed, or to improve defenses on cities you control. It's a very fun game to play with your friends or even against AI opponents. It even has seven pirate AI to pick from when creating an AI player, including a trained monkey, that all have different strategies.

The best part of the game in my opinion is the map editor. I've seen many good maps made by players and remember making a lot of my own long ago. Then recently it hit me. I needed to make a Sea of Thieves map. I attempted to do it manually by simply looking at a map and trying to guess where I should place islands in the editor but things just didn't line up as well as I wanted. The difficulty was the grids. Sea of thieves is on a map 26x26 square units with even the largest islands fitting inside a single square, and the largest map I could create was 48x48 hexagons.
Then @TheGeeNee created this
https://www.seaofthieves.com/forum/topic/108294/full-sea-of-thieves-map-transparent-background-clean-no-text-free-use-10980x10980

That was exactly what I needed to help me and thank you again @TheGeeNee for creating and sharing that. With it I easily cut out the devils roar and resized the rest of the world to perfectly fill a grid pattern so I would have exact locations orientations, and sizes of islands in relation to all others. Most islands were still smaller than a single tile or sat right on a line but it was very helpful.

This is the map I ended up with in game. The six outposts are fortresses, spawn points for up to six teams. Unfortunately these structures are the largest in the game and are bigger than all of the outposts but I did my best to face them in a direction that matches which side of the outpost the dock is on. All 20 large islands in SoT are towns with at least two resource tiles next to them, giving them geography similar to what they should have. Smugglers bay is the largest having a single tile of water at its center nearly surrounded by 5 land tiles. The wilds, only having six large islands, had sharkfin camp turned into a town to give each region 7 towns. Unfortunately I cannot name the towns whatever I want, but I can select a name from a long list, so I tried to make them similar, or at least starting with the same letter. The smaller islands, remaining forts, and even seaposts are all included, most being a single tile of palm trees or a rock.

Playing six teams with a ship each has a SoT feel to it. The entire world is open from the start, everyone is spread out on their own outpost and you all set sail collecting floating barrels..... I mean crates, sinking merchant ships, or immediately attacking a town, all to collect resources. Merchant ships can drop a pilfer that can automatically steal resources from another team, or a bomb that can be placed on any empty sea tile at any time anywhere. Eventually once all the ships have a few upgrades and all the islands have been captured, ships focus on specific islands, fighting each other over them in three or four way battles. This creates intense moments around islands like wanderers refuge.

Playing as the ship from plunder outpost, I kept fighting the ship from daggertooth outpost over plunder valley and wanderers refuge. Constantly those islands kept being recaptured as we continued fighting for control of them. Occasionally one of us would sink but we would instantly sail back. I went to go take back thieves haven and crooks hollow from the ship from ancient spire with two minutes left, but the daggertooth ship took over plunder valley stealing the win from me during the last twenty seconds.

If you haven't played the game, check it out. I imagine it's pretty cheap by now and the campaign levels are enough to keep you entertained for hours. If not, the map editor can provide you with the tools to make some really fun maps. It was definitely worth the full price and still a game I come back to periodically after so many years.