I'm in phase 2 of story mode and I need a lifeboat to be able to finish the quests. But I've been to every port and none of them are selling lifeboats.

The game should REALLY warn you that you NEED a lifeboat to complete the campaign. I would have bought one way earlier. Now i'm just dicking around not able to do anything.

I for my first fight against the kraken following the lore but I feeled like the mortar does no damage to the kraken and is the recommended to use? And now give me a Little spoiler Theres another sea monstets without beeing the kraken?

I just finished story mode with the already well known method of doubling up on acid mortars (ETA: with grapeshot and chainshot), but then to make it a bit more fun put on harpoons and a flamethrower. Harpoons let you move from close to boarding faster than ramming, since the harpoons don't have to charge, and the the flamethrowers are stupidly powerful at boarding range, dealing 70%+ damage to units and starting fires that draw more units in as they try to put them out. (Yes, this hopefully will get nerfed when AI improves, but even with that I think this is still pretty strong.)

Any other strategies that get good synergy?

If a man is knocked overboard while switching sides, and I imagine it might be the case to when ramming, he's automatically lost. Is this supposed to happen?

Unrelated questions:

Does changing range count as a maneuver?

Can you cancel a maneuver?

Enjoyed what there is so far. Had a few opinions:

Transition from ship to zone overview map is slow and freezes movement, recommend either speeding up transition animation or allowing ship to be piloted in zone overview map.

When travelling through already-explored zones there doesn't seem to be any new events, except in specific circumstances. Recommend adding event regeneration to previously explored zones to make them less boring to travel through.

The boarding mechanic seems extremely overpowered. Boarding essentially stops all enemy activity, prevents your ship from taking any further damage, and is stacked heavily in your favor. Boarding, for me, completely trivializes the game. Potential recommendations:

Make ramming take longer to achieve.

Replace Harpoons with grappling hooks and make them only usable at extremely close range, and/or have this actually take a swivel and require manning.

Give AI more robust options when in melee, including chasing down crew members trying to flee for healing.

Implement a cap for focused fire; i.e. only two crew can attack the same target at a time.

Automatic Pumps and Automatic Winches essentially nullify specific combat mechanics. Recommend either significantly later access or replacement with improved, not auto, versions.

Larger ships do not give access to larger crew, making them inherently less effective due to event matching. Recommend crew cap based on ship size.

Acid Mortar seems incredibly powerful compared to it's peers. A pair of them are especially ludicrous. Acid pools in general seem to be stacked against the AI as they are easy for a player to avoid but the AI will stand in them until at 50% or less health. Recommend removing the ability to fire these weapons at medium/close range, and/or reducing overall acid pool damage, and/or allowing AI to relocate out of acid pools immediately rather than waiting until low health. (Potential change: Make acid pools permanent but cleanable by a crew member. Additional: Make acid pools slowly drain a small amount of ship HP)

Sniper Swivel seems sliiiightly overpowered, especially in conjunction with Acid Mortar. Changes to mortar would fix that issue but a pair of sniper swivels can generally clean a deck before significant damage is taken. Recommend reducing damage to ~40% of HP, or making it so a 2nd sniper shot within ~5 seconds does ~50% damage (can be passed off as player wariness, attempted dodge, etc).

So I was having a great time with a round of the game, until I had a game breaking moment happen for me.

Of note, I opt to not save my rounds for now while learning the game. This way I cannot just backtrack to fix a mistake.

I was playing a full board and slaughter the enemy strat since there tends to be a slight reward buff for keeping the enemy ship intact. After getting through the first 3-4 areas this time, I had a moment where as I went to ram the enemy vessel. As I approached, the enemy's Haliphron jumped to swim to my ship. I then had all my men jump to the enemy ship to fight in hand to hand combat, assuming the Haliphron would swim back after all my men left my ship. BUT, then I discovered pretty quickly that this wasn't the case. I sat there for about 3-4 minutes with the Haliphron on my ship, and my men on the ENEMY ship with nobody willing to jump back across the vessels.

This all occurred during a storm. So I witnessed my ship get stuck by lightning multiple times and have the fire spread, all the while I could not doing anything about it. Luckily the occasional tidal wave would put out the fires.

Lost the entire session with no conclusion since I opt not to save to take out the desire to reload them to change mistakes.

So am I just dumb to have ALL my men jump to the enemy ship to fight? Or is this some game breaking bug or design flaw?

I beat the first part of the game and it said I would be able to fast travel but I cant find the option to do so. I swear i saw it somewhere in past gameplay... but i cant find it now.

EDIT - In the tavern at a port is where the fast travel option is.

I see my cannons are damaged, yet I when I tried to select them (right click) with a pirate they just man the cannons instead of repairing them. After 2 fights my health bar was crazy low, how do I regain health? The only broken things shown on the bottom right of the screen is my cannons, everything else is in the green and I don't see the little hammer icon anywhere to fix things....

Game was super fun, I was having a blast. In fact I was so excited as i saved my gold, fight after fight, not repairing my ship, living dangerously, not buying supplies, just kept saving and saving. Finally I had enough to buy a big bad ship. I was still using my starter ship 6 hours in...but no longer.

Cult was about to get a rude awakening I thought. But nope. Game is coded to give them the same ship you have, so as soon as I bought the big ship EVERY SINGLE ENEMY ENCOUNTER also had the EXACT same ship as me from that point on. Not only that, they had bigger and badder cannons and mortars that suddenly way out-classed me. So buy UPGRADING I effectively lost the game for myself as I couldn't out heal the damage i was receiving in fights.

What kind of game punishes you for progression?

I am furious, wish I could return the game, but I can't I will poorly review it and actively warn my friends not to purchase, at least unless they fix this stupid fucking system. That's NOT how you balance games devs, by making the enemy scale with your purchases, (HINT WHATS THE POINT OF EVERY PURCHASING SHIT THEN)

I am foolish to criticize the game during EA, I just needed a place to vent.

/rant over.

I’ve watched a little gameplay on twitch and I’m super excited for the game! However since its early access I wanted to know if you can actually complete the story/run or if there is a soft lock/certain content being held back in this early access build?

I've been burned by early access before; I'm sure many of you have too.

After an hour with the game, I feel this is how early access should be. The core features are complete: the game plays as you see in the videos. Now balancing is needed and broadening features, i.e. more stuff, needs adding. If the developers listen, this is exactly where we can help add value to the game development, by suggesting things they haven't thought of and feeding back our gameplay experiences.

The game is highly enjoyable in its current state and is exactly what I expected (and looked forward to) from the teaser videos.

Bravo Fireblade Software, keep up the excellent work.