Today I’ve played a pre-release version of Autonauts vs Piratebots. An automation strategy game where you need to defend your base and create an army to defeat the pirates and their boss to bring peace to the land.
Autonauts vs Piratebots is planned to release on July 28, 2022, for PC on Steam.
Here is Autonauts vs Piratebots gameplay video with an explanation of how the game is played.
I really enjoy playing the game and I spent even more hours after the first impression video and gameplay I made. So I do plan to share more content with late-game gameplay.
Autonauts vs Piratebots features low-poly vibrant visuals and cute characters. You start with some basic structures and you need to start creating structures and tools, gathering resources, selling resources for gold–and most importantly–automating bots to do the job faster and continuously for you.
The game is similar to popular automation games like Satisfactory, Captain of Industry, The Planet Crafter, Good Company, and others. Basically, colony management, crafting, automation, and base building, with procedurally generated levels and basic programming features.
Speaking about programming, this is the part that I really liked. You can use some programming-like statements like if-else, exit loop conditions and others to control the logic of how the automated bots operate.
All these features are implemented very well and required careful planning to make sure the automation works in harmony without… well, bugs. Same as in programming, things can go wrong.
For example, once I created, a bot that gathered wood. But there was another bot that cut the word and makes it into a plank and another bot that gathered the planks. Now if you don’t “program” your bot carefully, especially if all are set to “loop” (repeat their actions over and over), things can go wrong.
Sometimes an execution of a function stopped (similar to exception/error breakpoint in programming) because the bot’s tool broke so it couldn’t continue the other commands. So I needed to make sure to put a condition to grab a tool if that’s the case. This prevented the interruption.
The beauty is seeing how things work in harmony once you are able to program your automated worker bots to do their job with synergy with the other ones and you can focus on other things to do.
Kind of similar to real life in a way. Using robots to do lots of things that we humans are either unable to do, or not as efficiently as robots do. This productivity is important in Autonauts vs Piratebots because you’ll need to automate it so units are made and become active so they can protect your base.
The base structures have HP, so if it reaches zero you won’t be able to use them, and this can lead to a chain of things breaking and bots aren’t able to do their thing. Of course, you can make bots that fix issues like that.
Sometimes I was so unorganized and left a big mess on the ground with lots of wood, stone, and other resources. So instead of taking my character and starting cleaning it up, I create a cleaning-bot that whose job was to get all the orphaned resources and put them into containers–Smart 🙂
Disclaimer: screenshots and gameplay video are of a pre-release version of Autonauts vs Piratebots.