A firefight between mid-game and late-game ship.
Doblons.io
is a multiplayer Web Game released on 22nd September, 2016 by an Australian programmer Sidney De Vries, who later went on to create MooMoo.io and Krunker.io. Its initial version was developed over 4 days.
It is about pirate ships fighting each other and/or the occasional AI-controlled boss, and collecting the titular doblons to upgrade themselves. There are two types of upgrades - straight-up stat increases, which are purchased with doblons, and add-ons to the ship, which are only available once the ship levels up, and can be placed at the Front, Side, Deck or Rear.
This game provides examples of the following tropes:
- Abnormal Ammo: It's possible to shoot out coins by pressing F. This is actually a viable way to augment your damage output in late game, when you have already obtained all or almost all of the available upgrades anyway.
- Battering Ram: An upgrade to the front of the ship, far more popular than its alternative of two small frontal cannons. It can be upgraded two more times, and when combined with Ram Damage stat increases, a comparatively low-level ship can sink even the strongest one in seconds. As such, there are frequent ram-based builds, which completely forgo cannons in favour of maxing out the ram and adding on as many oars (or even a rudder) to the ship to ensure it can chase down anything.
- Boring, but Practical: Auto Cannon Deck upgrades. They literally shoot on their own however they desire, and all the upgrades do is add another one of them. Persisting with them lets you have 3 or 4 cannons that fire at all once, in addition to any other cannons you may possess, are affected by all the stat upgrades you invested in, and will attack off-screen targets as soon as you level up Cannon Range. Rammers will have a difficult time dodging 3 or 4 cannonballs at once, and the addition of either Mine Dropper or Rear Cannon will do a lot to discourage them as well.
- Collision Damage: There's minor collision damage if a player runs into one of the small islands on the map. The damage from running into other ships is similarly minor...unless they upgrade their Ram Damage stat, that is. A ship with high Ram Damage does not even need to have an actual ram to swiftly drown anything in its path.
- Dump Stat: Turn Speed is only significant for rammers. On the contrary, Cannon Range, Cannon Damage and Reload Speed can be safely ignored by ram-oriented ships, at least until they max out all their other stats first.
- Fictional Currency: The titular doblons are a semi-example, since the name is simply an altered version of doubloons, historical Spanish gold coins used during the Golden Age of Piracy.
- Friendly Fireproof: You are immune to your own mines, or to the mines dropped by the Mine Layer ships you own. Equally, the shots you fire do not affect your support vessels, and the shots fired from your Battleship and Man-of-War do not affect you.
- Gatling Good: If you choose a Swivel cannon as an initial deck upgrade, it can later be converted into a gatling gun, sacrificing individual cannonball damage for the constant stream of small bullets.
- Level-Up Fill-Up: Increasing the Hull Strength stat will not simply extend your maximum health bar, but actually increase your current health by that amount. It's possible to upgrade the other stats first, while keeping a sum of money in reserve to quickly heal the damaged ship through Hull Strength upgrades.
- Lightning Bruiser: The desired outcome of a pure ram-based build, which sacrifices side cannons in favour of oars that max out its speed, and use upgrades only to boost the ram and the number of oars. This frees up the stat points that would have gone into Cannon Range, Damage and Reload Speed to exclusively raise Ram Damage, Movement Speed, Hull Strength, Turn Speed and Auto Repairs, creating a ship that is both fast and hard to kill, if practically unable to attack outside of melee range.
- More Dakka: Gatling Gun and Scatter Rows upgrades both sacrifice the firepower of individual cannonballs for the constant stream of bullets from the deck and side ports, respectively.
- Alternatively, simply going for all the Side Cannons and Auto Cannons upgrades, in addition to maxing out Reload Speed, will ensure your ship spews more than a dozen powerful cannonballs several times per second.
- Regenerating Health: It hardly regenerates at first, but investing in an Auto Repairs stat will quickly fix that.
- Tuckerization: Some boss ships, like MG Masterov and IX Plode, are named after the YouTubers who helped to make the game popular in its early days.
