There are a couple of ammo types for the cannons that inflict different types of damage, as well as a Boarding option that sends your sailors to storm an enemy’s deck, thus disabling the use of either ship. Not only do you have to move your vessel around the grid, but you must also use maneuver points to adjust your ship’s orientation to allow for the cannons on both sides to hit the enemy’s ships dead-on. Battles are turn-based, with each ship having a different set of action and maneuver points. If you have a warship (as opposed to a mere merchant vessel), you can either let the battle play out automatically or roll up your sleeves and go in yourself. Depending on your starting settings or your campaign, other nations will declare war on you quite frequently - or certain captains will just single you out and pick a fight. One thing that can spice up the gameplay if you’re playing a Free Game or a more challenging campaign is a good, old-fashioned naval battle. It’s a shame, really, that when this happens the game becomes little more than watching a bunch of boats sail around in a circle. Building resources will inevitably make their way into town if you have trade routes running through it, requiring virtually no interference from you. With enough money in the bank, you can place any building you desire, sit back with the game’s speed on the fastest setting, and just watch it all happen. Having fully automated trade routes made the game far too easy, as much of the campaigns revolve around buying new construction projects and funneling the necessary building resources into those projects. With less than ten trade routes active, I began to see my funds run well into the millions, which effectively took away all of the challenge of the game. Once I figured this out in a runthrough of my first campaign, I no longer ran into financial problems, and it felt as though the game began to play itself. While you have the option to manually adjust the individual goods you exchange when editing trade routes, I learned the hard way that you can instead set the game to automatically trade with each city for you according to the supply and demand of every destination. You can tweak your route all day until you’ve found the swiftest possible path, but when you’re overseeing an entire Caribbean nation with a handful of trade routes that are constantly active, you’ll rarely notice the financial benefit gained from shaving a couple days off your routes. Having to pay attention to wind patterns and avoiding things such as shallow reefs that can slow your ships down seems to add complexity to the game on its surface, but in reality, it doesn’t feel as though it really matters that much. The path can be adjusted by clicking and dragging it around the ocean, which can allow you to use wind directions and sea conditions to your advantage. When setting up trade routes, a preview of the path your ships will take appears, along with an estimate of how many days the full route will take to complete. Unless you assign the Merchant perk to your main character at the start of the campaign, you cannot trade with hostile cities or cities with whom you are at war. Once you have convoys out on the water, you can set up trade routes between any number of cities you have purchased trade permits from. The citizens in each city appreciate having access to all of these goods, and become unhappy when there isn’t a constant flow of variety and supply. Resources span four different categories: Basic goods, which include things such as wheat, fruits, vegetables and wood, demanded goods like hemp, meat, and coal, export and craft goods such as clothing, coffee and tobacco, and quality goods like pastries and furniture. Each city can only produce up to seven different commodities (out of a possible 25) and it’s up to you to facilitate distribution to ensure that every city gets enough of each resource. However, after enough fumbling around, you’ll come to discover that it’s actually easier than it seems thanks to some of the game’s auto settings. Trade is the primary focus of Port Royale 4, and it can feel daunting at first. Performing tasks, combined with establishing consistent trade, rewards you with Fame points that can be used to unlock perks throughout the game. Additionally, you can perform tasks for different nations or for the Viceroy of your own, which usually consist of delivering a certain amount of goods in a designated time frame or patrolling an area of the sea to look for missing persons.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |