![]() ![]() The better your captains are, the more special skills they can gain – these range from being able to repair some damage rapidly to spreading fire over a section of ocean, causing heavy damage to foes trying to flank your ships. Ships can fire from their port and starboard side each round so it takes a bit of planning and forethought to fire off both broadsides before the end of each ship’s turn. This effects how many hexes ships can move and how swiftly they can turn to bring their cannons to bear. Each ship gets a certain number of manoeuvre points depending on how agile they are and the skills of the ship’s captain. Those who thirst for complexity in their economic simulations are likely to be satisfied with Port Royale 4!įrom time to time, you’ll be called upon by your chosen nation’s viceroy to go out pirate hunting to defend the realm! This is accomplished via a hexagonal grid where the ships of the various naval belligerents can move and attack. Of course, building anything at all requires gaining favour with the viceroy first, and then you’ll need to make sure adequate buildings supplies are shipped to construct the buildings in the first place. Unhappiness can be mitigated by making sure your trade routes supply towns with a healthy variety of luxury goods. However, building messy, noisy farms and workshops near residential areas can cause discontent amongst the populace, leading to problems like lower population growth and fewer people being available to work. If you build a fruit farm, for example, that can possibly create an abundance, lowering the price of that good, allowing you to get it cheaply and sell it elsewhere with an improved profit margin. There’s a reasonably complex set of systems determining the economy of each port. When zooming in to port level, you can also get a hexagonal view of the various buildings there. It’s a neat mechanic that makes the gameplay smoother as it showcases how much work has gone into making the landscape seamless at whatever zoom level. When you zoom out, time passes by much quicker as you get an overview of your convoys zipping between ports. When you zoom in, time slows down so you can focus on the niceties of loading and unloading your ships or developing your businesses in a port. Cleverly, this also acts as a shortcut for changing the speed of the game. ![]() You can zoom out so far you can see a massive panorama of the entire Caribbean and then zoom in so far you can see the little people scurrying between different buildings in the port towns. One thing that’s definitely very unique and awesome about Port Royale 4 is the graphical interface. It becomes a bit like a seaborne game of Railroad Tycoon, except instead of tricky moments where you decide whether to take a plunge and build an expensive railroad halfway across the map to undermine your opponent’s corporation, Port Royale 4 just has you continuously expanding with very little big risk/reward decisions. Most of your time is spent watching your money roll in from lucrative trade routes and periodically purchasing some new ships or buying up some businesses. It’s not really about pivotal decisions but a series of gentle tweaks. However, this illustrates perhaps the biggest problem with Port Royal 4. This is a huge relief, as though setting up my routes required a bit of fiddling, they didn’t require any more micromanagement to get keep them ferrying goods for a solid profit. ![]() ![]() Not only can you set up trade routes for your convoys of schooners and brigandines to follow and tell them exactly what to buy and sell along the way, you can even let them use their own best judgement on what amounts to buy and sell. Thankfully, there is a hefty bit of automation available to make trading more manageable. Learning the ropes of Port Royal 4 is made a lot easier by the addition of some tutorials but as I scanned my eyes over the estimated run time of each of these tutorials and found they cumulatively clocked in at upwards of an hour, I was a little intimidated. But is this ambitious marriage of finance and swashbuckling really fun? Well, that’s a part of it, but there was also residential zoning to be considered balance sheets to be done and tax forms to be filled! Yarr! Port Royale 4 tries to involve in the broader economics of this exciting time and place to create a more well-rounded simulation of being a merchant or privateer. When you think of the crystal blue Caribbean sea during the Age of Sail, surely you imagine it being filled with the sound of cannon-fire, stained with the blood of pirates and hiding vast riches of buried treasure. Shiver me timbers and adjust me commodity prices! ![]()
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