In article ,
says...
> > I found I spent more time looking at load screens than playing the game.
> > This is regrettable, to say the least. Auto traderoutes are a kind of
> > alternative to micro management (e.g. entering port at either end of the
> > journey), but won't be so profitable for long, due to market saturation.
> >
> > Tactical combat is slower than watching paint dry <sigh>. Realistic,
> > maybe, for sailing ships. Fun? <cough>
>
> I tried the beta, and it scared me: no, really, I come from a though period,
> and I thought I was burned out. As it happens, I *did* reinstall "Patrician
> III", and it is a whole different world. For some reason I also reinstalled
> "Pirates!", and I decided that I was not burned out after all.
>
> The micromanagement, the low level of feedback and the patience required
> (from the loading screens to the SLOOOOOOW naval battles) top a game that is
> actually not that deep. Some concepts are interesting (streamlining commerce
> so that each port has a clear "main good" - useful for monopolies and
> blockades). But, after a few hours, I felt I was simply doing the same thing
> over and over.
>
> Naval battles are nice, but nothing more. And, BTW, the main course should
> be strategic management. Stopping the game cold so to play an encounter that
> stretches into infinity (if the enemy flees) is a gameflow-breaker. I fear
> that they copied the idea from the "Total War" series without understanding
> how TW games' structure is wholly different.
>
> And, oh, the AI in the beta is brain dead.
For some reason I haven't even been able to log into the beta for the
last 2 days: it gives me a 'wrong password' followed by a c2d. So I only
got to play one extensive naval battle, really (apart from the
tutorial)- and this is why that battle was a gamebreaker for me:
The battle was very uneven: my convoy of 4 galleons surprised a solitary
pirate galleon. For some reason my 4 ships were in 2 groups with the
pirate scissored between once the battle screen started. With my
flagship and one other, I shot the pirate to smithereens in very short
order. But I didn't want to sink him, oh no, I wanted to board and
conquer that ship!
Now, the pirate had 14 hull integrity points left out of something like
500 or 700, I forget which. He'd also lost about 1/3 of his rigging and
24 out of his crew of 120 by the time he decided to turn tail and flee.
I set my 3 undamaged ships to chase him down. Now here comes the
astonishing bit:
That pirate galleon with a hull with more holes than a swiss cheese, and
only 2/3 of his rigging intact, made about 95% of the speed of my 3
pristine galleons. Seriously, if he were sailing that fast with that
hull, he'd be shipping water like nobody's business and it would a)
drastically slow him and/or b) sink him if c) the ship wouldn't break up
outright under the stresses.
Not to mention the sail situation.
So there he flees, before the wind. My 3 ships are immediately behind
him, and veeeeeery sloooooowly catching up, until they are actually very
close. Now I'm not much of a champion sailer, but I've crewed in yacht
races for my father-out-law, and there is such a thing as 'spoiling
their wind' -- e.g. if another boat gets upwind of you, you slow down
because they take away your 'clean' wind and create turbulence. Not so
here. That pirate kept trucking on remorselessly.
(remorselessly being on part of the programmers, you understand).
Lastly, you don't think I could set my ships' course to actually get
into boarding distance, do you, after I finally caught up? They'd
overtake by giving a wide berth, they'd veer away (!!!) or luff their
sails, but they would NOT get into boarding distance. Search me.
After over 1 hour realtime pursuit, I gave up in disgust and sank the
bastard.
Meh.
-------
Speaking of the economic simulation - quite nice, really, as you said,
but there are some things seriously lacking. I chose Portugal in my 3rd
game and did a bit of 'powerplaying'. Cracked 1 mil cash before 1610 and
that was after unlocking and buying 5 galleons and 12 small ships and
paying for pacts with every other nation. Just running 4 convoys of
either 4 cutters or 2 cutters plus 1 sloop I managed to depress the
market for goods so much that it became pointless to carry gold or
diamonds, Ivory or tiger-skins. Tea and Silk were still profitable, but
losing profit margins steadily --- and this was around 1610/1611 before
I had even a single galleon or brig in service for freight. Ummm ... I
wonder where that was headed. I was about to find out when I ran into
said pirate ship.
Maybe carrying porcelain in bulk - I had mostly avoided that 'cause
there was little profit in it to start with.
The LEAST they could've done game-design wise is a) enable the player to
give some rough orders to the captain - alternative port when no goods
available (really, carrying stone from India to Portugal is NOT ON),
take goods from the warehouse back home if nothing is in the tradecentre
instead of loading coal and pigiron and b) enable the player to buy/sell
from the strategy screen as you can do in Port Royale 2. The loading
screen waits forth and back are just ridiculously long. c) warehouses
are basically pointless unless you can have a warehouse manager who
intelligently buys goods locally when they're cheap and channels them on
to convois. As has been done in Patrician3.
With those load screen waiting times I would most certainly not be game
to check the market situation in my ports manually every month or two,
and then have to go enter each port manually AGAIN to load stuff from
the warehouse into the ships since the captains don't seem to know to do
that. Eeep.
Haven't been able to find out how the game develops in later stages
since, as I said, I haven't been able to log in any more.
Other people seem to have that login problem, there's some bitching
about it on the forums at Paradox. Which makes me wonder if you have to
log in to the retail game online as well in order to be able to play,
and if it will be beset by the same problem.
My router also shows an insane amount of traffic every time the game
starts up, which, frankly, has me wondering what it is that gets sent
out there without telling me first ... a mildly paranoid feeling, yet
.... Ah dinna like it.
+++++
Just for a comparison I dusted off Port Royale 2. The trading is much
more convenient. The naval battles play out much more conveniently (if
even less realistically not to mention no graphic glitz) but not being
able to control more than one ship in battle at a time while three
pirate towers are reducing you to sawdust and flotsome before you get to
destroy even the first of them, that is another gamebreaker - at least
scenario-wise, at least for me. I'm sure some people have managed, but
it's beyond me. So I can tootle in free play and get rich, but the
battle scenarios are not for me.
It's years, probably, since I last played Patrician 3 but as I remember,
I got quite adept at using my (very limited) sailing knowledge in that
game to simply escape virtually every encounter
-P.
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