I'm about three quarters way through my second game and the rough edges are beginning to show a bit more. Well... when I say rough edges... the problem is the game is too bereft of rough edges... it's...
Overbalanced!
Yes, that chestnut that's currently in vogue to be a bitching target is this game's biggest flaw. I had a sneaking suspicion it might be and that's now confirmed.
For my second game I chose to be a peaceful trader. I would do my utmost to avoid conflict and just numbercrunch my way to victory, buying cheap, selling dear, taking maximum advantage of the game's supply and demand system combined with hearty self-production of the goods most in demand via building farms and mills etc. I was a corporate magnate in two towns with 12 businesses and five residences. I spend hour after hour running my goods between ports, back and forth like a good hamster in the wheel, each month showing a noticeable increase in wealth. Because I was lugging so many goods about I was attacked by pirates a couple of times and gained some boats that way, but I also had to buy some boats here and there.
And this is where the game isn't so fun. While the combat itself is very well done and you have the ability to alter the course of a battle with your own skills, the battle side of the game is totally out of balance with the trading aspect. In effect, playing towards combat is OP whereas playing towards trading is just a nearly pointless grind. And the reason trading is such a grind is because trading is overbalanced.
Using battles to increase wealth:
You have to buy Cutlasses - 40gp each, one for each sailor, so a total of 400-800 x 40gp and, because you will be hopefully winning your battles then you wont be losing many of them, you probably lose about 20 per battle. So Cutlass cost = 800gp per 3 game weeks.
You have to pay your sailors and captain - for about 400-500 sailors (average post-battle levels from 5 or 6 decent mid-range ships) you're looking at an employment cost of about 15,000 per week. So Sailors cost = 45,000 per 3 game weeks.
The game also has general maintenance costs, which is a cost related to what buildings would probably cost in upkeep IRL-kinda-thing. For plain sailors the only cost will be storage unit costs, as you can't demolish storage units. One of these costs about 500gp a week. So Maintenance costs = 1,500gp every three weeks.
So total upkeep = 47,300 every three weeks.
Why 3 weeks? Because the game makes you wait far too long in the repair shop (balancing...). After any naval battle your ships will have lost health, and health doesn't regenerate by any means other than at the repair shop. Repairs cost about 800gp per day and any ship with a noticeable red chunk in it's health bar will take anything from 12 days to 18 days to repair. So the timespan economy of one naval battle is 3 weeks.
So repair costs = about 12,000gp
So total cost of battle = about 50,000gp every three weeks based on an average of five mid-range ships.
And what do you get in return? Normally a bounty for a Pirate and some ships to sell (plus usually free better ships to upgrade your flotilla with, selling off the smaller redundant ones).
Selling price of 4 decent mid-range ships = about 85,000-120,000
Bounty for the Pirate's head = about 20,000-50,000 (double that if you want to shaft your reputation and attack marqued pirates instead of wanted pirates, at the cost of slower future sailor recruitment)
So reward = 105,000 - 170,000. And sometimes you can suffer few enough loses to your sailors and health that you can do two pirates in a row, making your 50,000 outlay bring back 210,000 - 340,000gp every three weeks.
And this is all quite hassle free and just involves scooting your ship out into the sea, having a battle, going back to repair, going to sell your repaired unwanted ships, recruiting new sailors and Cutlasses, rinse and repeat every three weeks. It's easy, fun and quick.
Using trading to increase wealth:
Oh boy, where do I start...
As a trader you'll still have to bare all the costs that a battle master will have to bear. Same sailor costs (to avoid pirates), same Cutlass (initial) costs but thankfully fewer replacements needed, Same (initial) maintenance costs but with the added 'bonus' of this figure increasing exponentially if you start any of your own businesses.
So total upkeep costs = 46,500 every three weeks + an additional 75,000 every three weeks for your additional workers and another 6,000 every three weeks for your increased maintenance costs = 127,500 every three weeks.
And your reward is products which you can attempt to sell at 'best price' totalling approximately:
Rum: 35x650 = 22,750
Cocoa: 15x450 = 6,750
Hemp: 10x500 = 5,000
Sugar: 50x160 = 8,000
Cotton: 40x120 = 4,800
Fish: 85x350 = 29,750
Salt: 20x350 = 7,000
Tobacco: 25x1,000 = 25,000
Cloth: 35x450 = 15,750
Wood: 100x70 = 7,000
So even at best price (or near) that = 131,800 every three weeks (or there abouts - sometimes you simply can't get best price and sometimes you just want to clear space). Which, as you can see, all seems rather pointless for all the fuss. To which the biggest fuss is having to ship your own goods between your own ports to enable other products to get made - such as Rum which requires both Sugar and Wood to produce, and the sugar is grown at a different place to the Rum and Wood. Also, you'll still need to buy some ingrediants, such as for the Cloth, which requires Cotton... and Dyes, and Dyes cost, even at best price 160gp per unit.
My stats for this part aren't fully accurate as I don't have the production sheet in front of me, but it should be clear that even if I've remembered wrongly by a whopping 50%, it's still a paltry sum when compared to battling your way to wealth, with a lot less room for error if you make any kind of detour from a plan or click 'sell 100' instead of 'sell 1' as you skip through your sales screen, constantly swapping between moving 100s of units and selling 10s and selling 1s. I remember once selling my 200 sugar instead of putting it in the stock room, just from natural human error of 0.3% (you have to make hundreds of micro-actions) and basically stopping Rum production for 3 weeks, for example.
On top of this, in order to get best price you have sail from port to port, over the course of 10-20 different ports per every three weeks, which stops you from doing other things, like mini quests and main quest, and you have to do it on a constant basis, stop for even one week and your carefully earned 90,000 will vanish before your eyes in minutes. So on top of finding the best place to sell your goods, you still have to buy from all the ports you visit (and because you might as well) to get additional sales along the way, and in most respects its only really this aspect which creates profit of any interest. And, of course, different areas of the map have different needs but you can only visit one area in any 3 week period.
And just when you think you can cope with this horrible situation of small but steadily increasing gains, the game throws you a real curveball - you suddenly need to spend 2 weeks out of action to repair your ships. And this doesn't only happen after a fight when you can sell ships to pay for the inconvenience, oh no, your ships deteriorate naturally over time, just from sailing around and, if you let them get too ragged the crew mutinies and you can't leave port until you've repaired them. And here lies the final nail in the coffin of the trader route.
Even if you had no businesses and just sailed from port to port buying and selling with the minimum overheads, you've still got to take a one or two week forced absence from trading, wiping out 100,000 within a flash. Even if you've found your hideout and get free ship repairs, it's the lost time which is the killer. Because with trading, time is money.
And as if that wasn't enough, buying (upgrading to) new boats costs a fortune, upwards of 50,000-100,000 for a decent mid-range boat.
Via the trading route I had to work my ass off to go from 90,000gp bank account to 470,000gp bank account to the point where I just had to give up out of both boredom and frustration. I just stopped, sold all my businesses, sold all my remaining stock, went out and killed 5 pirates in 4 outings and am currently at 1,000,000gp, with an extremely strong flotilla.
The trading game versus the battle game gives you these kind of playstyles:
With the blue line being the battle economy and the red line the trading economy, except the micro-analysis of the trading economy would look like this:
As any sense of progress gets almost, but not quite, obliterated every week as the weekly costs get removed from your total.
So, on the face of it, the game does indeed offer many different ways to play, but, unfortunately, it's primary selling point beyond combat, that of a trading simulator, is woefully cumbersome, unwieldy, boring, repetitive and altogether way too soul destroying to be considered any kind of genuine game option.
So while even after playing two games there is still stuff to explore, such as the pure pirate route and the marque route, both options are still primarily combat routes and once those are tried there doesn't leave much replayability, what with both the pure trading and trading with businesses routes both being pretty much no-goes. And while 200 hours is still a good chunk of time to get from a game, enough of a chunk to still make this a superb game, it's still not going to be a better game than a Civilisation game because, while its a better and more enjoyable game, it simply doesn't have that replay value, and when people buy strategy games it's the replay value which is their true value.
In terms of a game, I give this game a hearty 9/10, in terms of a strategy game, I give this game 6/10.
It's as if someone spent months balancing the trading aspect to over-perfection and inertia while leaving the battle aspect untested and over-powerful. At this moment in time I can't envisage there being any reason to trade in this game at all, at least once past the first initial stages of building a relatively strong first 3 or 4 ship flotilla.
