Overall Thoughts About the Game

[StressEater]

I am a huge fan of this series. It is by far one of my favorite strategy games. There are a lot of mix reviews right now about this game. Which is why I thought it might be nice to start a thread where we can discuss our thoughts and possibly help others to decide if they want to buy it or not. Lets start with, if you have never played a Port Royale game, then the most important thing to understand is that there is a HUGE learning curve to this game. A lot of people who try to play this game just end up quitting. I was one of them. But, luckily a friend of mine kept pushing me to keep playing. I am very glad she did. As far as the game itself. I do not feel that it is as good as the third one. They took away building your own town. Which was the best part of the third game. Also, they removed you being neutral. Now, you have to pick a country. You can not just be a merchant anymore. They also changed the military battles to turn base, and that did NOT turn out well at all. One of the things that bothers me the most is that the game lags out and starts to crash the longer you play it. They also changed the captain system and you can only have so many military ships per captains points. Which means the most you can have is 8 points worth of ships. The best ships are worth 2 points. So you can not have more than 4 of the best ships in one convoy. Which now makes the best ship in the game useless when your choice is 4 Ship of the Lines or 8 Galleons. With the 8 Galleons you get 288 cannons and 1440 sailors with the potential of 16 attacks per round vs 4 Ship of the Lines with 200 cannons and 800 sailors with only 8 attacks per round. Lastly it brings me to the new fame points they introduced. This is by far the worse part about the game. You have to build up fame points to do anything in the game. If you want to control a city, it cost fame points. If you want hire a captain, fame points. If you want to buy the best ships, gain fame points. If you want to produce tier 2 goods, yep you guessed it, fame points. The fame points are really hard to come by later in the game. So if you wasted a bunch of them on ships that just sunk, or took control of a town that became annexed during war time, those fame points are gone forever. I still enjoy playing the game and it is still my favorite game series. However, I do not feel that Port Royale 4 is at all or even close to as good as the third Port Royale. I hope to write a guide for this one if I can ever get it to stop crashing so I can finish the game. I would have had this done a week ago.