Royal Port 4 Review – Yo Ho Ho and a strand of rum
If the 2020 events ruined your major travel projects for the year, maybe a trip to the sunny Caribbean is planned for you. Port Royale 4 offers a particularly unique opportunity to escape in paradise if, of course, your holiday idea includes the construction of plantations, the exploration of commercial roads and the fight against hackers. Port Royale is a series of trading simulation and strategy games where you compete with other nations to dominate the Caribbean by establishing fruitful trade and maintaining profitable cities. The newest addition to this series of the early 2000s is beautiful and vast, with new naval battles in turn and a decent number of construction projects that expand the building elements of the city, but it unfortunately does not reach to maintain the engaging or addictive gameplay..
In Port Royale 4, you have the opportunity to play with Spain, England, France or the Netherlands in your Caribbean conquest of the 17th century. Each nation has its own long campaign, but there is also a free mode of play with widely customizable settings for anyone wishing to follow their own path. Become familiar with the gameplay can be quite difficult at first, and although the tutorials take about an hour or more, it is always easy enough to get lost once threw to the sea thanks to the range of different mechanisms.
Most of the game takes place in a large aerial card that allows you to quickly move from one city to another and follow the many ships that occupy the waters, but you can also zoom in enough close to any city for See the width of everyday life. There is not too much to observe; You will not see people buzzing or going to their occupations as they do, let’s say Tropico, but there is always a decent amount of details in buildings that can be admired.
Most of your time is devoted to the purchase or order of the construction of new ships, all inspired by historic vessels of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to the creation and management of commercial roads and the construction of new Farms, residences or infrastructure in your cities. You have to browse manually to discover new cities on the map, buy licenses to trade with each of them and ask for licenses to build construction projects anywhere outside of your hometown.
In addition, you can perform tasks for different nations or for your own viceroy, which usually consist of delivering a certain amount of goods in a specified period of time or patrolling a sea area to search for missing persons. Perform tasks, combined with the establishment of a coherent business, rewards you with renowned points that can be used to unlock benefits throughout the game.
Trade is the main goal of Royal 4_, and this may seem intimidating at the beginning. However, after having gropered enough, you will discover that it is actually easier than it seems thanks to some automatic parameters of the game. Each city can produce only seven different products (out of 25) and it is to You to facilitate distribution to make sure each city gets enough of each resource. Resources cover four different categories: commodities, which include elements such as wheat, fruits, vegetables and wood, products requested like hemp, meat and coal, export products and ‘Crafts such as clothes, coffee and tobacco, and quality products like pastries and furniture. The citizens of each city appreciate having access to all these goods and become dissatisfied when there is not a constant stream of variety and supply.
To establish a commercial route, you must assign individual vessels to convoys or groups of vessels that perform tasks together. The vessels will simply sit in your shipyard to do nothing if you do not assign them to a convoy, which you need to do at the lighthouse of the city. Move ships to a brand new convoy is quite easy, but try to add a ship to an existing convoy is a bit awkward: all ships must be parked in front of the lighthouse before you can add a new one to the group, which means One we spend a lot of time floating around the ocean to find the right ships just to disturb their tasks and remind them at home for a second.
Once you have convoys on the water, you can establish trade routes between any number of cities with which you have purchased business permits. Unless you attribute the merchant advantage to your main character at the beginning of the campaign, you can not exchange with hostile cities or with which you are at war. When configuring business routes, a preview of the path taken by your ships appears, as well as an estimate of the number of days that the complete route will take. The path can be adjusted by clicking on it and dragging it around the ocean, which can allow you to use the wind directions and the conditions of the sea to your advantage. Have to pay attention to the wind models and avoid things such as shallow reefs that can slow down your ships seems to add complexity to the game on its surface, but in reality it does not feel that it really matters a lot. You can change your route all day until you have found the fastest way possible, but when you supervise all a Caribbean nation with a constantly active business handle, you will rarely notice the financial advantage from the Shaving a few days off.
Although you have the possibility to manually adjust the individual goods you exchange when changing business routes, I learned to the hard you can instead configure the game to automatically exchange with each city for You depending on the supply and demand of each destination. Once I understood that during my first campaign, I have not met any financial problems and I felt that the game was starting to play. With fewer than ten active commercial routes, I started to see my funds in millions, which has actually removed all the challenge of the game. The fact of having fully automated business roads made the game much too easy, Because most campaigns revolve around the purchase of new construction projects and the delivery of the necessary construction resources to these projects. With enough money in bank, you can place the building of your choice, sit down with the speed of the game on the fastest setting and watch all this happen. Construction resources will inevitably arrive in the city if you have commercial routes that cross it, practically requiring any interference from you. It’s really a shame that when it happens, the game does not become much more than watching a group of boats navigate in a circle.
One thing that can spice up the gameplay if you play a free game or a harder campaign is a good old-fashioned naval battle. Depending on your starting settings or your campaign, other nations will tell you the war quite frequently – or some captains will simply choose and choose a fight. If you have a warship (as opposed to a simple merchant ship), you can either let the battle take place automatically or roll up your sleeves and enter yourself. The battles are in turn, each ship having a different set of points of action and maneuver. Not only do you have to move your ship around the grid, but you must also use maneuvering points to adjust the orientation of your ship to allow the canons on both sides to hit the enemy ships. There are two types of ammunition for guns that inflict different types of damage, as well as an boarding option that sends your sailors to storm the bridge of an enemy, thus disabling the use of one or the other ships. By performing tasks throughout the game, you can also earn tactics, which are special capabilities or bonuses that can be applied during the battle.
Manual naval battles require a little care to win, but it’s not too complicated for novice players in the turn in turn. The elements of the strategy are not particularly complex and, in some respects, it may be more difficult to acquire powerful warships than combat with them.
If you refuse a battle or if you simply do not have a ship equipped to fight one, the enemy will entirely seize your ship or will loot any cargo that you have on board. It may take some time to unlock enough captains to order a warship, which can not navigate water without 1. Captains are unlocked with renowned points and can be improved and attributed to different skills such as the increase in the speed of a ship or the granting of additional maneuver points in combat. The process of building the reputation, purchase and strengthening of vessels and unlocking captains can take time at the beginning, which means you will not feel equipped to lead a naval battle for at least a little while.
Port Royal 4 has some basic elements that sound well on paper, but they all show weaknesses in their own way. Naval battles are pleasant, but certainly not enough to write. I would have liked to feel harder to cook with more exciting explosions and animations or more grandiose music, but they are only minor missed opportunities. The business roads are passed for sensitive to the choice of the player, but in truth, if you simply click on some cities and that you randomly define the exchanges on automatic, you will probably keep your funds in the dark. The same goes for the increase in the production of resources and the construction of your cities. You can plant new farms and install new factories all you want, but at some point, it will not even be necessary. Once you have enough money to buy everything you want without worry, you do not have much left to do in addition to a stronger fleet of war.
The construction of the city is rather not stimulating and offers virtually no interaction with individual buildings at the micro level. Place farms, production facilities and municipal institutions looks more like a secondary chore than a project that arouses enthusiasm, and if the balance between the labor market and the availability of living spaces for citizens Can be tricky, the needs of citizens themselves seem not very important..
In truth, much of the Port Royal content 4 It has the impression that it does not matter. I rarely felt the impact of my actions outside the battle and barely felt the need to please my citizens. It is extremely easy to make them happy as long as you create some business routes that attend your city, because the only thing that seems to interest them is the influx and the variety of new resources. You can place parks, hospitals and bars around their homes to make them happy, but again: it does not really seem Mathere.
All this does not mean that Port Royale 4 is a bad game. It’s beautiful, refined and large-scale, and free games can offer an endless gameplay. There is no doubt that some players will benefit from a rewarding experience of this game, but I found that the rhythm was too slow – and the motivations too weak – to deserve long hours of play. I did not have the Feeling that my choices were counting, and I did not really have an attachment or investment to the goals set for me. In a campaign, the Caribbean domination did not even cross my mind. I was left alone by other nations, and there was no urgency or need to increase my production at ultra-high levels or to expand my power to more cities. I would have liked the game more if I pushed me or offered more reward or complexity, but maybe players who do not worry that less guidelines will consider this as a non-problem.
Global, Port Royal 4 gives a beautiful design to its historic vessels and its detailed buildings, and the naval battles of tour-turn strategy are a good change of rhythm over the large soothing overall map in which you will pass the most of your time. The game can be as stressful or as peaceful as you want depending on how you adjust the settings of your free games or the way you approach some campaigns, but it would be fine if it was more heavily weighted by taking decision or rewards and consequences. Although I found the automatic exchange settings to make the game much too easy and without intervention, you can always make your life more difficult and manually switch the exchange of resources.
Cities building enthusiasts will not be satisfied because it plays a minor (and less interesting) role in the game that we hope, but I would recommend Royal Port 4 to the fans who have already played the series or Those who love a mix between resource management and strategy. For all those who are somewhere between the two, I can recommend you wait for a price drop. ### Good * Ships and buildings look great * Free games offer a lot of play time * Decent mix of strategy and business 68 ### The bad * Slow pace * Low reward or incentive * Many things will be learned to hard * Nothing really COMPTE