Port Royale 2

The Good
Port Royale 2 has a lot going for it. Every once in a while, a game comes along that enthralls me and compels me to keep playing it. Port Royale 2 is one of those games.

The game is as big as the player allows it to be. If you wish to focus on wealth and empire building, have at it. If you want to beat up on pirates or one of the four nations of the Caribbean, have at it. The game is pretty much Sid Meier's Pirates! on steroids and a belly full of Red Bull.

If you are upgrading from the original Port Royale, you'll find not a few refinements to the trading system. Your ship's captains are no longer mindless drones that obey your orders to the letter. They will now buy and sell if the price is suitable, which in turn fills your coffers faster than in Port Royale.

Building and maintaining businesses are easier as well. Getting materials to cities is less of a chore than it was in Port Royale, so if you require sugar to churn out those kegs of rum, you won't have to beat yourself over the head manipulating your ships trade routes in order to get it there.

The missions are different as well. You will be asked to economically sabotage opposing nation's cities, steal settlers, sack ships, etc.

For me, the joy comes from the trading. Balancing and expanding the trade empire is a great challenge in itself, so I find myself engaging in battle less and less the more I play (attacking a nation who owns a city that I make a lot of money from or own businesses in is bad for my bottom line). But in all honesty, the combat is the weakest part of the game.

The Bad
The ship to ship combat segment is a big step down from the original Port Royale. In the original, you could have ten on ten ship battles that were a lot of fun to watch and control. In Port Royale 2, for some reason the player can only control ONE ship at a time while the enemy can control up to five. Horatio Hornblower himself would soil himself over those odds. After watching ship after ship plunge in to Davy Jones' Locker after their hulls were shattered by 200 cannon or more, I decided that the risks outweighed the benefits so I avoid combat all together.

Pirates now not only roam the seas, but have pirate bases that the player can invade and sack. The problem with this, however, is that if you neglect taking the pirate down until long after they have become established, their bases are defended by up to ten cannon towers. The cannon towers are often packed closely together, so one or more can clip a shot off as you make an attack run. While the towers only appear to shoot one cannon ball per round, this cannonball has the devistating effect of a Howitzer shell. You'll be lucky to make two or three passes against the towers before your ship becomes a future attraction for skin divers. The towers are incredibly difficult to damage, so if you pit your five ships (one at a time, mind you) against a fully guarded pirate port (or enemy nation port, for that matter) expect to have a lot of grieving widows for the sailors who now rest on the sea bed floor. Considering that some of the better ships are really quite expensive, it seems almost foolish to throw them up against crack shot tower gunners for some gold and a little prestige.

Port Royale now has a sword fight minigame as well, and it is implemented poorly. If you have ever played the arcade game "Shanghai Kid" from the early 1980s, it's pretty much the same concept. You can attack the enemy swordfighter either high, low, or somewhere in between. Despite the fact that swords are designed to cleave an enemy in two, swordfighting is pretty much a bloodless affair. The "health bar" depletes until either you or your enemy fall to their knees and put their hands up in surrender. There is also a "fatigue" bar as well, so if you or your opponent get tired, they can't swing their sword until they rest up. If I were in a swordfight, I'd hope that my instinct of self preservation would compel me to keep on swinging, but whatever.

The Bottom Line
Despite my lenghty criticisms, the game is well worth the purchase price (especially if you enjoy economics and business management). However, if you are considering plopping down the dollars for this game, you might wish to consider buying and playing the original Port Royale first. The first game isn't as refined as Port Royale 2, but it seems to be a lot more balanced in where the fun is.

The Good
- It's difficult to make the Caribbean look bad. While the graphics in this game are fairly simple, they still manage to look beautiful. The interface is very crisp. It's not quite the easiest thing in the world to learn, but the learning curve is very small.

• The music is great. I'm listening to it right now, in fact.

• The ability to have multiple fleets operating independently.

• To an extent, I liked the freeform nature of the game.

• The scenarios were fun, and pretty challenging.

• You don't have to engage in ship battles if you don't want to.
  
  The Bad
  - The ship combat and swordfights are, sadly, laughable. Ship combat is very similar to Sid Meier's Pirates, except everything is mouse-driven, for some bizarre reason. It's as if Ascaron thought about making combat similar to Pirates, and (to borrow a phrase) they've "read the sheet-music, but never heard the song performed". Instead of using the keyboard to control your ships and cannons in combat, you use the right mouse button to turn your ship, and the left mouse button fires. Due to this baffling control scheme, I tend to spend half my time accidentally scrolling the map around, or left-clicking on parts of the interface instead of the open sea, which won't fire your cannons. Nothing's more annoying than accidentally clicking somewhere on the mini-map, when you meant to fire a broadside of grapeshot. So, I don't feel too ashamed about playing on Easy difficulty as a result. I only wish I could set combat to Easy, and the actual "trade difficulty" to Normal. It's not that combat is too difficult - it's just too annoying.

• This game is a bit too freeform. Outside of the scenarios, there are absolutely no goals other than those you set for yourself. Without any kind of "score" to keep track of, other than rank or money, you've basically got to find your own things to do. I prefer a bit more direction.

• There weren't enough scenarios for my liking. They could've done a lot more with them, I think.
  
  The Bottom Line
  Port Royale 2 is, at its heart, a trading and empire-building simulation, with a few game-like elements tacked on.

Your bread and butter is trading. The game has 19 basic commodities, arranged into four groups of four (and one group of three), and two basic town types - Colonial towns, and Governor towns. Each town can only ever produce five commodities, varying by the town's location and the type of town it is (only Governor towns can produce "manufactured" goods, using "colonial goods" as a resource. Colonial towns need manufactured goods to stay happy. And so on). Also, residents of a town will consume any resources the town has above and beyond those required for local manufacturing, at a rate determined by the population of the town.

So needless to say, everybody needs something. Just running back and forth between a few towns, stocking up on goods they produce and offloading them at towns that don't produce those goods can be quite profitable.

As you trade favorably with towns - that is, supply goods that are in demand - your reputation with the town will increase, as well as your reputation with the town's country. (Naturally, purchasing goods that are already in low supply will lower your reputations). Once your "trade reputation" in a particular town reaches 100%, you can buy a building permit, allowing you to construct residences and businesses in the town.

Of course, just because you can construct businesses in a town, doesn't mean they'll be profitable. Other NPC traders are doing the same thing, and they will dynamically build more businesses and houses as necessary to maintain their own profit.

Every town has its own local economy. As a town runs low on the basic resources (foods, building materials, and what not) it will start to move into a recession. You can directly influence the success and wealth of a town by trading - you can supply the town with everything it needs to boost its local economy, encouraging other traders to set up businesses there and create a demand for more settlers and resources. But on the other hand, if you want to eliminate your competition in a town you've got your eye on, you can buy up all of that business's required stock from the market, or buy up all of the town's basic resources. If a town is in a recession for too long, businesses will start to lay off workers, and settlers will start queuing up to move out of the town and find work elsewhere. Eventually, the businesses will start to close down entirely. Or, you can simply buy your competetor's businesses outright, though this carries a hefty pricetag.

There's all /kinds/ of sneaky, underhanded things you can do if you want a monopoly on production in a given town. However, it tends to take a long time for a town's status to change, and it's not something that's undertaken lightly. Often, it's better to just "play fair" and build your own competing businesses, and employ trading convoys to export your product.

Ahh, trading convoys.

Before you can actually set sail, your ships must be grouped into convoys (the number of allowed convoys is determined by your rank). Each convoy can have ten ships, five of which may be escort ships. Only escort ships come into play during a battle, and the rest of your ships in the convoy are treated as trading vessels.

In order to use your convoy, you must hire a captain from the local tavern to manage the convoy for you, for a modest salary. As he works, he gains experience points. Most captains you hire are very inexperienced, but over time, they can earn up to five levels in each of the three skills - Navigation, Gunnery, and Trading. Each skill provides a slight bonus to those activities (Navigation helps you move a bit faster, Trading gives you better prices, and so on.)

Once your captain gains a total of four total experience points spread across the skills, he can be assigned to a trade route that you define. He will then automatically travel to each town on your route, trying to find the best deals. You can leave the decisions up to him, or manually specify which goods should be traded at which town.

Once trading starts to get a little dull, you can always do missions. Every town has a tavern where you can always hire captains or gamble with a simple card game, but occasionally there will be other NPCs there offering you missions, pieces of a treasure map, or sometimes they'll just read you a history lesson or a biography of a pirate.

You can also do missions for town Governors and Viceroys (but in order to do so, you must have a trade rank of 100% with that particular town). The Governor missions tend to mainly involve supporting towns by supplying goods, or if the country is at war, he can offer you a variety of combat or sabotage missions (for example, he may order you to force an enemy town into a "recession" state, by any means you choose.) Also, during wartime, he will offer you a Letter of Marque, which will let you attack their enemies without reprisal from other, uninvolved nations. Ordinarily engaging in combat without the blessing of a Governor has serious reputation consequences with all nations.

A Viceroy, on the other hand, gives you tougher missions. During wartime, he may order you to weaken a nation's military strength by capturing or sinking their Military Convoys (typically five very powerful ships), or he may want you to bolster his own military by handing over one of your own convoys to him. Once an enemy nation is weakened, and the Viceroy's nation is strong, he may order to you to attack enemy towns and annex them for his nation. Once you take a couple of towns for him, you may be rewarded with a town of your very own. Since no other NPC traders are allowed to build inside your town, you have complete freedom in developing it. Running your own town is nearly a separate game in itself.

Now, one thing I haven't really touched on much is combat, mainly because it's something I really dislike in this game. Due to the weird interface it uses, I generally try to avoid combat unless it's absolutely necessary. Luckily, if you have no escort ships in your convoy, you can simply "evade" combat encounters. Your ships won't be captured or sunk, but there's a good chance you'll lose your cargo. On the other hand, if you lose a combat encounter with an escort ship, you lose all of your other ships. So while it's inevitable that your trading convoys will occasionally be attacked by pirates, or by nations with whom you have a poor reputation, it pays to keep them completely unarmed. The loss of a little cargo on occasion is always preferable to losing the entire convoy.

The few times I do engage in combat, it's mainly to knock the pirates down a notch or two. Over time, pirates become more powerful and add ships to their own fleets - once they start building up a dangerous force, I like to hunt down and capture all of their ships. You can even destroy their hideouts once they're found, which gives you a good bit of cash and a nice reputation boost with all nations.

Now, with all of that said, I'm not entirely certain if I like this game or not. My issues with combat aside, I think that this game could have been greatly improved if it had some kind of storyline, or some pre-defined goals. While setting up profitable businesses and trade routes can be fun, once you actually do that, the only thing left to do, aside from random missions, is set up more businesses. Or, participate in one of the frequent wars, though that tends to be a little combat-heavy for my liking.

I suppose if I were to recommend this game to anyone, it would be fans of Railroad Tycoon 3 (of all things), mainly due to the similar challenges of setting up businesses along profitable trade routes, and the various methods you have of... "dealing with"... your competition.