If your nation grants you carte blanche in dealing with rival powers, it is quite possible with enough ships, for example, to completely block the sea route to individual cities in order to starve them from the sea. On the other hand, the cycle of goods later enables things that you might not even think of in the first 10 to 12 hours of the game. On the one hand, this adds a certain element of chance that makes it practically impossible to permanently insert a trading tactic that always works. It may sound a little redundant, but in a business simulation, having a tactile and visually simulated economy is just an incredible bonus. Corresponding icons above the cities on the picturesque but somewhat static map of the world inform you about particularly scarce goods that can be bought at a correspondingly high price. Kitts to a standstill? Then Havana will have to get the precious beans from somewhere else. Hurricanes, epidemics or plagues of locusts bring the production or export of cocoa in St. Every ship that you see on the map contains a certain amount of goods that are delivered to the destination port and in turn influence supply and demand. Those who bring prosperity and growth to the cities meanwhile rise in favor of the crown and may even later wield the scepter in individual cities.Īll of this is based on an impressively real-time simulated cycle of goods, which developer Gaming Minds has taken over from Patrician 4. When you get tired of their teasing, your next big investment is putting together a small but powerful reaction force to keep the waters along the trade routes clean. Your booming business will of course soon arouse covetousness among pirates. Where you are initially dependent on third-party suppliers, you soon set up your own production facilities in order to manufacture a number of the twenty goods yourself.
If you initially buy every single sack of cotton yourself in order to later switch to more expensive goods such as tools and finally clothing, at some point you will figure out automatic trade routes that can encompass a good dozen cities. The player expands his world and his horizons on his own and feels really good, especially in the first twelve to 15 hours. One cannot credit the game highly enough that it succeeds in making beginners and experts alike grow with their tasks.
Port royale 3 strategy series#
In addition to the central endless game, two campaigns each serve privateer or trader souls and gently introduce the player to the basic mechanics, but you always do your own thing, deviate regularly and with impunity from the given course and generally play your own hybrid form of trade and Conquest.Įven if connoisseurs of the series quickly find that a lot has remained the same here, in the campaigns they enjoy a pleasantly lax Caribbean exploration with a shallow story, without feeling tampered with or as if in an inflated tutorial.
Port royale 3 strategy free#
Free as a bird, it is entirely up to you in which direction you set the sails in this initial situation. This kind of carefree romanticization is nowhere more welcome to me than in economic simulations like Port Royale 3.
The weather is great anyway, scurvy is much less bad than it is made and no sooner has you trimmed the Erroll Flynn mustache than a beautiful governor’s daughter is ready to fall in love. Some charitable and wealthy trader will fish you out of the water and hold out the prospect of a lucrative job. The 16th century Caribbean – pretty much the best place to go overboard anywhere.