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Compare Pirates! vs. Port Royale II

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 155 / 164
Date: January 21, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I played Port Royale II for a couple weeks before losing the CD to a pile of Christmas wrap in the trash (probably). So when my wife wanted Pirates! instead, I went for it. (Besides, she let me buy a couple Fraggle Rock DVDs at the same time.) Now we have to take turns at the one computer powerful enough to play the game.

Sailing around is quicker and more interesting in Pirates! The land has interesting little landmarks, and you can choose to go ashore if you want. There's weather clouds that affect speed and running into reefs can hurt ships (unless at easiest difficulty).

Fighting naval battles is faster and much easier in Pirates! Port Royale II had a much harder battle because you could be up against several ships at a time versus your fleet (you sail one ship at a time at the enemy and switch to the next in your fleet when that one gets too hurt). With Pirates, you always use one ship against one or two enemies. The enemies are usually one small armed escort ship and one poorly armed cargo vessel. If somehow you loose, you have to re-engage the battle with another ship if you want to continue fighting.

Sword fighting is pretty easy to master in Pirates! (I have never ever lost a swordfight, and I am #3 most notorious pirate in the world.) I have only played the two easiest difficulty levels, so maybe this will get harder. I almost always sail one of the smaller, faster ships, get in to boarding range, and swordfight to a victory (even with 40 of my crew to their 150 crew). The animation during sword fighting isn't bad, but pretty repetitive, as there's only about 6 different scenes. Big ships, Little ships, Bars, Garden (for the honor of the governor's daughter), Fortress, etc.

Trading is much better in Port Royale II. I could spend all my time trading and amassing a fortune without a fight. You could even buy property and build plantations or factories in different towns, set up automatic trade routes using hired captains, and even strongly affect the local economy by what you did or didn't supply the town with. Pirates! doesn't allow enough cargo capacity, variety of goods, towns with money, or reason behind local prices to make trading very interesting.

Reputations with different countries make much more sense in Port Royale II, where people hold more of a grudge for acts of piracy. In Pirates!, I was able to capture a dozen Spanish ships before their towns would stop letting me sail into port and earning promotions based on sinking the odd pirate ship, then I quickly marched into 2 or 3 of their towns and replaced the governors with Dutch, and earned a not quite whopping 1100 bounty on my head. I made much more than that from just sacking those towns. I cleared my entire reputation by sailing the brother of a Jesuit priest from one town to the neighbor (about a 30 second run), and was instantly awarded with a Spanish promotion to Admiral (for all my good deeds sinking pirate ships presumably).

Doing missions was better in Port Royale II. There you would get an assignment to sack a town, gather a quantity of goods, or follow a trail of a pirate, etc. Usually it involved going quite a distance under a time constraint. In Pirates, you always just escort a ship from one town to the neighbor. You almost always have to defeat exactly one pirate along the way. I had one mission that I was to deliver a special crop to Marcaibo. Along the way, I stopped by a settlement and was asked to escort a governor to Marcaibo. Next door was a Jesuit mission, where I was asked to escort some settlers there also. I fought the three pirates (one chasing each of my escortees), and was rewarded with a promotion and land (what's that for?) when I got into town. Other missions are to find pirates (they're everywhere, but the named ones can be hard to track down), or dig up burried treasure (buy cheap map pieces and then walk your crew around land following landmarks to the oh-so-obvious piles of treasure). In Port Royale II, pirate treasure floats in the ocean.

Land battles for capturing cities only exist in Pirates! and are fairly easy and turn-based. If your crew outnumbers the soldiers in town, as long as you fire at them from the cover of trees, you will win pretty easily. In fact, if your crew gets unhappy (rare if you fight ships as often as I do), then go fight a town and do so poorly that your crew is reduced. The crew will be happy because there is now more gold per person, never mind that half just died senselessly due to poor commanding. In Port Royale II, taking a town consists of firing on batteries out in the water, using hundreds of tedious passes of your ship, firing once on each pass to avoid being hit by the battery.

Romance is a nice addition in Pirates! You have to earn a rank before getting to dance with the Governor's daughter. The prettier ones are better dancers. To dance, you have to follow her hand signals as to the next step (one of 6 directions). It takes a little to get used to, but failure doesn't cost anything so there's plenty of chance to practice until you get it right (or buy the dancing shoes which will override most of your bad moves with the right ones). Give the lady a good dance and she gives you gifts or information leading to pirates. Make her happy a few times and she will want to marry you.

Sneaking into towns in Pirates! isn't something I've tried yet. It looks pretty tedious, and I can sack the town faster than that if I really want to get into an unfriendly place. My wife isn't as bloodthirsty as I am (I sail on Captain Feathersword's Friendly Pirate Ship), so she has done this several times, and ended up in jail almost half of those attempts.

Port Royale II has a better variety of ships, or at least they matter more. In Pirates!, I always sail small fast ships and defeat even the biggest by outmanoevering them. In Port Royale II, you had better have a comparable sized ship or you were outmanned and outgunned.

Both games seem to be pretty stable, assuming you have the graphics power to run them. I did find that about 20% of the time that Pirates! is launched, it would run very slowly. Rebooting would solve the problem. The first time I ran it I didn't know that wasn't normal and spent the first night playing battles in slow motion and complaining that it takes forever to get anywhere. At normal speed, it is much more fun.

MY RECOMMENDATION:
If you like a trading game, get Port Royale II.

If you like being a bloodthirsty pirate who always wins, get Pirates! (and stay on the easier levels).

If you love pirate games, get both and have fun with a broader spectrum of activites.

Great game if you're into trading simulations

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 72 / 76
Date: October 06, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This game is awsome, I've played Port Royal 1, and Port Royal 2 just bring it to the next level. Obviously this is not a boat racing game, so I don't understand why are other reviewers complaining about the wind. It is a trading and simulation game, and the trade is a lot of fun. Graphics are great, trading engine is crazy, and completely open ended. Buy low sell high, make profit trading in the caribbean sea, get higher social ranking by hunting pirates, establish automatic trade routes, and many more things you can do in the 17th century. If you like any kind of trading game that put you on hook for many hours, you can try this one.

Good Game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 22 / 23
Date: April 22, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I am a pirate simulation guy. I played Pirates, Pirates Gold, Pirates 2004, Sea Dogs, Pirates of the Caribbean, Port Royale and High Seas. No game has the trading down like Port Royale 2. It is the best trade simulation game available, bar none. With that said, the piracy part of the game is very difficult. You cannot operate at all without a Letter of Marque. If you attack a country's ships without a letter everyone pretty much hates you and you cannot trade any more. The game for you is basically over. You need to trade (which means you probably need to be friendly with 2 countries). Although you can buy your reputation back to neutral or just wait long enough for your reputation to get better. I think this makes the game more true to life.

The ship to ship fighting is pretty basic, you need to have more men than your opponent or you will lose. A bigger ship with more men is necessary to win most battles. Unlike Pirates where you can always win whether you are in a rowboat or a ship of the line. Sometimes there is a sword fight, which is impossible to lose unless you close your eyes until the fight is over.

You can get married; look for buried treasure find castaways floating chests. There is really a lot to do in this game. Time does not fly by and you really have control over how much time actually goes by. This can be accomplished by slowing time down when you are in town and speeding it up when you are at sea. There is no wind to speak of in the game, not historically accurate but who cares? Nothing is more boring than watching your ship take forever getting from one place to another.

You can personally control many sea captains and ships. It can get very hectic and long-winded but all in all I think this is a good game. I have played it more than the new Pirates since I find it much more challenging. A superior trade simulation where you can actually trade tobacco...imagine that, oh wait Sid Meier couldn't. It is worth the 20 bucks to pick up a copy.

Great game, but be sure on what you're looking for.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 10 / 11
Date: September 17, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This is a great game, very fun, but make sure this is what you are looking for. This is not some sort of action, adventure, or RPG game. This is a strategy. My review won't go into detail, you can read tons of detail from other reviews, but I wanted to make sure you all know, this is a strategy game, don't buy it thinking it is anything other than that.

Great Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: December 25, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Unfortunately, a lot of these reviews are trying to compare Port Royale 2 to the remake of Sid Meier's Pirates. The two games are not meant to be alike. This game, made by the same company that gave us the Patrician series, is a carribean trading game with a good amount of action included. It's about building up a legal or illegal trading empire. Sid Meier's Pirates is an action game - trading plays almost no role.

This game excels in the trading genre, and is ok in the action drama. It doesn't rely on as much micromanagement as the Patrician series, but still manages to deliver.

Port Royale 2

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 8 / 12
Date: September 05, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I downloaded the demo version and liked it so I ordered the game. I opened it and tried to load it onto my computer. Wouldn't do it. Tried another computer, still wouldn't do it. I then tried my wifes computer and it downloaded. Tried to play it and it crashed. I went to the website and found I wasn't the only one having a problem, the answers were evidently in the video card.
I gave it to my son. He downloaded it on his homebuilt computer and it works. question 1 and 2 are his feelings about the game. He thanks me for buying the game for him.
Advice, make sure you have everything the system requirements ask for before you buy the game. I thought that since the demo worked so well that the full game would also, wrong.

Port Royale 2

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: January 09, 2007
Author: Amazon User

The game is pretty cool. Similar to sid meier's pirates. There is more trading and economics of scale in Port royale. The naval combat is better in Pirates. I don't think port royale is very fair. Even if you have 4 war ships in your feet, you are only allowed to fight with one, while the computer is allowed to fight with all 4 or more at the same time. Personally, I enjoy pirates more.

Serious design flaws make this game a snoozer.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: March 01, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Here's a perfect example of what's wrong with this game. I was asked by a governor to go build a school in Corpus Christi. OK, I went to Corpus Christi and started trading with that town, because before you can build anything in a town, you need a building permit, and before you can buy a building permit, you have to impress the locals by delivering a ton of goods. I spent most of my allotted time currying favor with Corpus Christi, until finally I had enough merit to buy a building permit--only to be told that my rank was not high enough to have more than three building permits in the Caribbean, and I already had three. I should come back when my rank is higher. Of course, time expired and my mission failed. The governor was "very angry" with me.

OK, what's the point of sending someone on a mission that can't be completed? That's not fun. That's just a waste of time. (And you know what's really unfair about this? All those offending building permits were awarded to me for free for earlier service. I didn't even have a choice.)

Another problem: you can set up automatic trade routes to trade at the docks of various towns, and this nets you some easy money, but it won't do what you really need it to do: your automated captain cannot access your own warehouse if you have one in the town. That means your sugar plantation in one town cannot automatically supply your rum distillery in another town. You have to keep MANUALLY sailing from one town to the other, loading sugar, unloading sugar, loading rum, unloading rum. Do you know how boring that gets? Buy the game if you want to find out.

try buccaneers bounty

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: March 28, 2006
Author: Amazon User

try this link http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000ENWRXG for the bundle buccaneers bounty which includes port royale 2. still amazon.com.

Product Description
Includes 3 action packed stratgey games in 1 package - all with a Pirate theme! Get ready for some the ultimate Pirate adventure with Patrician 3, Port Royale 2 and Tortuga.

Spanish Mission Impossible

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 7
Date: July 17, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This would be an apt subtitle for "Port Royale 2." This is a beautiful game in many respects, but the designers have a strange idea of fun: yeah, why not inveigle you into sending your poor ships one at a time against an military convoy of vessels more powerful than you can possibly acquire yourself, which attack you five at a time? See your whole fleet go up in smoke after doing just token damage to the enemy? Or attempt to capture a city (similar chances for success) just to rescue a little puppy dog?

Some reviewers have warned about a "steep learning curve." That's an understatement. I can handle steep learning curves. What I can't handle is ridiculous odds and suicide. For two weeks I gave it my best shot, but the game difficulty is still "easy" and my patience for punishment is exhausted. What one learns is that it's best to just stay out of the governor's palace. He's a twit and evidently doesn't like you at all. But without governors' missions, there's not much interest left to the game.

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