Caltrops - Gamerasutra - anyone with a qt3 account

Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra

by FABIO 01/06/2005, 2:20pm PST

Can someone add this to that pirates thread? There's no official forums for the game so I figure the developer community there has the best chance of getting back to Firaxis.

The red 'X' glitching out of maps (most often lost family and incan cities ones) needs to be fixed ASAP. The family member is glitched out of the game and will never appear no matter how hard you look for them which makes it impossible to complete that whole quest series.

There needs to be a happy medium between the hardest difficulty level (swashbuckler) and the next hardest (rogue). Once you get the hand of things, rogue and everything below it offers no challenge, yet swashbuckler is a ridiculous surge foward in difficulty. All I want is more challenging duels and the like, yet swashbuckler outright cheats. Suddenly giant cargo-laden indiamen are faster and manuver rings around my sloop. The wind seems to conspire against you and change direction to blow against you every time you make a turn. All I want is a step up from rogue so duels aren't an automatic win, plus the other aspects made more challenging. With swashbuckler you get the more challenging duels, and combat is more realistic where number matter more (you can take on 5 to 1 odds on rogue), but the fucking wind plots against you and turns both strategic travel and combat into a crawl where you spend half your time standing still (if not being pushed back outright) and simply moving fowardt becomes a struggle. Actually, the other ship seems to have less problems with the wind and will always be faster and more manueverable than you no matter what the size difference between your two ships. Even with the navigation skill, pilotting a sloop with cotton sails, it's a struggle just to move on swashbuckler.

Has anyone ever thought that the wind really added to the fun of pirates? It makes travelling east a total agonizing crawl, and since this game has no way to accelerate time, that's a lot of time spent staring at your little boat crawling across the screen. You can't even point it in a direction and go do something else, or you'll crash into reefs, land on a shore, or get sunk by pirate hunters or forts, so you're stuck staring at nothing. The only people I can imagine this appealing to are the diehard sim types that have custom rudder pedals built into their desks for flight sims, and if you're into those types of games, why on earth are you playing pirates? The only way to not be hampered by this is to go with an easier difficulty level, where all the challenge of the FUN aspects is removed. Trying to "tack" the wind and consulting point of sailing charts then comparing them to a table on ship sail configurations isn't my idea of fun and seems to totally fly against Pirates' whole casual play concept. It's one thing for wind to affect speeds and make you travel a little faster or slower, but on harder difficulty you can't even MOVE half the time, even with the fastest boat with the fastest sails with the navigation skill. I find myself wishing for a seperate "gimp wind" option independant of the overall difficulty level. All I want from harder difficulty level is more challenging battles, not for the game to turn into a slow and boring simulation in the name of REELISM.