Random tasks appear from time to time in order to increase fame points, such as delivering goods to a town or finding part of a treasure map.
Each nation has a viceroy who constantly guides your game with missions, such as spreading settlers or constructing certain buildings. Thankfully, developer Gaming Minds Studios has added some other stuff to keep things interesting for a more general audience.
#PORT ROYALE 4 GAME SERIES#
I can understand how this attracts players to the series who like to focus on trading, but it’s definitely not everyone’s cup of tea. It reminded me of an actual job at one point. I was constantly checking between cities, adjusting trade routes, and monitoring prices.
#PORT ROYALE 4 GAME MANUAL#
Unfortunately, I felt manual buying and selling and building trade routes was a bit of a chore after a few hours. This forces you to choose a route around towns to visit and properties to buy or sell automatically at the best prices. Manually navigating between towns and buying and selling goods went smoothly after a moment, but luckily you can also set up automatic trade routes. Gold lets you build more ships, buy access to more cities to trade with, and expand your home port to produce more goods.ĭespite having a pretty good tutorial, it took me a while to get a feel for the in-game economy. Each city has a handy overview of goods and prices, including green or red bars indicating a product’s availability and price level. The game includes 18 historic ship types, which can be grouped into convoys to increase loadouts and protection. As a trading simulation, Port Royale 4 revolves around building ships and buying goods cheaply in one city, and selling your goods elsewhere where the prices are high. At the same time, they will structurally lack other goods, which are then more valuable in that particular city. Each city produces certain goods, such as cereals, luxury items, cocoa, cotton or rum. Still, I think Port Royale 4 manages to mix the historical situation well, with my Spanish campaign mostly focused on growing Spanish cities and defending against attacks from other nations, for example. Being Dutch myself, I would have liked to start playing for the Netherlands straight away, but unfortunately you first have to win a campaign as a Spaniard. Finally, the dominant power at the time was the Dutch Republic. The French are based around the Louisiana region (named after Louis XIV, after all) and are also looking to eat the cake from Spanish territories. England, meanwhile, are among the newcomers and will challenge Spanish dominance and their island possessions. They start with most of South and Central America under their control. The Spaniards are the most established power in the region. There are four playable nations in the game, each with four different characters that focus on trade, construction, or piracy. The accompanying background music is pretty decent as well. There are lots of cool details, like people walking around towns, weather effects, and a day and night cycle. The game map looks pretty good in my opinion, with jungles and cozy houses observable on land and a clear difference between clear shallow waters and deep seas. Unlike previous games in the series, the countryside map is fully 3D and you can zoom in and out of your towns and cities in order to construct new buildings. The game’s huge map covers the entire Caribbean region, including the Gulf of Mexico, bounded by Florida to the north and Venezuela to the southeast. Most of the time, you’re scrolling the game map to find your towns and ships, looking for a profit. In fact, Gaming Minds Studios calls it a trading simulation game.
Micromanaging your trade is, without a doubt, the core element of Port Royale 4 gameplay. So how do these elements work together and do I like the end result? had planned, with combat and conquest playing secondary roles in terms of importance. It turns out that Port Royale is much more trade-oriented than I think.
I confess that I haven’t played the other games in the series, the last of which (Port Royale 3) was released in 2012. The game is set in the Caribbean of the late 16th and 17th centuries, when the major powers Colonials of the time fought each other and many pirates over control of the lucrative commodities the West Indies had to offer. As a fan of historical games and empire building, I was initially very excited about Port Royale 4.
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