Sid Meier's new "Pirates" game is insidious

[Lechev]

P.S. anyone else find the dancing more nerve-racking than then fighting???

The music is pretty good except too much of J S Bach "Brandenburgh Concerto (No 3,4,5). maybe should include some other composer's music of that era..

[Rosacrux redux]

Hmm... I can see Sid continues milking the same, old, tired cow... why doesn't he turn on "Colonization" and start milking that old cow for more milk... even a modern transition of the old game would a great gift to all us TBS lovers

[solypsist]

finally solved all the missions and retired, married and wealthy.

[Kraxis]

Hmm... I can see Sid continues milking the same, old, tired cow... why doesn't he turn on "Colonization" and start milking that old cow for more milk... even a modern transition of the old game would a great gift to all us TBS lovers

Yeah... Colonization all the way. That was a great game, and I can see its possibilities in the of today. Perfect.
It need not the complex techsystem and diplomacy of Civ3, it would benefit quite a lot from better graphics (I always wondered how the game would if it looked like when that first ship on hte intro made landfall).

[The Tuffen]

Absolutly loved colonization. Really hope an updated version is released as i can't get it to run in XP.

[ShadesWolf]

Hmm... I can see Sid continues milking the same, old, tired cow... why doesn't he turn on "Colonization" and start milking that old cow for more milk... even a modern transition of the old game would a great gift to all us TBS lovers

If only, my altime favourite game, I still got back to it now and play from time to time.

Please an updated version, with Total war type epic battle.....

[SwordsMaster]

Gah! Got the game 2 days ago, can't stop playing! It is addictive in the same way the good old Civ 2 was.

I still cant master the dancing thingy and keep destroying my lady's shoes, but we're getting there.

In the other hand, the only thing that can stop me from capturing a ship, is that it blows up . Im playing on mrdium now, and the blowing up happens quite often. Im always too broke to upgrade the grape shot...

Anyway, a great game.... My assignments will suffer...

[Tribesman]

First try yesterday , good fun , but havn't managed the dancing at all , once you stumble you seem to miss out on the next hand signal as well .
Grabbed a French line ship from the same location as Tuffen found his .
Raining today so no work , time to go Pirating

[SwordsMaster]

Anyone know yet what is the difference of being in "good health" and "bad health"? Or when you get too old?

[Sir Moody]

when the Health status changes it indicates ure getting older and as such are getting slower

my current Game is for Carribean domination by the Britich - im 29 now and theres only 8 Spanish Ports and 1 Dutch left to work with (i got rid of the french first)

its truely a damn fine game and so darn addictive

[BDC]

when the Health status changes it indicates ure getting older and as such are getting slower

my current Game is for Carribean domination by the Britich - im 29 now and theres only 8 Spanish Ports and 1 Dutch left to work with (i got rid of the french first)

its truely a damn fine game and so darn addictive

How do you do that? Get a big crew and just beat up everyone on land?

[Sir Moody]

to capture a Port the the first stage is pissing the nation off to the extent they wont let you dock anymore - then Attacking the Port.

In the majority of cases 1 attack wont be enough you will have to attack the Port a few times in quick succession until you are given the option of installing a new Governer.

and yes a large crew is very very helpful....

[doc_bean]

You can also piss off a specific city by firing at it from the world map (pressing the spacebar), after you sacked your first city you should be hated enough by that nation :-)

If you want to quickly get your ports up in rank (from poor to wealthy) it's best to install a new governor and send some immigrants in. This might be to much of an inconvenience at earlier era's though.

I've also noticed that city flourish when they have other friendly ports nearby, Margeritha went down hill quickly after I had isolated it (conquered the 3 neighbouring cities on the main) and my newly conquered cities grew very fast. Same thing with Havana (although much slower) after I had the keys for a while.

It might also help to attack ships trying to leave and enter a port, I'm pretty sure this works for troop carriers (lowers the amount of defenders, or at least keeps it the same).

Great game, much deeper than you notice at first.

[frogbeastegg]

Word of advice to any other Radeon users out there: don't try the 4.12 cats with Pirates. I did and my framerate went from glassy smooth to unplayable jerkiness. I am now happily using the 4.11s.

Is it my imagination or does your pirate slowly start to look ... um, less cute as he ages? I'm sure mine has unsightly stubble now ...

[Sir Moody]

yup frog as he ages he looks more and more haggered....

only 3 ports left now -all Spansih and all with 400-500 troops.... its gonna be a long battle :)

[Forward Observer]

yup frog as he ages he looks more and more haggered....

only 3 ports left now -all Spansih and all with 400-500 troops.... its gonna be a long battle :)

I'm too lazy to read back through this thread, but if it hasn't been mentioned before, a good way to prep an enemy port before battle is to get the either the local Indians or pirates to attack first. They will usually be defeated, but it can reduce the enemy forces by as much as 40%.

By the way the manual indicates that the enemy forces can have artillery units, but I have not seen this in any land battle yet.

Has anyone encountered this yet?

[Sir Moody]

yup i know but the 3 remaining (well 1 now ) are the land locked ones and you cant send pirates or indians to those

[Ja'chyra]

Is there a demo version of this out?

[Forward Observer]

Is there a demo version of this out?

There is nothing listed for a demo at the "Pirates" web site.

By the way I saw it in the CD version at Wal-Mart yesterday for only
$37.95. I paid like $54 for the DVD version, but regardless, I still feel like I got more than my money's worth.

Cheers

[Nelson]

This Christmas I received Pacific Fighters, Battle for Middle Earth, the Painkiller expansion, Riddick Escape from Butcher Bay and Pirates! .

Guess which one kept me up all night?

Dancing is very helpful and one can only get good at it by dancing a lot and learning the music. Consequently the game rewards long bouts of play. My first dances of a session are always lead footed.

I play at rogue. I might move to swashbuckler eventually but rogue is hard enough especially in the earlier time periods.

I always take the fencing skill as I remember that as being most important from the old version. Charm is useful but a social failure won’t get you captured or cost you your flagship! So I enhance the fencing skill when given a choice between say, a puffy shirt and a spyglass.

I could go on and on talking about Pirates!. My brother got it too and we spent the last week comparing notes. Any designer looking to remake an old favorite should talk to Sid. He knows how to rekindle the magic.

[Somebody Else]

Here's another person that can't handle dancing. I can't in the game either. Everything else comes fairly easily - I didn't notice much difference between the difficulty levels. Heh - I just captured two brigs and a galleon using a skeleton-crewed large frigate, Henry Morgan's one actually - stole that off him before my first ever division of plunder.

[ElmarkOFear]

I bought the game for my son for Christmas, but have yet to load the game onto the PC. He is busy playing thru the Neverwinter campaign and I have been preoccupied with Civ3 Complete. Sounds like a made a good choice in games though. :)

[Bob the Insane]

I didn't notice much difference between the difficulty levels.

I didn't either until I got to Swashbuckler and all of a sudden you need the reactions of a mongoose to keep up, especially if you start on that level...

[Somebody Else]

Actually - I just had to tone down the difficulty levels - I promoted myself up to swashbuckler late at night, whilst somewhat tired. In the morning (the next afternoon) I had to go down a level. I seem to have quicker reactions when I'm tired or something.

[Gawain of Orkeny]

I remember playing Oirates on the commodore 64 and I was totally addicted at that time. Looks like I may have found a game to buy with the exchange I have coming from EB for returning that crap game RTW .

[Kraellin]

ok, i've been on vacation for the last 6 weeks and didnt have a computer available to me that was powerful enough to run the game. i bought it, but couldnt play it. i'm home now and have been playing this for 2 to 3 hours per day since. it's quite an improvement over the original and i'm enjoying it.

however, my machine seems a bit underpowered, even though it meets and exceeds the minimum specs. i've a bit of a lag in response time from when i hit the appropriate button, like in the sword fighting and to when the game actually responds. thus, the dancing is almost impossible. by the time i read the hand signals and enter my key press, my boy has already stumbled the move and so i naturally miss the next signal and stumble that as well. the sword fighting i can get away with as the anticipation/prediction is a bit easier and the moves are so exaggerated that i could go for a walk and come back and still beat the other guys. but the dancing is impossible.

along with that, the land battles are incredibly tedious. i like them, or would, but it takes just too long for the soldier groups to move from one square to the next. a battle that shld take no more than 10 minutes or so, takes about 30 to 40 if i have a large group of pirates.

the sea battles are great. i've a few things i might have done differently, but it's pretty nit-picky. the smooth transitions from sea map (strategy) to the sea battles (tactical) is impressive. if you meet a ship and decide to fight it, the relative positions of the ships and land masses are EXACTLY the same in the tactical as in the strategy map. that's quite a feat.

i played and quit the first game on the easy mode.... way too easy. i'm currently playing the middle level of 'adventurer' and now have a frigate as my flagship, and where this is better, i may have to jump up to rogue soon.

everything transitions better from one thing to the next, the sea battles, the land battles, finding the pirate treasures, the in town stuff and so on. much more professional.

however, they left out some obvious mechanical things ... or i think they did. the game is so intuitive that i've spent almost no time looking in the manual. one of the things i'd like is a hot key for the 'continue' button. in some screens you can use the '5' key on the keypad or the return key for the 'continue' button, but in others, you cant. this is a bit clumsy and shld be an easy fix (if it actually needs a fix). i also dont like that i cant save games in town. i can understand why not in a conversation, but surely you shld be able to from the town menu. that just seems obvious. i do like that there is an autosave that takes place when you quit. that's a nice feature, but i dont like that i have to go to sea to use a save slot to save. also, the save slots cant be named. i like naming my saves so i can remember them better.

i've also a bit of a bored feeling with the game. maybe i'm just playing on too easy a level, but there's something overall missing from the game, some sense of adventure or newness or something. there are few surprises and few areas where i cant predict the outcome.... or something. i dont know. maybe the royal navies shld be more active in pursuing me with a fleet of ships of the line or something, or maybe there shld be more of a fog of war.... something.

also, what happened to the routine of sailing into an enemy port and playing cannon fire from the fort to you and you to the forts? i've seen a few enemy forts fire at me, but i cant seem to engage them in combat. i always liked that aspect of the game. if you then won, you could enter the town and pillage it or take it. now, the only way i seem to be able to do this is to land on land and walk to the town and capture it that way.

i've also noticed that almost no ship can or will outrun me in the tactical battles. even the small pinnaces that shld be able to run rings around my frigates or at least outrun them, are easy prey.

also, wasnt it true that when you got captured and imprisoned that you either lost all your ships and plunder or only kept one at the most? now, i can get out of jail free (for 500 gold by bribing a guard) and, i get all my ships back. that just seems odd.

my impression is, then, that the game is more professionally done, but it also seems to have been dumbed down a bit and is a bit too predictable. it's still fun, but not quite the adventure the old game was. if you took the first person, limited view of the high seas that Pirates of the Carribean had and combined it with this game, added in charts and maps and more realistic navigation on the open seas, i think you'd get more of that sense of 'gee, i wonder what's over the next horizen?'.

K.

[Spino]

Word of advice to any other Radeon users out there: don't try the 4.12 cats with Pirates. I did and my framerate went from glassy smooth to unplayable jerkiness. I am now happily using the 4.11s.

Doh! Didn't realize the Cat 4.12s were not optimized for Pirates! However, I'm using the Cat 4.12s and the game runs rather well on my rig at 1024x768 (then again I have a XP 2400, 9800Pro & 1gig of ram). It could be better but it's not awful. I'm not touching the 4.11s, according to many user posts over at rage3d.com the 4.11s are more problematic with other games than the 4.12s.

There is good news for the ATI users, the Catalyst 5.1 drivers have been released and have addressed the problem with intermittent/choppy video playback when anti-aliasing is enabled.

Is it my imagination or does your pirate slowly start to look ... um, less cute as he ages? I'm sure mine has unsightly stubble now ...

Who wants to be a pretty pirate? Aside from death by cannon, sword and hanging by local officals I believe death by unsolicited buggery is also in the standard job description. The uglier the better!