Quote Originally Posted by Zenicetus
Ugh... I hope not. You'll be commanding flag fleets of up to 20 ships, including (late period) ships of the line. Any real pirate would turn tail and run, the minute he saw your ship over the horizon. There were a few exceptions (I think Morgan had 10 ships at one point), but pirates were mostly lone predators on merchant ships that weren't very well armed.

The way pirates/rebel ships have been represented in RTW and MTW never made much sense to me. All the big (user-selectable) ships on the strategy map are fully armed combat ships. Your merchant ships are those tiny things that crawl along the trade routes, and the "pirates" don't attack those. They just wander around waiting to attack your navy. Weird, and not at all how real pirates operate. They're acting more like privateers, except they're not under a clear allegiance to any other faction.

So I hope they aren't represented the same way in Empire. If they're in at all, they should be just a minor annoyance... there for a little local color in the Caribbean, the Barbary Coast, and maybe the Indian Ocean if you can navigate there around the tip of Africa. I think the game's naval combat will be more along the lines of Horatio Hornblower, Jack Aubrey, Nelson, etc... conflict between nations and sizable fleets, not rag-tag pirates. I really hope they avoid the Disney route here. There should be enough "wow" factor with real navies pumping cannon fire at each other.
+1
Defenitly