Well, prepare yourselves, this isn't a compliment. This is the supermod verison.
I've played Sea Dogs (which other than the bugs is a wonderful game) and COAS which is...similar to this game...but I decided I wanted to try the others to see what was there. First of all, it sort of seems like the same game in a different stage of development. But never mind.
What went wrong? First of all, the encounter system SUCKS. Go to port, get a mission (procedural, on this point, much better than Sea Dogs which as you know only had a hard coded delivery or two and not much more than that). Looks like I need to get to this other port nearby. But first to get butt raped by pirates/Spanish/French (which for some reason started hostile, I never did find any way to calm them down). They will swoop in as your stationary ship off shore gets started. In fact, they will happily attack you next to a friendly fort, and no you can't leave until they're dead or you run away. And don't fire your cannons near a friendly fort. Just like in Sea Dogs, if a random ball hits the fort, they will hate you, don't ask me how I know that. It's laborious to get anywhere because you have to keep swerving around various enemy ships to avoid battles that will waste egregious amounts of your time in battles neither they nor you can win.
The battles are just broken. Multiple times in my brief playthrough I got locked into infinite encounters. I never did find out what grapes and bombs are good for, because as soon as you turn towards enemy ships, they turn around, and guess what, they are almost all faster than you. Best bet is to get into battle with perfect sails and go perpindicular to wind, for some reason they can't resist chasing you with tailwind. But if you can't run from them, they will run from you to keep you more or less at maximum cannon range, where I can hit fuck all and same for them. Boarding them is impossible. In this there is a similarity with Sea Dogs; if you don't pick a very very fast ship like a Shynyava or a Corvette, you're asking to get locked into deathmatches with who knows what, Sea Dogs also didn't mind spawning you right next to an enemy ship lol.
The cannons were also broken. Maybe it was the mod, DON'T KNOW because getting the game to run without it was impossible. Every - single- battle cannons blew up. In the long battles, almost all of my cannons blew up. Oh look, I can upgrade cannon skill. 2% reduction in blown up cannons. So I put a couple points into that so my cannons only blew up 96% as much as before. Is that...the best use of skill points? Doesn't sound like it. It was ever so much fun losing all my cannon in battle, so realistic, really slowed things down.
Then the crew. Ahhh the crew. I never did find out what their deal was. In Sea Dogs, you pay your crew, your crew is content. You can even skip a month, they probably won't kill you, maybe. In this game the crew comes to kill you regardless. You can bribe them with like, double the pay. But that only slightly delays their murderous intentions. Maybe they were upset that it was physically impossible for my starting ship to sink and board others. I can understand that. What I didn't understand is why they were planning my death a month after I hired them. Was it RUM? The rum I took on board which they never touched? Or maybe the ale I took on board for no apparent benefit. There was that boatswain I hired, whose greatest apparent effect was the wages I had to pay him each month. I found the option of firing the crew and hiring a new one, which sort of worked but was very expensive and gamey bullshit. But the new crew wouldn't have any better work ethic than the last. I don't get it.
One of the last battles I was in, my ship and my escort were caught by pirates just off of Curacao, you know, trying to leave the place. They had three ships. I tried running. Nope. I tried ordering the other ship to beat them up. They got beat up. I fired all my balls and knippel. The grape and bombs are useless as I mentioned. Anyway, by that point I only had 3 or 4 cannon left. The enemy ships stopped firing. Nothing was happening. Maybe all their cannon blew up, or they ran out of shot, or we always have to keep open the consideration that the game is a buggy piece of garbage and it could have been a bug. They just turned towards me, then turned around, maintaining the same distance from me. After fruitless attempts at breaking the stalemate, I looked it up and planned to save the game, and edit the map distance to like 0 so that encounter could fuck right off. But the game crashed switching windows, so...I had to do this mission to Curacao like 3 times because of that, and then the crew murdered me and so forth.
Speaking of which, never did find the hidden meaning of the boarding battles. Me versus 20 guys. Um, no?? Maybe it is possible, but I never got a chance to practice fighting in the game, not that I consider that a constructive matchup. Being boarded was no different although that may have had something to do with me firing the crew so they wouldn't kill me in a mob on board. I much prefer being murdered by sailors I do not employ.
I went for the "realistic" wind and damage. Big mistake. I just had to turn on fast mode a lot, especially since the AI loved to get into those stalemate positions while basically doing no real damage. I sank 0 ships during my game, and my ship was never sunk. Are we having fun yet? I get it though, they historically used fast mode in a lot of battles once all their cannons blew up and they needed to activate the map. No apparent way to turn it off. I was thinking of editing that in the files, but I lost my patience with the game before getting around to it.
The plot I never found. It does apparently exist although the meat of AOP is the procedural missions, sail back and forth, do stuff. Try not to get stuck on a peninsula when exiting a port and get raped by pirates, that sort of quality gameplay. Bridgetown I think I recognized from AOP2, like I said, same game in a different stage of development. Same music. And that kinda stuff.
Not really sure what the "correct" way to play is. It was a thankless and joyless run, filled with long, punishing, inconclusive battles, a hold that could just about carry food and balls and not much else. I got into port in a storm and finished my delivery. Then I went to the tavern "until nightfall," which revealed the storm still going. I went back in "until morning." A couple of days of that later, I decided to leave in the hurricane, but once I exited town the sun was out. Grrreat.
IMO, the tutorial of COAS is a masterpiece. The plot, ehhh, could never figure it out, no idea if the quests are broken or way too hard. This game is sort of like COAS without the plot in it. I really wish I had gotten more out of it, but, just, no.
I've played Sea Dogs (which other than the bugs is a wonderful game) and COAS which is...similar to this game...but I decided I wanted to try the others to see what was there. First of all, it sort of seems like the same game in a different stage of development. But never mind.
What went wrong? First of all, the encounter system SUCKS. Go to port, get a mission (procedural, on this point, much better than Sea Dogs which as you know only had a hard coded delivery or two and not much more than that). Looks like I need to get to this other port nearby. But first to get butt raped by pirates/Spanish/French (which for some reason started hostile, I never did find any way to calm them down). They will swoop in as your stationary ship off shore gets started. In fact, they will happily attack you next to a friendly fort, and no you can't leave until they're dead or you run away. And don't fire your cannons near a friendly fort. Just like in Sea Dogs, if a random ball hits the fort, they will hate you, don't ask me how I know that. It's laborious to get anywhere because you have to keep swerving around various enemy ships to avoid battles that will waste egregious amounts of your time in battles neither they nor you can win.
The battles are just broken. Multiple times in my brief playthrough I got locked into infinite encounters. I never did find out what grapes and bombs are good for, because as soon as you turn towards enemy ships, they turn around, and guess what, they are almost all faster than you. Best bet is to get into battle with perfect sails and go perpindicular to wind, for some reason they can't resist chasing you with tailwind. But if you can't run from them, they will run from you to keep you more or less at maximum cannon range, where I can hit fuck all and same for them. Boarding them is impossible. In this there is a similarity with Sea Dogs; if you don't pick a very very fast ship like a Shynyava or a Corvette, you're asking to get locked into deathmatches with who knows what, Sea Dogs also didn't mind spawning you right next to an enemy ship lol.
The cannons were also broken. Maybe it was the mod, DON'T KNOW because getting the game to run without it was impossible. Every - single- battle cannons blew up. In the long battles, almost all of my cannons blew up. Oh look, I can upgrade cannon skill. 2% reduction in blown up cannons. So I put a couple points into that so my cannons only blew up 96% as much as before. Is that...the best use of skill points? Doesn't sound like it. It was ever so much fun losing all my cannon in battle, so realistic, really slowed things down.
Then the crew. Ahhh the crew. I never did find out what their deal was. In Sea Dogs, you pay your crew, your crew is content. You can even skip a month, they probably won't kill you, maybe. In this game the crew comes to kill you regardless. You can bribe them with like, double the pay. But that only slightly delays their murderous intentions. Maybe they were upset that it was physically impossible for my starting ship to sink and board others. I can understand that. What I didn't understand is why they were planning my death a month after I hired them. Was it RUM? The rum I took on board which they never touched? Or maybe the ale I took on board for no apparent benefit. There was that boatswain I hired, whose greatest apparent effect was the wages I had to pay him each month. I found the option of firing the crew and hiring a new one, which sort of worked but was very expensive and gamey bullshit. But the new crew wouldn't have any better work ethic than the last. I don't get it.
One of the last battles I was in, my ship and my escort were caught by pirates just off of Curacao, you know, trying to leave the place. They had three ships. I tried running. Nope. I tried ordering the other ship to beat them up. They got beat up. I fired all my balls and knippel. The grape and bombs are useless as I mentioned. Anyway, by that point I only had 3 or 4 cannon left. The enemy ships stopped firing. Nothing was happening. Maybe all their cannon blew up, or they ran out of shot, or we always have to keep open the consideration that the game is a buggy piece of garbage and it could have been a bug. They just turned towards me, then turned around, maintaining the same distance from me. After fruitless attempts at breaking the stalemate, I looked it up and planned to save the game, and edit the map distance to like 0 so that encounter could fuck right off. But the game crashed switching windows, so...I had to do this mission to Curacao like 3 times because of that, and then the crew murdered me and so forth.
Speaking of which, never did find the hidden meaning of the boarding battles. Me versus 20 guys. Um, no?? Maybe it is possible, but I never got a chance to practice fighting in the game, not that I consider that a constructive matchup. Being boarded was no different although that may have had something to do with me firing the crew so they wouldn't kill me in a mob on board. I much prefer being murdered by sailors I do not employ.
I went for the "realistic" wind and damage. Big mistake. I just had to turn on fast mode a lot, especially since the AI loved to get into those stalemate positions while basically doing no real damage. I sank 0 ships during my game, and my ship was never sunk. Are we having fun yet? I get it though, they historically used fast mode in a lot of battles once all their cannons blew up and they needed to activate the map. No apparent way to turn it off. I was thinking of editing that in the files, but I lost my patience with the game before getting around to it.
The plot I never found. It does apparently exist although the meat of AOP is the procedural missions, sail back and forth, do stuff. Try not to get stuck on a peninsula when exiting a port and get raped by pirates, that sort of quality gameplay. Bridgetown I think I recognized from AOP2, like I said, same game in a different stage of development. Same music. And that kinda stuff.
Not really sure what the "correct" way to play is. It was a thankless and joyless run, filled with long, punishing, inconclusive battles, a hold that could just about carry food and balls and not much else. I got into port in a storm and finished my delivery. Then I went to the tavern "until nightfall," which revealed the storm still going. I went back in "until morning." A couple of days of that later, I decided to leave in the hurricane, but once I exited town the sun was out. Grrreat.
IMO, the tutorial of COAS is a masterpiece. The plot, ehhh, could never figure it out, no idea if the quests are broken or way too hard. This game is sort of like COAS without the plot in it. I really wish I had gotten more out of it, but, just, no.
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