Poll Your favorite era of play?

[Heinz-Fiction]

Ah thanks, this helps alot

 

[yakrall]

do time periods advance when its over? do you get a message to end the game or you can "advance" to the next era?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

They remain fixed throughout the game.
It would hardly be feasible to play long enough to reach another one anyway.
So you can pick which one you like and if you want to try another one, that's added replay value.

 

[Grey Roger]

In free-play you could easily play long enough to theoretically advance to the next period. Just start the game in 1679, for example. You can almost certainly keep the game going for a year, so now it's 1680 - and you've just crossed from the end of "Spanish Main" into the start of "Golden Age of Piracy".

If it were implemented, you'd suddenly notice that one day later, every soldier on duty in every town suddenly has a new uniform, all the governors have been replaced, and every king or queen has died and been replaced because when you talk to those new governors, they're all claiming to represent their respective new monarchs. It becomes even sillier if some colonies change ownership and belong to a different nation from one period to the next - starting a game in 1599 and progressing from "Early Explorers" to "Spanish Main" would be insane. So having the time period advance within a game is probably not a good idea.

 

[SuperCrumpets]

Well it could just be ship availability only or something

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Well it could just be ship availability only or something

In theory, yes it could. There even used to be code in place to do exactly that, though it was never put to use.
Until eventually it was replaced with the more extensive "Periods" mod that alters a lot of additional things.

But it is technically quite easy to have it for ships based on a defined "first year" and "last year" of appearance for each ship.