On Piratical Wealth

Games
1

Or, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Pirates.

It occurred to me that the looting economy of Pirates! is seriously borked once you get free repairs.

Any ship’s payload is virtually guaranteed to be worth less than the ship itself, given that space is set aside for food and cannon, that not all ships carry the most expensive goods, and that ships are likely to have some upgrades later in the game.

On top of that, you can sell ships anywhere! Even in the smelliest fishing village, the shipwright apparently owns a never-ending stack of gold while the merchant is on the verge of starving with his 50 doubloons or so. And even bigger towns might not give you a good price for your looted goods.

So the most efficient strategy is to simply grab ships – any ships, ignoring the payload – and just sell the ships. If they carry gold, so much the better. Other goods are barely worth the effort trying to sell them.

IMO the game should either reduce the price of ships to about 1/10 of what they are worth now, or else prohibit selling ships altogether so that you can only scuttle them. That would still leave goods as a miserable way to make a living, compared to beating a named pirate or capturing a town or treasure ship. Perhaps raising the price of goods would be in order, too.

2

I’ve yet to actually play the game (it’s on order and should be here soon), but it does sound like a fairly basic flaw in the game econ assuming that siezing ships past a certain point is no more difficult than just robbing them.

Perhaps the ability to sell the ships needs a tweak so that you can’t sell a big ship in small village for example. Given the time/cost of building a ship you would also have thought that there should be some risk in being known for turning up, even at a major port, on a regular basis to flog second hand ships.

3

Christoph is correct.

The only cost associated with this is you have to keep your crew large enough to man the prizes OR you have to make landfall pretty often to sell them.

4

I can see this heading for a “well just don’t do it then” response soon so I’ll pre-empt it ;)

Going to have to pretend I haven’t read this when it shows up then as it sounds like a bit of a “win button”

5

What you say is true to an extent, e.g. my first goal is always to get promoted by one nation. However, I don’t see it as so much of a problem:

  • You can only do this after becoming a Count. It represents government subsidy of a privateer.

  • Spice or Luxury Cargo is often worth more than the ship, and ships should be pricey. They can easily be worth the price selling them. Goods and Sugar at the right ports also make good money.

  • You get much less money for ships in small ports, and so in practice only sell in major ports. I do agree it’s weird that ports that can’t afford a ton of food have a hidden stash available for buying 7 ships.

  • In order to do this strategy you either risk your ship and lose crew in boarding, or cannon them into submission. If you cannon them, their damaged ship greatly slows you down on your return to port.

  • It’s a game about pirates, what’s so bad about making money pirating?

  • Taking ships still isn’t the prime way to make money. It’s beat out by finding buried/lost treasure, hunting pirates, and sacking towns. The only thing that makes less money is being a merchant, which even though at the bottom of the pile is still feasible.

6

Sure about that? I could have sworn that I got the exact same price for a ship, no matter where I sold it.

  • Taking ships still isn’t the prime way to make money. It’s beat out by finding buried/lost treasure, hunting pirates, and sacking towns. The only thing that makes less money is being a merchant, which even though at the bottom of the pile is still feasible.

I’d rather say that being only a merchant is nearly impossible, no matter what the manual says… since you can’t buy ships anywhere! Try being a merchant with a sloop. You always have to take over someone else’s trading ship first.

7

Yah, I’m sure about getting a lower price for ships in some ports. As I recall I also got better prices places I had a higher rank, but now that I have good rank everywhere that’s a pain to check.

Heh, good point about being a merchant! I’d stuffed that at the back of my mind so it wouldn’t bother me. The first thing a merchant needs is a frigate flagship, so that at the start of every voyage he can go pilfer 7 Spanish Galleons to haul his cargo… I do wish you could buy ships in port, as it might be entertaining to at least try to be a short haul merchant.

Then again, it’d probably be quite a dull game without any action.

8

On higher difficulty levels, this becomes a real mitigating factor.

It’s very hard to keep a large crew (over 200 men) happy without continually bringing in lots of gold. If you have less crew, it’s easier to keep them happy long enough to go ship hunting, but it’s hard to man them all - you start sailing at reduced speed, firing and reloading cannons more slowly, etc.

It’s definitely “the” way to make money (outside of hunting famous pirates) on lower levels, but up on Rogue and Swashbuckler, even the one before Rogue (Adventurer?), it’s not as straightforward as it sounds.

9

Good point. My comments were for Swashbuckler. On the lower levels fencing is so easy it’s definitely free money as you can seize every prize with no damage and no risk.

10

My comments were at the rogue level.

I don’t tend to keep a huge crew. I make landfall a lot. (I shop a lot and visit as many daughters as I can. I am a dancin fool.)

11

(I shop a lot and visit as many daughters as I can. I am a dancin fool.)

Its finally arrived I was going to have a quick half hour playing it at 8pm, its now 1am. Sid Meier strikes again!

But fuck me, I hate dancing. I’m only playing easy atm (forget cargo, forget stealing ships, head to south america, shoot off sails, plunder the gold and sink the ship) but I cannot do the dancing. I have at least twigged it’s glorified Simon says but I still cannot fathom the correct milisecond in the first 2/3rds to get the fancy move and the last 1/3rd just ensures I get laughed off the dancefloor.

12

Practice will help, but dancing slippers will help more. Keep talking to the guys in the back of taverns until one offers to sell you slippers.

[size=1]That’s not a euphemism.[/size]

13

I’m disappointed by Pirates. Game of the Year? I sure hope not… I say both The Sims 2 and World of Warcraft are far better games, and World of Warcraft has my standard VSOG complaints.

One of the problems with Pirates is repetition. Swordfight. Swordfight. Swordfight. Swordfight on a ship. Swordfight in a bar. Within this repetition there is also repetition. Your opponents fight much the same, making all of the fights feel very similar if not identical. I’m up to Adventurer level, and I use the same strategy in each fight.

I defeat the bad guy. Then I have to defeat the bad guy AGAIN for another puzzle piece. You’d think after a few times I’d just make the guy tell me EVERYTHING so I don’t have to keep wasting time going back to him.

The 9 notorious pirates. I defeat them as easily as I do the captain of a canoe.

The different towns look eerily the same. The tavern is one size fits all… interior design is something of a lost art I see.

In a sense, my complaints about this game are similar to those in Freelancer. Its an open ended game with not enough game. Granted, its a lot better than Freelancer, but the game needs more variation. It needs more complexity. It needs more dynamism.

This would be a GREAT game to have a working realistic economy. Some of it is dynamic… you can stop or assist governors as they go to new towns.

What seems to be happening from a reviewer standpoint is that there is such a concern about games moving away from being open ended that EVERY open ended game is creamed over. GTA3, Pirates, Morrowind. GTA3 is the best of the three, but even that game is too limited in terms of gameplay. You drive, you run, you shoot things. Creativity comes into play in terms of the missions.

Pirates ultimately is a simple action game. The minigame of swordfighting. The minigame of dancing. The minigame of treasure hunting. The minigames themselves hold some challenge despite their sad simplicity, but where’s the big picture? Where are the EMERGING pirates… why are you the only pirate who continues as the other 9 slowly dwindle to your quick blade? Why don’t the governor’s daughters have other suitors for you to compete with? Why don’t the shipwrights vary in their gold supply by how many ships they need and the demand, which should be dynamic based on the realistic economy?

Pirates has a good basic structure despite its simplicity and an excellent world structure. It has some key components. It simply needs more. More gameplay, more complexity, more GAME.

Pirates is a mini-game. Where’s the rest of it?

14

Get back to us once you stop playing on easy Brian. What’s the point of complaining (mostly) about difficulty when you obviously haven’t even tried Swashbuckler?

15

Dancing is all about learning the patterns (as far as I can tell, there are only ten of them). Until you get to that point you’re stuck trying to follow every single move, and that’s much too taxing at the higher difficulty levels.

  • Alan
16

Most of Brian’s complaints are not about difficulty but about endless repetition and lack of strategic options, and I completely agree with him there. The Freelancer and Morrowind comparisons are very apt. Pirates! is great for 10-20 hours but really doesn’t have a lot of depth. That has nothing to do with the difficulty level.

17

This would be a GREAT game to have a working realistic economy. Some of it is dynamic… you can stop or assist governors as they go to new towns.

Certainly cannot argue with that, it killed my enthusiasm of trading within about an hour of playing the game. In addition to being the lowest earning of the activities you can engage in, it is seemingly pointless.

Whilst it may very quickly drop off my “must play” list, I do think I’ll have pirates sat on my harddisk for a while yet.

Practice will help, but dancing slippers will help more. Keep talking to the guys in the back of taverns until one offers to sell you slippers.

Do these show up at an particular locations? I’d RTFM’ed that they were there somewhere but have yet to be offered any slippers. Call me a killjoy but an option to threaten to choke her to death with her silk stocking unless she coughed up the goods seems a much easier option, especially for the ones that bounced off the branches on the way out the ugleh tree.

18

Most of Brian’s complaints are not about difficulty but about endless repetition and lack of strategic options, and I completely agree with him there. The Freelancer and Morrowind comparisons are very apt. Pirates! is great for 10-20 hours but really doesn’t have a lot of depth. That has nothing to do with the difficulty level.[/quote]
Right, and much of the particular endless repetition and lack of strategic options he talked about came because he was playing on easy. The dull swordfighting. Defeating notorius pirates as easily as a canoe. He doesn’t even realize that governor’s daughters do have other suitors. etc.

Going back and rereading, I see I mostly tuned him out after the second paragraph where it was clear he’d hardly played the game. I agree with him that chasing down the same guy for yet another map piece is lame. Still, IMHO this was the only cogent point he made.

At it’s root it is a simple game repetitive game, but playing at Swashbuckler alleviates this quite a bit as you often can’t approach the same situation in the same manner.

19

No. You typically buy get them in Taverns, just make sure you buy whatever map pieces come up (even if you already have it figured out) otherwise they’ll keep being offered to you instead of other items.

In a sick twist, if you dance particularily well you often get a choice of such items as a gift, or the location of a wanted man who’ll often bargain for his release with an item. Not much help if you can’t dance in the first place…

You might try wooing the plainer daughters, as they have just as much stuff to gift but are much easier to please.

20

You could throw in those other suitors of governor’s daughters that you mentioned above. This obligatory “duel the fiancé” event is funny the first three times but gets old fast, especially since it happens every single time, no matter what’s going on in the world. As does the obligatory abduction by Colonel Mendoza…

At it’s root it is a simple game repetitive game, but playing at Swashbuckler alleviates this quite a bit as you often can’t approach the same situation in the same manner.

Well, you are occasionally forced to avoid a fight. That’s about the only change I can think of.