Port Royale 2

Other products by TRI SYNERGY INC

Product Features

• As you complete missions, you'll gain wealth and property -- as well as new enemies to deal with
• Set up your own trade cartels and exploit any position you earn
• Discover the consequences of war, as you loot and conquer towns, build new facilities and try to take care of your people and your crew
• Choose from 16 different ship types, including some available only to nations or pirates
• Open-ended gameplay -- stay a pirate and outlaw forever, or take over a town and grow it into a mighty port

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0002IWYO0
• Item Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Media: CD-ROM
• Release Date: September 13, 2004
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #16,028 in Video Games (See Bestsellers in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Set in the Caribbean in the 17th Century, Port Royale 2 lets you will trade with over 60 towns and create your own production facilities. You will not only increase your trading empire, but you will also have a larger influence on the development of the New World.

Trade is not everything though: Pirates and military fleets threaten your trade convoys. You can escort ships for your convoys as needed, turn the tides and hunt for pirates, or capture the military ships and become more famous while expanding your own fleet as well as your stock of goods.

If that is not enough, you can also take on missions for merchants, diplomats, and other characters. In the missions of the Vice Kings, you attack and conquer enemy towns and are able to directly influence the defenses of your home towns. Succeed and you will be rewarded with buildable land.

Overview

• Huge game world with 4 nations and 60 towns
• Construct production facilities, houses and special function buildings to help your towns flourish
• Create your own towns
• Stronger consequences in wars (towns can be conquered)
• Introductory scenarios to describe all important features of the game
• 8 special scenarios for a quick and easy start into the Port Royale 2 world
• Open ended game with endless detail and game depth
• 16 different ship-types
• New and improved sea battles using modern 3D Graphic Technology

Construction
Construct buildings and production facilities, as well as specialized buildings, in 60 towns. You will also be able to build your own cities, once you have received land gifts from the King of the New World, where you are responsible for the towns defenses as well as its needs.

Influence in the New World
Buy production facilities or even entire companies from the AI opponents, making it possible to build a syndicate in one or more cities. In extreme cases (money permitting of course) you could even buy ALL the production facilities from ALL the AI (computer opponents) in the entire Caribbean.

Sea and Land Battles
Define which ships you want to take to battle and which to put on escort duty. In the 3-D Sea Battles, you have the choice to protect your merchant ships with your battleships. You can sink, plunder, or capture the enemy ships. Towns can be attacked from sea or land, and you can control either route yourself.

Intelligent AI Opponents
Military convoys and pirates will have their own methods of battle. Pirates may group up and loiter about their hideout, striking unwary passers-by. Military convoys, however, the military convoys may consider you a wanted man and will actively hunt for on the high seas. Just be careful not to get caught in a crossfire!

Overhauled Trading System
The successful trading system of Port Royale has been expanded in many areas. The production abilities have been made more specific to towns, creating areas where certain goods are well produced is some areas while scarce in others. This helps to simplify things and also makes automatic trade routes more logical and user friendly.

More Automation
At a certain experience level the captains of your convoys will have the ability to create their own trade routes and their own deals, leaving the player with more time for building up his financial empire, missions, and hunting.

Motivational Longevity Features
If you are more successful in building your financial empire, you can hire more captains. The ability to get concessions for towns will also expand. However, you'll need to show your skill as a trader in order to receive a concession. If you are good enough you will be able to spread to every town in the Caribbean, and have a seemingly endless number of convoys. Through intelligent control and overview screens, it will be a simple task for the player keep an oversight of their entire fleet.

Atmospheric Graphics
Beautiful landscapes, towns with core buildings, production facilities and homes will amaze you! Unbelievable, superbly detailed buildings and realistic real-time 3-D sea battles with transparent water and underwater life will demonstrate the power of the Port Royale 2 engine.

Modern Interface
A modern interface with clear icons, created with care and attention, will provide an easy to use interface which every player will be able to pick up, even with a game of this depth.

Product Description

Port Royale 2 takes you to the notorious port town of the 17th century, during the days of pirates. Become a respectable merchant sailing the high seas for commerce, or become a powerful pirate. Decide which ships you take into battle; Sink, plunder or capture your enemies' ships. Completely open-ended gameplay lets you become a pirate captain, merchant, commander and more. New damage display, water transparencies and underwater life animation will make you feel like you're on the high seas, in the Golden Age Of Piracy

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

162 of 171 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Compare Pirates! vs. Port Royale II, January 20, 2005

By	Mark Pontius "mpontius2" (Irvine, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

I played Port Royale II for a couple weeks before losing the CD to a pile of Christmas wrap in the trash (probably). So when my wife wanted Pirates! instead, I went for it. (Besides, she let me buy a couple Fraggle Rock DVDs at the same time.) Now we have to take turns at the one computer powerful enough to play the game.

Sailing around is quicker and more interesting in Pirates! The land has interesting little landmarks, and you can choose to go ashore if you want. There's weather clouds that affect speed and running into reefs can hurt ships (unless at easiest difficulty).

Fighting naval battles is faster and much easier in Pirates! Port Royale II had a much harder battle because you could be up against several ships at a time versus your fleet (you sail one ship at a time at the enemy and switch to the next in your fleet when that one gets too hurt). With Pirates, you always use one ship against one or two enemies. The enemies are usually one small armed escort ship and one poorly armed cargo vessel. If somehow you loose, you have to re-engage the battle with another ship if you want to continue fighting.

Sword fighting is pretty easy to master in Pirates! (I have never ever lost a swordfight, and I am #3 most notorious pirate in the world.) I have only played the two easiest difficulty levels, so maybe this will get harder. I almost always sail one of the smaller, faster ships, get in to boarding range, and swordfight to a victory (even with 40 of my crew to their 150 crew). The animation during sword fighting isn't bad, but pretty repetitive, as there's only about 6 different scenes. Big ships, Little ships, Bars, Garden (for the honor of the governor's daughter), Fortress, etc.

Trading is much better in Port Royale II. I could spend all my time trading and amassing a fortune without a fight. You could even buy property and build plantations or factories in different towns, set up automatic trade routes using hired captains, and even strongly affect the local economy by what you did or didn't supply the town with. Pirates! doesn't allow enough cargo capacity, variety of goods, towns with money, or reason behind local prices to make trading very interesting.

Reputations with different countries make much more sense in Port Royale II, where people hold more of a grudge for acts of piracy. In Pirates!, I was able to capture a dozen Spanish ships before their towns would stop letting me sail into port and earning promotions based on sinking the odd pirate ship, then I quickly marched into 2 or 3 of their towns and replaced the governors with Dutch, and earned a not quite whopping 1100 bounty on my head. I made much more than that from just sacking those towns. I cleared my entire reputation by sailing the brother of a Jesuit priest from one town to the neighbor (about a 30 second run), and was instantly awarded with a Spanish promotion to Admiral (for all my good deeds sinking pirate ships presumably).

Doing missions was better in Port Royale II. There you would get an assignment to sack a town, gather a quantity of goods, or follow a trail of a pirate, etc. Usually it involved going quite a distance under a time constraint. In Pirates, you always just escort a ship from one town to the neighbor. You almost always have to defeat exactly one pirate along the way. I had one mission that I was to deliver a special crop to Marcaibo. Along the way, I stopped by a settlement and was asked to escort a governor to Marcaibo. Next door was a Jesuit mission, where I was asked to escort some settlers there also. I fought the three pirates (one chasing each of my escortees), and was rewarded with a promotion and land (what's that for?) when I got into town. Other missions are to find pirates (they're everywhere, but the named ones can be hard to track down), or dig up burried treasure (buy cheap map pieces and then walk your crew around land following landmarks to the oh-so-obvious piles of treasure). In Port Royale II, pirate treasure floats in the ocean.

Land battles for capturing cities only exist in Pirates! and are fairly easy and turn-based. If your crew outnumbers the soldiers in town, as long as you fire at them from the cover of trees, you will win pretty easily. In fact, if your crew gets unhappy (rare if you fight ships as often as I do), then go fight a town and do so poorly that your crew is reduced. The crew will be happy because there is now more gold per person, never mind that half just died senselessly due to poor commanding. In Port Royale II, taking a town consists of firing on batteries out in the water, using hundreds of tedious passes of your ship, firing once on each pass to avoid being hit by the battery.

Romance is a nice addition in Pirates! You have to earn a rank before getting to dance with the Governor's daughter. The prettier ones are better dancers. To dance, you have to follow her hand signals as to the next step (one of 6 directions). It takes a little to get used to, but failure doesn't cost anything so there's plenty of chance to practice until you get it right (or buy the dancing shoes which will override most of your bad moves with the right ones). Give the lady a good dance and she gives you gifts or information leading to pirates. Make her happy a few times and she will want to marry you.

Sneaking into towns in Pirates! isn't something I've tried yet. It looks pretty tedious, and I can sack the town faster than that if I really want to get into an unfriendly place. My wife isn't as bloodthirsty as I am (I sail on Captain Feathersword's Friendly Pirate Ship), so she has done this several times, and ended up in jail almost half of those attempts.

Port Royale II has a better variety of ships, or at least they matter more. In Pirates!, I always sail small fast ships and defeat even the biggest by outmanoevering them. In Port Royale II, you had better have a comparable sized ship or you were outmanned and outgunned.

Both games seem to be pretty stable, assuming you have the graphics power to run them. I did find that about 20% of the time that Pirates! is launched, it would run very slowly. Rebooting would solve the problem. The first time I ran it I didn't know that wasn't normal and spent the first night playing battles in slow motion and complaining that it takes forever to get anywhere. At normal speed, it is much more fun.

MY RECOMMENDATION:
If you like a trading game, get Port Royale II.

If you like being a bloodthirsty pirate who always wins, get Pirates! (and stay on the easier levels).

If you love pirate games, get both and have fun with a broader spectrum of activites.

74 of 78 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great game if you're into trading simulations, October 6, 2004

By	Leo (California) - See all my reviews

Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

This game is awsome, I've played Port Royal 1, and Port Royal 2 just bring it to the next level. Obviously this is not a boat racing game, so I don't understand why are other reviewers complaining about the wind. It is a trading and simulation game, and the trade is a lot of fun. Graphics are great, trading engine is crazy, and completely open ended. Buy low sell high, make profit trading in the caribbean sea, get higher social ranking by hunting pirates, establish automatic trade routes, and many more things you can do in the 17th century. If you like any kind of trading game that put you on hook for many hours, you can try this one.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Game, April 21, 2005

By	Pirate King "jsabatin" (Alaska, USA) - See all my reviews

Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

I am a pirate simulation guy. I played Pirates, Pirates Gold, Pirates 2004, Sea Dogs, Pirates of the Caribbean, Port Royale and High Seas. No game has the trading down like Port Royale 2. It is the best trade simulation game available, bar none. With that said, the piracy part of the game is very difficult. You cannot operate at all without a Letter of Marque. If you attack a country's ships without a letter everyone pretty much hates you and you cannot trade any more. The game for you is basically over. You need to trade (which means you probably need to be friendly with 2 countries). Although you can buy your reputation back to neutral or just wait long enough for your reputation to get better. I think this makes the game more true to life.

The ship to ship fighting is pretty basic, you need to have more men than your opponent or you will lose. A bigger ship with more men is necessary to win most battles. Unlike Pirates where you can always win whether you are in a rowboat or a ship of the line. Sometimes there is a sword fight, which is impossible to lose unless you close your eyes until the fight is over.

You can get married; look for buried treasure find castaways floating chests. There is really a lot to do in this game. Time does not fly by and you really have control over how much time actually goes by. This can be accomplished by slowing time down when you are in town and speeding it up when you are at sea. There is no wind to speak of in the game, not historically accurate but who cares? Nothing is more boring than watching your ship take forever getting from one place to another.

You can personally control many sea captains and ships. It can get very hectic and long-winded but all in all I think this is a good game. I have played it more than the new Pirates since I find it much more challenging. A superior trade simulation where you can actually trade tobacco...imagine that, oh wait Sid Meier couldn't. It is worth the 20 bucks to pick up a copy.