Port Royale impressions

We recently had an opportunity to take a good, close look at Ascaron's upcoming strategy title Port Royale, a game that will combine economic strategy with 17th-century naval battles. You'll begin the game's lengthy single-player campaign as a lone sea captain, though you'll eventually be able to hire additional sea captains and commission huge fleets of caravels and frigates. By improving your starting character's skills in trade, navigation, and sea-battle accuracy, you can advance through 10 experience "ranks," and with each successive rank, you'll be able to hire an additional captain and commission 10 more ships. Ultimately, you'll be able to command a fleet of up to 100 ships.

Your main goal in Port Royale is to become established as the governor of a port town, though exactly how you go about this will be up to you. The game will let you advance your status either through profitable trading, or through conquest of the high seas, either as a lawless pirate or as a privateer (a mercenary captain who accepts contracts to hunt down pirates, ships belonging to rival nations, or both). Once you gain a few ranks and command several convoys of ships, you'll be able to automate them on trade routes or patrols while you deal with your most pressing business.

Port Royale will take place between the 16th and 17th centuries in the Caribbean Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Your operations will revolve around the colonial holdings of Spain, Holland, England, and France, and you'll be able to undertake missions on behalf of all the nations, including missions to capture or sink convoys belonging to rival countries.

Port Royale's economic strategy elements make intuitive sense but offer a surprising amount of depth. You'll be able to dock at any port town to which you've sent a friendly convoy, unless you've angered the residents of that particular town. As you might expect, you can purchase and repair ships at a port town, but you can also trade valuable commodities for profits. Port Royale's trade system is based on supply and demand, so you'll naturally want to buy items like grain, fish, and hemp at a lower price and sell them back at ports that are offering better prices. If you happen to be on good terms with the governor of a particular city, you can request planning permission, which lets you build your own money-making buildings in that particular town, including your own fishing huts and grain farms, as well as hospitals that increase the quality of living for the town's inhabitants and even stores that will buy and sell commodities at your own prices while you're at sea.

However, you'll find that some ports produce surplus amounts of some products but have a shortage in others. By delivering scarce goods to specific port towns, you'll not only be able to get a good price for them, but you'll also be able to increase your own reputation and standing at that town. Increasing your reputation is an important part of the process of becoming a governor, but if you're well liked, you may be entitled to other perks, such as being offered the hand of another governor's daughter in marriage, which can not only increase your reputation, but may also make you privy to privileged information if your bride-to-be is the gossipy sort.

Port Royale also features full-scale naval combat that will let you either automatically resolve battles or command them yourself by giving your ships orders manually, just like in a conventional real-time strategy game. You can arm your ships with one of three kinds of cannon ammunition: cannonballs, which are damaging to enemy hulls; chain shot, which tears through an enemy's sails and renders it unable to move; and grapeshot, which causes damage directly to an enemy crew. You can also choose to manually broadside an enemy ship, or even board it to overwhelm your enemies through force of numbers. Depending on your particular objective, you may wish to try to capture your enemies' ships rather than destroy them, since you may wish to plunder their cargo, or simply steal away their ships to fill out your own ranks or sell at the next port for some quick cash. You'll even be able to collect bounties for hunting down famous pirates. Or, if you prefer the life of a pirate yourself, you'll be able to commandeer a pirate cove for yourself and use it as a base of operations.

Port Royale's colorful graphics seem to do a good job of cleanly rendering ships and towns, and the game also features oil-painting-style portraits of its various characters, including town governors and delegates from the game's four nations. Though Port Royale was recently released in Australia and some parts of Europe, this promising strategy game is scheduled for release in the US later this summer.