Combat system is awful. Trade and colony building aspect is good for a while. Would rather play Corsairs from 1999.
Basically this is a trading game:
1. You establish colonies which produce various goods
2. You can build facilities for processing those goods eg making cotton into clothes.
3. You trade these goods between your colonies your European home port.
There seem to be a good number of types of buildings and most are levelable.
You can build new ships with various cargo capacities, speeds, etc.
You can capture colonies from other nations which is just a number battle of the amount of soldiers defending vs attacking. (You can load soldiers onto your ships)
Everything mentioned is pretty good and gives a good basis for the game - good potential. However this is unfortunately all the game has to offer.
The combat element of the game seems like an after-thought. Rather than being able to zoom in seamlessly and fight the enemy on the high seas, instead whole squadrons of ships are represented by one ship on the world map (these can only be split at a port) and when you enter combat with another squadron the combat mode loads. You can probably find a video of this somewhere.
Combat has two modes: RTS style and direct control.
In RTS mode you can select a ship or several, and tell it where to go. You can set waypoints, you can set attack stance etc.
However, when two ships are in semi-close proximity, your ship wont obey your orders to go in a certain direction and will instead try to path-find around any ships in its way.
This means you cant get a ship to close right in to the enemy for boarding without going to direct control mode.
While in direct control mode you can turn with A and D, set sails with W and S and fire port and starboard guns with Q and E.
However you can only control one ship at once meaning you can't turn multiple ships simultaneously. This means engaging in a close range battle with multiple ships is nigh on impossible. While turning one ship to get a good position on the enemy (holding A or D for a good few seconds), your other ships will have kept going in a straight line and end up in a severe tactical disadvantage.
Ever play Corsairs from 1999 by Microids? That was genuinely more fun. If you try this demo and are left feeling disappointed, find a copy of Corsairs though I have no idea if it's possible to get it running on Vista or 7. I'm going to give that a go right now actually.