Gameplay

Port Royale Business School, Class of 1675

This is especially a problem when you try to get a business up and running. Playing a Caribbean tycoon can be touch and go. You build a plantation and a warehouse, then you set up a trade run and suddenly it's not making the money it was before and you can't really tell why and then you start bleeding gold until the game comes to an ignoble halt and...hey, wait, what just happened?

Your mission, should you choose to accept it

Deadly broadsides

Big ship, little ship

Welcome to the base of Port Royale's learning curve. It's quite a climb, but once you get to the top, you can dabble with a robust scripting tool that lets you set up automated convoys to run back and forth. Once this is set up, the money starts rolling in and you're free to pay attention to the rest of the game. As you go up ranks by gaining experience, you can control more captains, each of whom can lead his own convoy. Basically, you'll have one captain running around doing missions and exploring with your main fleet. The rest will be your staff for automated trade routes.

You'll find the best parts of the game with your main fleet. This is where you'll pick up random missions, which are very Railroad Tycoon. You know the kind. 'Please ship twenty tons of coal to Poughkeepsie by April 15th, 1855'. Except now it's stuff like, 'Please take twenty units of rum to Port-au-Prince by April 15th, 1655'. You can drive dignitaries around and haul colonists to small towns to grow them into bigger towns. You can hunt down pirates to collect bounty. You can purchase letters of marque, which are simply licenses to steal from a given nationality.

Vera Cruz's most wanted

Where there's smoke...

South American shores

Living a life of pirating should be one of the best things about Port Royale, a game that claims to afford you the freedom to play as you like. And we all know no one with an eye for excitement wants to be a goody-two-shoes when he's turned loose in the Caribbean with a sailing ship. But for a couple of reasons, crime doesn't really pay. The first problem is the way the police -- here in the form of a fleet of powerful attack ships from the offended nation -- will magically materialize out of nowhere to do a 17th Century Rodney King on your poop deck. It seems to be Port Royale's way of telling you to play nice until you've got a bunch of big ships stocked with men and expensive cannons. Even then, the retaliatory attacks seem to scale to stay one step ahead of your combat capability. It's just not fair.