Well… in honor of my pending interview with Three Rings this week, I figured it was high time I checked out some of the “competition” if you will.
|
And by checking out the competition, I mean I just beat Sid Meier’s Pirates! with what I guess can be considered a maximum score. At least, there wasn’t anything left to check off on the scorecard when I was done.
That is to say, I scored 126 out of a possible 126 fame points. I was made a Duke by all 4 nations, rescued/avenged my family, found all of the lost cities, vanquished the other 9 named pirates and took their treasures, accumulated a bucketload of money, married a cute little Dutch girl, and settled down as governor of a city I conquered very early into the game. And I ended the game on max difficulty level. |
My only regrets are that:
- I never once saw (much less had an opportunity to capture) a Ship of the Line
- I retired an old and burnt out man (it would have been nice to have finished the game in better health and retired willingly).
- I played most of the game on the middle difficulty level (would have been nice to have been able to bump up to higher level sooner, but by the time it occurred to me to do so, my health was poor enough that I couldn’t win a duel against a blind puppy).
Near the end of the game, I discovered an interesting bug (at least, I assume it was a bug). Every time I spoke to my father-in-law (governor of Tortuga) while wooing my wife for treasure maps (yeah, it sounds weird), he gave me 50 acres of land. I think I got a total of about 400 acres this way before I realized what was happening.
Then, the one time I tried to talk to him in the hopes of getting more land, he decides to give me a mission in stead of free wealth. So I ignored him and sailed off to collect the last big treasure in the game and retire.
Other than the governor bug, there was really only one interesting event that happened throughout the entire game. I took a Spanish Flag Galleon with a rowboat.
Enter me, accidentally losing my fully equipped large frigate because I had switched my flag onto my sloop to sail back into town before dividing up the treasure and hiring on a new crew (light ship functions better against the wind). With my sloop in hand, I capture the first three enemy ships to sail by… and then I get greedy.
I’m hoping for a Ship of the Line, and am not really paying attention. So, when I see a large “New Warship” sail by, I pounce. I had taken a serious beating in the three battles before, and hadn’t taken on any more crew members since setting sail. So, after casualties, I had something like 60 men between four moderately damaged ships. The galleon has 200 men and 40 guns.
I attack the warship and whittle at it for a while before I take a heavy dose of chain shot to the sails and am immobilized. The galleon fires another salvo (something like 32 guns remaining), and I sink.
Somehow, since I have multiple ships in my fleet, it just transfers me to the next boat in the line. So I attack again, same result. He’s down to like 180 men and 28 guns and I’m down to under 40 men and two ships, a fluyt (notable for being the absolute worst ship in the game), and a heavily battered little brigantine. So… I try one last time with the brigantine since it’s personal now, and I figure I can always sail away on the fluyt if worse comes to worse.
My brigantine isn’t as heavily damaged as I thought it was, it still has a full 20 guns and no hull damage, just a bit to the sails. So, I reef them to avoid damage and start kiting the big meaniehead who sunk my other two ships. Things go well for the first little bit, I quickly hammer him down to something like 10 guns and 50 crew. Unfortunately, he gets one last good hit in, and completely destroys my sails.
I return fire and realize that my only hopes of winning are to somehow board his ship, so I get out and start pushing. Have you ever pushed a sinking warship? It’s not very effective.
It probably took 20 minutes (RL) before my little raft drifted into the computer’s ship. Something was wrong with the computer’s targetting because once I got within chain shot range, he kept overshooting me. I mean… it’s not like I was going anywhere.
When we collide, I somehow have 17 men left. Computer is down to 18 
Posted by Ammon in games, pirates, play, three rings