Sid Meier's Pirates: Who here has played it yet.

[Muad'Dib]

Lookey What I Found.

"When I bring this baby back to the shipwright man, he gonna have himself a heart-attack."

[Muad'Dib]

Fortune, Empress Of The World

Too bad you can attache a .wav file & .jpg at the same time. Oh well sing along, and imagine the opera is actually playing when looking at this pic.

"O Fortune
like the moon
you are changeable,
ever waxing
and waning;
hateful life
first oppresses
and then soothes
as fancy takes it;
poverty
and power
it melts them like ice.

Fate--monstrous
and empty,
you whirling wheel,
you are malevolent,
well-being is in vain
and always fades to nothing,
shadowed
and veiled
you plague me too;
now through the game
I bring my bare back
to your villainy.

[Muad'Dib]

The End

Forced retirement.

Robby Krieger electric guitar intro.

"This is the end...Beautiful friend."
"This is the end...My only friend, the end..."

[Muad'Dib]

I'll get you next time Henry.

[Beethoven's 9th]

[Dinner]

I bought Pirates yesterday and I've literally stayed up all night playing. I still haven't figured out how to block when sword fighting but I don't seem to need it a Journeymen level though navel warfare can be a bit tricky. The hardest part of the game for me so far has been the dancing but maybe it's just because I've been up for forty hours playing. Hopefully, it will get easier after I'm rested.

[Muad'Dib]

Holy Freakin Moley

Man did I have a rude awkening. There is a HUGE difference when you play Swashbuckler after say your 2nd division of plunder then if you are just starting out. I'm getting creamed so much that all I'm doing is constantly reloading. Yeah I eventually get the outcome I want but it is time consuming.
In my first game when I switched over to swashbuckler, I was starting my 3rd cruise. My ship was fully loaded. I had all the specialists for my crew. I had lots of special items to help with the various encounters (Dancing, Sword fighting, etc.), and I had high ranks to help with recruiting and ship repairs & upgrades. So for the rest of the game, at swashbuckler, it was a piece of cake.
Not so when you start out from the begining. Your ship (a sloop, if your playing the 1660 Era) moves like a garbage scow. Your crew is very small (you start with 40 men but recuiting with get less than 10) . Enemy ships rip you apart because they move faster than you and out gun you, so your only choice is to go for the boarding action, quickly, and hope your ship is still in one piece. Enemy captains are extremely tough & fast (even when they choose Cutlass & you choose Rapier). You have to finish off the captain quickly or your crew starts to dwindle, fast. When you do win, you find yourself sailing back to port to make repairs. And repairs are very costly even the upgrades. Then you recruit and if you came back too quickly there's no one to recruit. Take one ship next to a Spanish port and they send out a pirate-hunter that has a bigger, quicker, faster ship than you that is manned by a bigger crew than yours. Try to outrun him and he sinks any ships you captured in the navigation screen and also pounds away at you, so you find yourself once again limping back to port. Meanwhile, your crew looses morale because you just spent the first year at sea trying to eek-out an existence. You go from 100 (starting gold) to maybe a couple grand. Dancing is even tougher. You trying to dance as if your on Broadway--no slippers here to help. The moves are fast and intricate. If you reload to try again the music is even faster. I think it cycles through a series of tunes before it comes back to a more reasonable tune.
Buying treasure maps to the 9 Legendary Pirates cost you 600 for each piece of a 4 piece map. Not the 200 for the whole thing at the lower level. So here I am with 15 months at sea, my crew is content and I have less than 7k in gold. I have one specialist (a Gunner--thank god for him), I have 3 upgrades (Cotton sails, Bronze Cannon, and Fine-grain power). Reached the rank of Major for the Dutch & English. I'm in reach of a port that has Copper plating. And I got a kiss on the hand from a gov's daughter that leads me to a fugitive in a port near by that will lead to a 3k reward or a special item (tough decision to make--gold or item).
But I'm having fun getting my ass kicked.

[Adagio]

Yep, that Swashbuckler is defently tough... as mentioned before, the step from the second hardest level (don't remember the name) to Swashbuckler is a huge step... too huge I'd say... Right now I'm playing the second hardest level, and I haven't lost any battles (though dancing is still diffecult... might be because I don't spent much time with it... only danced a couple times since I started a new game)... As I played on Swashbuckler I only won 1/10 battles... I've got a better hand on fighting now, so I believe I might have a better chance next time I play on Swashbuckler...

A good thing about those treasure maps is, you don't always have to buy all 4 pieces... lots of the times you can find the treasure (or family if you want) with only 2-3 parts
Though sometimes the treasure can be hard to find. Yesterday the map pointed to a place (near Magerita IIRC) where I couldn't land by ship (when going towards the beach my ship just turned around instead of asking me to land), so the only way to get to that place was to land far away from where what can be seen on the treasure map and hope to find a way back to that place... but that was a little more diffecult than it sounds like, because one of the small towns was not in the same spot when walking than in navigation mode

[Kassiopeia]

Swashbuckler is the hardest? Thank goodness, I thought I'd just started to horribly suck! I'll immediately revert to Rogue and not feel bad about it one bit. My guess is that it's the ultra difficult level for the really seasoned guys, and clearly too much for your first game.

[Adagio]

Hmmm... It sure is nice that the captains of the other ships are planning their rute based on where I am, so I don't have to sail that far to catch them

[Kassiopeia]

Whee! I've been playing a completely new game as Adventurer in the 1640s and having much more fun than as Rogue in the 60s. I've already nailed three high-ranking pirates, I'm getting a hang of the dancing and I have a Royal Sloop with all of the available upgrades that can kick some serious butt.

[Dis]

so you guys are still playing? What's the replayability of this game? How many hours have you all played so far?

I'm going to ask for this game as a christmas present. I just want to make sure first.

[Kassiopeia]

It's really open-ended and there's a heap of stuff to do. I haven't played more than maybe ten hours now, though, I've been too busy with other stuff, but I'm optimistic that I'll get tens of hours more out of the game. There's the lost cities quests, the relatives quests, avending the villains... my first game I played for about six seven hours but then I got bored of it because it was too hard on Swashbuckler and reverting to Adventurer or Rogue would take two years and I had made mistakes I could avoid the next time.

And i haven't even had a go at the sneaking minigame yet! I find it better to just attack hostile towns head on if I have business inside them, such as catching a criminal.

[Kassiopeia]

The game area is also so large it's scary. You have to plan out your voyages, because the wind directions shift season by season (I think) and it's easier to get from the east to the west in a given season with a given ship when the wind direction is right, to give an example.

Crossing over from the Caribbean down to South America is an exercise in itself, you have to stock up on food and when you're there you may end up in trouble if the Spanish are mad at you since there are few non-Spanish towns around. I just sacked Santa Marta and made it French, though. And I hear there are settlements accessible all the way up in Florida! (or at least the Dutch Rutter told me so)

[GhengisFarbâ„¢]

Is it worth playing? I got several weeks ago due to preorder but haven't opened the box yet.

[Dis]

if you already have it, what's to lose by playing it? It's not like you have to pay again.