Port Royale 2

I played Port Royale 3 and where recommended to try out Port Royale 2 instead. Even tough the graphic in Port Royale 2 are far from it's sequel it's functional and the game play it's self are far more enjoyable.

Tried to get into it but I struggled to figure out how to make money trading. The economic model is finicky and seems opposite of all the other trading games in that trading in bulk seems to loose money not make it. The price of a good changes for every individual item sold or bought, if you by 10 of something at a time it give you a weird average of the cost if you had bought 10 single items. this continual shift causes weird trades: EX I was in a port that manufactured brick, wishing to sell to another port in need of brick. The port had 95 bricks, if i buy 10 bricks I get an average price of 98 a unit, if i buy all the bricks the average price *increases* to 145 a unit.. So buying low means i can only by a handful of bricks. On the other end it's the same, i can sell 1 brick for 167 but if i sell 10 bricks the average was 128 and gets worse for selling 100 units. SO in this case despite the manufacturer having lots and the recipients having zero stock if I buy all 95 bricks and try to sell all 95 bricks I actually loose money (buy at 148 sell at <100) the only profit to be made was only buying <10 bricks. This created an odd micromanagement where it wasn't even about finding low prices and selling high it was finding how much could be bought or sold at a low price. buy too much and you'll never make back your money, sell too much and you'll also loose. I prefer the usual model that when you find a low price you can buy the whole stock at that price and also sell at the high price rather than work with the average for some quantity SIDE NOTE: you might totally experience weird water glitchyness. there's a number of work arounds but you should be able to get it to work with one of them. took me a bit to get it running right.

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I very fondly recall playing this years ago, and it hasn't lost it's luster. The world is detailled, with lot's of options instead of a forced path. Very Zen, and a game that doesn't hurry you along. It will take some time to get into it and discover all the options - the UX and the tutorials have some small issues (sometimes you need to leave and reenter a town to move them along), but this is a welcome contrast to the linearity of more contemporary games.

INSTRUCTIONS IF THE GAME KEEPS HANGS AFTER MAP LOADING AND NEVER GOES INTO THE GAME: the release files are in a broken state that requires reinitializing. Do this: 1. Add Ascaron.Exception.exe and PR2.exe to Windows 10 DEP. Reboot or it won't take effect. 2. Set the two .exes to run in Windows 95 compatibility mode. 3. Run PR2.exe. You should get a runtime error, PR2.exe shuts down and Ascaron.Exception.exe opens up. If you only get an error box about translation files and not the XML -something one. (Your game release is now intialized.) 4. Remove Ascaron.Exception.exe and PR2.exe from DEP and reboot. 5. Run PR2.exe. (Win95 compatibility mode recommended.) The game: NOT RECOMMENDED. Even though Port Royale 1 was a major across-the-board improvement over the Patrician franchise, PR2 plays even worse than Patrician games. It feels like work, the earlier decent ship controls have now been replaced with smartphone-tier mouse-crap (in addition to asaninely being limited to controlling the convoy one ship at a time) and addtitions & changes, especially the port towers, F-ing suck. The towers: they are small, impossible to hit with a full broadside and cause insane damage despite shooting out seemingly just one cannonball. You need a mid-to-late-tier ship mostly to be able to hang around long enough to take these game-design-hell F-ers out before you run out of convoy ships to send out (the limit being 6, not much when the enemy can send all those ships at once to gangr**e your ships one by one). The trading has been fucked up and destroyed even worse. Now the only practical trading strategy worth wasting time on is consumption scalping. This makes most goods with suboptimal consumption rates worthless to trade with. Your optimal trade routes will consist of two ports: the place that produces the goods worth trading and one port that consumes those goods in a heartbeat. It is a pain to play and requires weird things on some systems to get running. DON'T BUY IT.