A bit like Dungeon Keeper 2 set on a spaceship: You place facilities to keep your crew alive and improve your offensive/defensive capabilities while fighting off persistent alien invasions. There's more adrenaline involved than I expected - things get intense when you're racing through your ship's crawlspaces trying to exterminate an infestation.
It's a giant Caribbean sandbox. The playable scenarios focus on how the different game mechanics work, and then you can start an open-ended run with the world as your oyster. Make alliances with Spain, France, England and Holland or betray them for the spoils of piracy. Meanwhile, you can build up your manufacturing bases almost anywhere on the map and organize trade routes to amass an enormous fortune. It can take a while for your strategies to play out, but the game speed can easily be adjusted to skip ahead to the payoff.
This game throws a *lot* at you, and the menus/user experience are counter-intuitive several places. If you're willing to fight with it, you can figure out what works and what doesn't. And then it gets oddly captivating as a series of optimization challenges.
