So, to add to this, Port Royale 4 still manages to hold on to some vestigial alternate gameplay elements from previous iterations, although those hoping for the variety of Sid Meyer’s Pirates! will find Port Royale 4 a bit lacking. Waiting until you get your first capstone building is interesting, but when you’re building twenty of them, there’s no reason to keep going on.

You can basically explore the extent of what the game allows you to build, and then get bored because the game is simply earning money in a loop over and over past that point. I mentioned back in the Space Station Manager review that just making money so you can spend it on capital that only makes you more money is a bit of a boring gameplay loop. No bars means a shortage that you should sell to because the prices are raised until you get to one bar. Anything two bars or higher means low or normal prices you should buy down to one bar. As with all the Gaming Minds trading games, a “four bars” system tells you when to buy or sell. Because every commodity’s demand increases slightly with every increase in population, but the amount of a single commodity shoots up quickly with even one more factory, building more than one of any given type of factory before building one of all other types of factories will lead to an imbalanced economy where there is a permanent shortage of the commodities whose factories you don’t build while there is a permanent glut of the commodity whose factories you did build. Due to the way that the game is balanced, colonies need to expand and have more population (which increases demand) to run more factories that produce more goods to satisfy the increase in demand. At the same time, you make the most money selling to a colony when it is nearly or completely out of a commodity. Colonies generally want at least 20 days of supply for every commodity, and satisfaction/prosperity (which is important for expanding your colonies) depends upon having all its needs met. The price a colony will pay for a commodity is based upon its (fixed) base price, multiplied by how much supply a colony has of that commodity. There are 25 commodity types (plus sailors/”job seekers” that kind of act like a commodity), and every colony consumes a certain amount of each commodity per day based upon its population. Then you… umm… just sit there and continue to make more and more money, I guess? Eventually, you start building an armada and conquering the Caribbean so you can manage all the cities, so that you can make all the money.

You use that wealth to get the rights to develop and run other colonies, too. When eventually you have run out of goods to buy low, you can use the fabulous wealth you have to expand the city you control, build new factories, hire workers, and then sell the products high. You use this money to buy more ships so you can buy more low and sell more high. You use the money you have to buy goods you buy low and sell high. (It depends upon your difficulty/starting settings.) Thus already being richer than most people will ever be, you set out to become unimaginably wealthy. You start out as the manager of a colony, owning one or more ships, and having enough money to buy several whole apartment complexes. If you’re new to this kind of management game, here’s the basics of how it goes: Those of you who have played Port Royale 3 or Rise of Venice can skip to the next section.

Port royale 4 ign review