Plunder pirates map spoiler upgrade#

Or when you limp back to port, your ship slightly broken from the last fight, looking to beg the governor for new missions so you can upgrade all over again. Or summoning a sea serpent and getting into more of a tussle than you were expecting. Or when you find a wedding ring and propose to your beloved, only for her to insist that you first need to conquer some fortresses. Or the first time you board a vessel and find yourself fighting a dueling minigame that feels like the bastard offspring of BattleCON and a tug-of-war rope. What about splitting your hull down the midsection and adding an entire cross-section for hauling extra cargo? Admittedly, this isn’t visual design at its keenest - the cannons are properly placed, so you can’t eyeball an approaching ship’s firepower without handling the ship or asking outright and therefore letting its owner know you see them bearing down on you - but it does manage to put all the information about a ship out there on a the table instead of pushing it into their player area. Even the underwrought Plunder let us add cannons. Sure, we’ve seen sails that peg into the hull. Or the first time you tinker with those modular ships. As maps go, it’s one of those abstractions that comes closer to approximating reality than more realistic portrayals can manage. It’s a question of setting into port, avoiding pirates, maybe going the long way around.

Dodging a pursuing vessel isn’t as easy as staying one move ahead. Certain passages are prime opportunities for would-be traders hoping to turn sugar and rum into doubloons. As a map, it produces bottlenecks and short jaunts and long hauls. How often do ships wander away from charted shipping lanes, anyway? Not very often, if Shiver Me Timbers is to be believed. It’s just nicer to look at than some boring chart of the Caribbean. It looks like the attractive, organic, play-as-you-go maps of Star Trek: Ascendancy, minus the organic and the play-as-you-go, which at least leaves attractive. Like the first time you see its weird map, with its hubs and lanes, its layovers and merchant vessels ripe for plundering, its top-heavy standees for loudly announcing which goods or services are for sale at each location. Shiver Me Timbers is best when it’s producing first moments. No, it isn’t similar to Star Trek: Ascendancy.