Reviews for Black Sails

[JudeZombi]

Good start!

Congratulations on making a good start for a game, that would indeed be in order. But if you really want this to be a coin-flipper I suggest you add the follwing:

- Foe Radar, when your down to fighting one single small ship its one hell of a bitch to find it in that big field. The radar could be a guy in the mast telling you in which direction you should said to find the last ship.

-Increase Scroll Control. By defult, the screen is not very raipid in movement so when you try to move downwards on the screen your stuck with 1-2cm if anything at all to fight with. The screen just needs to be more raipd or afixed on your ship.

- Increased Grapichs. It needs a couple touch ups here and there, some paint and a new feather in the broom and you got a winner.

Thats about that.

[axolotl1]

A rum game, matey.

Ok, I've finally spent enough time playing this to write an informed review.
I've never played Pirates or anything else similar to this, so it's new to me.

Battle: The battle options are intelligently set up. I like that you can upgrade your ship either by hijacking other ships, or by buying them. I didn't have to spend much time searching for the other ships MOST of the time by doing two things. Usually all the ships start out near the center of the map. If there's a ship you can take out quickly, do that first. Then, look in the last place you saw the other ship. Don't go where it was headed.

Instructions: It's very hard to write complete instructions for a game like this, that are short enough to put within the game, I'm sure, but the instructions for battle had some deficiencies which make this game difficult to play at first. I had to restart about 10 times, trying different things out. You should make it clear in the instructions that the way to take an enemy ship is to take out all the crew with grapeshot, and NOT by an abordage fight, which just destroys the enemy ship.

Travel: Good balance. Both the speed at which you move around and the rate of enemy encounters are perfect.

Trade: Good scaling between money from battles and cost of materials and upgraded ships. Chainshot was a great value. Because enemy ships have no sails, as far as battle is concerned, you can save a lot of time by using chain rather than roundshot. I thought that abordage was sort of a waste, though, because buying men, guns, and swords is much more expensive than buying ammo. It would be worth it if you made it so that we could take over enemy ships via abordage, then it would be a trade-off between the cost of supplies and the cost of new ships.

Town attack: Sorry, I haven't got to this yet. I'm waiting 'til I can get the best ship and stock it with crew and weapons. So far I'm up to the 30K ship.

And for anyone who read this far, a hint: cannon upgrade is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing to ALWAYS have. It doesn't matter what kind of ammo you use, you can always win with fully upgraded cannons, even against stronger ships with better ammo, coz you can reach them without them getting you.

Dang. I donno how you're doing it, Ignatus Zuk, but all these games you've released lately are excellent strategy games that supply me with days of entertainment. Good job. Go make tons of money with your skills. Go Lithuania !=P

[QuickNick]

Very nice game!

I REALLY liked this game BUT didn't like how it seemed to be mostly numbers and luck rather than skill/strategy.(some strategy in it though :)) You have to pretty much hope you end up against a weaker force. And then in the battle it is based on numbers of swords or power of cannons or defense of ship. There isn't much strategy involved as most often both ships can get off a round on the other without being able to avoid the enemy's shot.(sometimes I can escape their shot, but it hardly matters when my defenses are so much lower) Overall, great idea, well made, but not enough 'interactivity.'

[narkofer]

Great idea but need a little more work

I loved the game actually, I've always looked for games of this kind, but there were somethings with nonsence, such as:
1.- Conquering the towns (it was cool seing all of them with ur flag though)
2.- why serve to a king if u coudn't really get something from him
3.- it would be cool a radar or something because sometimes it was hard to find the enemy boats...

[kfunk]

Fun game, but a little buggy

It is very similar to Pirates, the nes/computer version anyway - haven't played the new one. This is not really a bad thing - I always enjoyed that game.

Okay, I have read some comments where people complain of the lack of a save feature - There is a save, you need to press P (for pause) first and then you can save

Also some people have stated that the game is too hard, and you do suck at the beginning, but if you upgrade your cannons quickly, you can make out pretty well and then slowly upgrade your ship

Bugs/cheats:
The best way to win every time is to upgrade your cannons so that you can shoot further than your opponents and then drag the ai ship to the border - if you position yourself perpendicular to the border, you can easily decimate your opponents from afar...and they wont even try to run away

You can also sail around with a crew of zero, frequently the AI will come at you with grapeshot ven though it doesn't have any effect - can't kill a nonexistent crew

The save feature isn't super-reliable, I lost my save one time after I got wiped out (by running into an enemy ship with a crew of 0 after I had already grape-shotted it into submission...oops)

Notes:

What I disliked about Sid Meiers original pirateswas the lack of a sense of purpose, I loved its freeform nature, but really would have liked some sort of structure. Missions, goals, anything. Freeform is a good thing, but the lack of clear goals (that I observed) other than to blow up as much stuff as possible before you die led me to lose interest in the game after awhile. Then again, maybe people like that, it's only my opinion...

I would have liked a slightly better intro - for example, the save feature was hard to find.

Other than that, I really liked it - fun game, very playable, nice graphics etc. Good Job!