Windward Horizon Steam Charts & Stats

I've been looking for a Sid Meier's Pirates successor for years. This is it. It's just Sid Meier's Pirates with more depth. I'm loving this.

Review from a very casual solo gamer: EDIT: As of 6-5-25, new options have been added that address the most common requests from players. You can now turn off level scaling so that it's easier to defeat pirates (everyone's biggest complaint was level scaling), can adjust your starting power, and you can even completely turn off pirates from the game if you want to. The single person developer has been knocking it out of the park to give players new options with every update. The major complaints from negative reviews, which were completely legitimate complaints, have now been addressed and fixed. Or, at the very least, you now have sliders to adjust those mechanics to your liking. ------------------ Windward Horizons plays quite a bit differently than its predecessor, and that's fine thing if you're patient and take some time to dig under the hood. It's not as intuitive as the original Windward, so if you're the type of impatient super-casual player that just dives in and expects to know how everything works just by looking at it (like I am), it's probably going to frustrate you. It's a semi-casual game, but it does take a little bit of patience to figure out. Luckily, guides are out now explaining most of this stuff. Do a little reading and you'll get a lot of enjoyment from the game. The first thing for casual players to note is that the game expects you to specialize your ship/tactics. It's not a game where "bigger ship/better cannons" automatically means you'll be slaying pirates easily. Not by a long shot. There's level scaling with enemies, and every piece of gear you add to bulk up one stat comes with taking down another stat. Ex: You can get a new cannon and add 10% to your firepower, but you'll lose 10% of your hull/ability to withstand shots before sinking. The graphics are nice, the music is pleasant, and it's fun to play. The basic premise is that you're a ship captain, sailing around the global map to different provinces, and then you're placed on a smaller map with cities on islands that you can trade with, help grow, do missions for, and the like. You can join a number of different factions for story quests and bonuses, and you'll eventually want to join them all and start raising your reputation with each one. The economy works by trading. You take basic materials, combine them to make more valuable materials, and sell those to a province. Eventually, if you keep the province supplied well, it will grow. Half of the ships are locked behind needing a province to be a certain size before it will be sold to you. And the biggest ship, the Ship of the Line, can only currently be earned by joining the online play. It's big and has tons of spaces for many more cannons and armor...but again, that doesn't mean you're going to slay with it. It's slow to the point of being unusable for most stuff. Many of the early negative reviews made valid points, particularly concerning balance and the punitive number of pirates, but so much has been adjusted and tweaked in the first 5 days of release that those problems have been fixed now. There are a good number of ships to earn over time, and each one has more space and different stats depending on what you like. Picking the individual parts of your ship (from cannons to sails to crew and such) changes the stats of things like armor, speed, diplomacy, attack power, etc. Sometimes even just swapping them out to different spaces in your ship can tweak it to your advantage a little bit. Whereas Windward had a square grid, and each square had cities in them to conquer, Windward Horizon has one big global map containing provinces (local maps with towns) that you can freely sail around. Sail into a province and you're taken to a local map with cities spread around it. The grid layout is gone. The game will create some cities and provinces on its own, and you'll also receive missions from established cities to go found another city on the local map or a whole new province on the global map. This involves looking at the resources available in the area, and then building the appropriate workshops to capitalize on it. When you found your own city, you have a few more options on how that city does what it does. You trade resources to make the town grown and earn money. Windward Horizon is deceptive in that it's very easy to just pop in, play a bit, and pop out, but it's not a quick one-session type game, at least not for the solo aspect of it. It takes patience, time, and a small bit of effort to grow the cities on the map which will enable more profit, better equipment, and better ships. There are a couple of mini games like fishing and diving for treasure that are done well. I'm not a fan of mini games in general, but these fit in seamlessly, are actually fun to play, and provide you with money and gear for your ship. The more you do it, the more your skill stats level up and the easier it gets and the better the gear you find. The diving mini-game is a bit punishing at first, but as you level up that skill it becomes much easier. Playing online with other people on a public server: Keep in mind that the game is really designed for the online play, which is basically just solo with additional battle instances where you and other players all fight together. And for people who hate online games, I hear you. I'm one of them. But I still recommend at least trying it after you've played solo for a while and gotten comfortable on your own. Unlike FPS games where immature grade schoolers spit insults at every new player who just wants to relax and have fun after work, everyone in Windward Horizon online plays on the same side against the pirates in the online mode. It's cooperative and very friendly. Even if you hate online games, you should give it a try. It's a great game for the price, and it's still being tweaked this early on to make it more fun for the players. Because some of the game mechanics aren't intuitive, save yourself a massive headache and look over the guides people have put here on Steam, particularly concerning trading and province growth. Those mechanics are simply not intuitive enough for a super casual game player to try and figure out on their own. The guides are fairly short, and will save you a lot of frustration. I recommend it.

It's...FINE. I played a decent bit of the original (off steam) -- and it was fun, but a decade later, the second one comes out! Surely, it's as good as I remember. Unfortunately: my memory tends to make games more exciting than they are. Ignoring issues that prop up by playing on the official MP server (a billion provinces, co-op instances sometimes getting crowded etc problems you can avoid by playing with friends / solo) -- the game has a problem where, just like an MMO: you cannot lose. You're always moving upwards, you're always collecting better gear, you're always advancing rep, and you're always growing provinces -- and if you aren't, well, they're definitely not shrinking. That's okay, I think -- to a certain type of gamer. It's a pretty casual game -- there's some talk about it being deep, but it's all very surface level. I'm not sure if it has to be otherwise. The trading, production, and needs system would've been very impressive back when the first Elite came out, booting it up on my Commodore 64. As it stands now, though: it exists, and doesn't do much more than that. To which, I have to ask the question: does it need to? It gives you money. It gives you a way to grow a province you can be involved with. That's pretty much all it needs to do. There's a few story lines, and whilst I haven't completed them all (not that it's obvious at all how to continue some of them: hope that's worked on!), they're all very. Okay. The writing isn't for me. I read through most of them, and it definitely feels like the female characters got more 'attention' but the 'attention' is them having a sentence stating they're displaying the same emotion 3-4 times or smiling at you, or 'catching/locking your gaze'. Again, not very highbrow: but I'm a broken record at this point, does it need to be? The core of the game, then, is increasing your item level, your ship's experience level, and then optimizing your stats once they're all maxed out. The systems work -- all the information you need is there, and there's enough talent choices to make you feel like you've got options and diversity. There's a decent bit of buttons to press -- but like the developer, Aren, suggests: just bind literally everything similar to the same button. Damage? Same button. Buffs? Same button. Defensives? Probably just fine with the same button. Alongside moving your ship, it provides a good amount of combat interactivity -- if nothing else. Despite this being worded as potentially negative, it's great. I don't think this game is trying to be a twitch shooter. If you like a simple Age of Sail themed game (that plays more like a scifi spaceship one), and you like the idea of grinding out levels and gear score in a mix between WoW/Diablo, I think Windward: Horizon is a good fit for you. If you want more indepth trading, production halts, disruptions, manipulations -- I'd stay away. If you want a more realistic, weighty game, I'd also stay away. There's two main downsides of the game, however, is simply this: you have to pay attention too much, and that's sailing in maps. Whole lotta times where I wish I could've just clicked the maps edge and slowly sailed to it. Yes, I get that having higher rep/joining a faction lets me teleport in and out (after a minutes wait!) -- I like that, but I don't like manually piloting my ship just to get to the map's edge. It's not even devaluing getting the rep upgrades, because frankly the AI suck at pathing and it'd still be slower than doing it yourself / getting the rep up. Please consider that as an addition. I don't care if it's an upgrade I have to slot on a helmsman/captain. I'll gladly take an autopilot function in map ala the docking computer in the elite series rather than spending another second traveling through the miserable procgen levels. Speaking of procgen levels: that's the other huge issue with the game. The terrain isn't interesting, the islands aren't interesting, and the map isn't interesting. I guess it isn't that much of an issue, because we're not landlubbers -- but it feels hollow. It feels especially hollow when you get an incredibly awkward province that you don't QUITE know the perfect angle to enter from. Again, the pains would be lessened with an autopath function. If all those things combined makes you think, 'hey, I think it'd be cool to grind my pirate ship out and blast scurvy dogs online with other captains' -- go ahead and pick it up. If you're not sure? Play the demo for twenty hours. You can literally just do that. It's free. 7ish???/10 it has problems but it's still fun if it's what you're looking for : )

Edit: The dev has responded and said they will be lowering the wait time in-between quests that require mandatory wait times from 30 minutes down to 10, they are also lowering the 1m undock feature down to 20 seconds. Bless 'em. Hello gamers, here are the cliffnotes: If the idea of an ARPG (diablo-like game) where you mix and match gear for various age of sail boats plus have factions/region/town building sorta' like Sid Meier's Pirates than this is the game for you. Full review down below. [h1]Good:[/h1] • Has online servers you can host yourself with a public server from the dev always up. Gives you the server code, game won't die in the future. • Community is very friendly, helpful, and drama free (as of writing this, these things often change). • Developer is responsive if not sometimes a bit snarky, aren't we all. • Game has a fair bit of content to go through and if you are into role-based game play MMOs often give you, like tanks - healers - DPS of various types you will like this. • Has great trading mechanics. • Decent enough music, sound design, etc. • Loads of customization for your boat including unlocking loads of cosmetics for free, like the good ol' days. • Very playable offline, online, or both. • Fixes, patches, nerfs, and buffs are reasonable. • Loads of abilities, skills, and more to customize how you play. • No micro-transactions thank the heavens. [h1]Take it or leave it:[/h1] • Dev will personally help you out with a quest and fix if you are stuck. This is also a bad thing because the dev had to do that to begin with. • Some of the base mechanics are confusing, such as ship building, town rising, etc. Once you learn it though it's simpler than you first thought. • There are only 10 total different boats in this game, which is a fair few less than the first Windward. Due to the customization system there is a whole lot more you can do with said boats, so it is a trade off. This is a quality vs quantity problem that could be solved with more boats added in the future to have the best of both worlds. • The over-world sailing is kind of a nothing burger. It isn't bad, it isn't good. It is mostly boring with you watching a little ship graphic sailing around. This could be improved upon by having a small window showing your boat sailing around to at least give you something to look at. • Tutorials are plentiful but do a bad job at explaining some of the harder parts of this game to figure out and the questing tutorials are so bad they should just be rewritten. [h1]BAD:[/h1] • The quest system is esoteric in a very bad way. I am not sure how you are going to get through this without asking loads of questions in-game online, through the discord, or waiting for guides. Semi-impossible to figure out on your own. Very badly designed. • • Additionally all boats past the first 5 boats must be unlocked through this quest system making it compoundingly bad. • The official server tends to fill up fast disallowing for players to try out the town building mechanics online on the main server. • The world gen is kind of sloppy, it's just a fractal map and when you really explore the world it becomes obvious how unnatural everything is. [b]I really want to focus on this next one[/b] • There are a lot of moments that waste your time, such as sailing into a town to do some trading and it puts you in a bad spot, you spend many minutes sailing around looking for a port. Worst still is you gotta often leave while sailing against the wind, thus going twice as slow, to escape. There are mechanics to bypass this via gaining a lot of rep with each faction but this takes dozens of hours and EVEN THEN... When you get to "insta port" that is, when you enter a region you are friendly with you are placed at a dock right away with no sailing, [b]you still have to wait an entire minute before you can "insta' undock" or leave the region.[/b] [i]I cannot stress enough how frustrating the random mini-time sinks in this game are[/i] and the 1 minute timer makes me want to pull my hair out I hate it. It is in the game for seemingly no reason at all. If you are doing frequent trade runs you will waste hours to this over the span of a playthrough. You also will have to wait sometimes up to 30 minutes to do the next story quest because the character "needed time to do X thing" this... I mean I get it, you are telling a story and I fully understand I could just go do some 'raids' etc, but what if I am fully focusing on story progression? This just slams you with up to 2h of wait time during some story missions. [h1]Conclusion for sure[/h1] This game has a ways to go, it feels almost like a polished Beta more than anything but it is still very fun. With some more tweaking, which happens often, I feel like this could become one of the best age of sail games out there. I mean it's an ARPG but ships and pirates and more. Please Aren if you are reading this please remove the 1 minute "region leave" button thing, it is horrible for no reason.

This game does not respect your time. Currently there's a pretty terrible scaling issue with pirates that makes playing solo pretty much unplayable.

Loved the first game, was really looking forward to this, severely disappointed. Quests anywhere but not in the region you are in, wares you have with you can't be sold anywhere, no explanations, and so on. I really tried, but refunded it, it is just pain and no fun.

Windward Horizon takes me back to the days of Patrician, the beloved trading simulation from the 90s. If you enjoyed Patrician’s combination of economic strategy, trade routes, and naval combat, Windward Horizon will feel like a fresh yet familiar experience. In Windward Horizon, you take control of a ship and navigate through a beautifully designed open world. The game’s trading mechanics are solid, allowing you to buy and sell goods, manage resources, and grow your fleet, much like the classic Patrician. The addition of naval combat and exploration adds a modern twist, making each journey feel more dynamic and exciting. The graphics are well-crafted, and the gameplay offers a balance of strategic planning and action, with plenty of opportunities for customization and progression. Whether you’re focused on expanding your trade empire or engaging in sea battles, the game offers a depth that keeps you coming back. If you're a fan of old-school trading sims like Patrician, Windward Horizon brings that nostalgic feel into a new era. It's a solid choice for anyone looking to relive the glory days of trading strategy with a bit more action. https://youtu.be/iCPRjC7EVbM?si=c6PRkbMwVXFSAhot

[b] Updated review after ~36 hours of playtime. Original review below, created at 5.3 hours.[/b] As promised, I came back to give this game a updated review—and after a few small patches and sitting at 36.2 hours now, I’ve got more to say. The dev has pushed out some updates, mostly bug fixes and “balancing” tweaks, but let’s be real: it all feels like slapping a damn bandaid over a gaping wound. Players complained about scaling? Now you can tweak world settings. Players hated the XP penalty from upgrading ships? That’s adjustable too. Instead of actual balancing, it feels like the dev threw up his hands and said “screw it, let the players either break the game or Skyrim-easy-mode it.” (Yes dev, I saw the description.) One update buffed the repair skill (not water barrel), and holy shit, what the hell was that buff? I can drop fog on myself, stop moving, hit repair, and fully heal in a few seconds. The fog’s still there after I’ve fully healed. It’s busted as hell. And if I can do it, so can the AI. I don’t even wanna imagine how broken that is in PvP. Meanwhile, my water barrel—which has 90% of my talent points dumped into it—feels like I'm slapping a wet napkin on my ship. Strategically healing over time gets outclassed by just yeeting fog and repairing everything while the AI does the same. Combat is still trash. Skills hit way harder than cannons, and I still routinely get deleted down to 30-40% HP by a single enemy skill. When you’re up against 4–5 enemies? Don’t even bother—there’s no time to react. No time to fog, no time to think, just dead. Pirate Kings and Captains? Absolute bullshit. You do barely any damage, they pop you down to a sliver of health, then full-heal like they’re playing a different game. Your only hope is to let your AI buddies swarm them while you plink away from the edge of the screen, hoping not to get aggro’d. It’s miserable. Also, I found the most broken and overly busted skill ever seen in this game. My first mate or captain, don't remember who, but one of them gives my volley fire skill an insane 200% penetration, 100% crit chance, and 100% crit damage which allows me to one shot most ships I come across. And those that aren't one shot, I cannot even imagine what it's like to fight them normally. Story-wise? I gave up trying. Dialogue is endless and feels meaningless. I started skipping everything. Only thing I do remember is a dude trying to find his cat... and then banging a girl you were helping. No joke. Here’s what the game hits you with: *You hear noises and murmured whispers coming from behind Alvana's door as you get near it. Moments after your knock, the door cracks open to reveal Alvana with disheveled hair peeking through.* Captain? Now is not a good time. [Continue...] *Before you can reply, you hear Rowdy's gruff voice calling out for her. Seeing your expression, she grins and shrugs.* Sorry. Rowdy and I just... clicked. No hard feeling Vinylsdarkside. [Continue...] *She shuts the door on you, leaving you standing there and wondering how this happened. Oh well. She wasn't that interesting anyway. All those unresolved daddy issues? Who needs to deal with that? You're better off. Yeah, this is for the best.* [Leave] Farewell. Bro. What the fuck is this cope or cuck nonsense? I’ve completed every character’s story (check my achievements), but I’m still locked out of some ships. One ship requires 8 steel, 8 silk, and 12 exceptional quality lumber (25% chance drop from Mahogany btw). But guess what? I don’t have enough storage to even hand over the items to unlock it, so I’m forced to buy another ship—just for storage—so I can unlock a different ship. And I don’t even know if that ship will be better. Let me hand in quest cargo in batches or, better yet, give us a damn cargo vault like people have been asking for. Right now it’s either clog your inventory or throw stuff overboard. It’s dumb. Oh, and trading? Still cheese. I figured it out: buy resources, craft better quality goods, and just sell them back to the same province. Boom, free 100–200g profit per item. Or sail to another province for 200–400g profit... but why bother? That’s how I got to 1.4M gold. And that’s with me staying at tier 3 ships because combat scales with your ship and I didn’t wanna risk making things worse. I’ll be real, the only reason I’ve dumped this many hours into the game is because I stumbled on the player province loop. You grab a "Settle a Province" quest, find a spot with at least 3 resources—or just one really solid one like Mahogany—and build up as many towns as you can. Dump town supplies on them every 12 minutes, and boom, you’re swimming in cash from crafting high-end goods while passively pulling in decent XP from quests. [b] I still don’t recommend this game. [/b] Balancing is a joke – Instead of fixing core issues, the dev just made everything adjustable, letting players break or dumb down their own experience. Combat is still busted – Skills are overpowered, healing is either useless or absurdly OP, and enemy captains are straight-up unfun to fight. Story is pointless – Wall of dialogue with no weight or purpose, and some of it is just plain weird or immersion-breaking. Ship progression is tedious – You need absurd materials and storage just to unlock ships, sometimes requiring you to buy ships you don’t even want. Cargo and trading are clunky – No cargo vault, inventory management is a chore, and trading is exploitable cheese with no real challenge or depth. Multiplayer is at least easy to access – One-click from the menu. Probably the only feature that doesn’t suck. Still not worth recommending – Game’s core systems just aren’t fun or rewarding, and that hasn’t changed after 36 hours of play. [b] Original review. [/b] [b] Played the original Windward and loved it—this one just feels like a downgrade. [/b] I’m not a fan of how ship upgrades work now. In the original, if I remember right, each part had a dedicated slot—ammo, cannon, crew, whatever. Made it simple and clean. This one? You can slap on like four cannons and two crews on the second ship you get. It's... interesting, I guess, but now you're stuck manually comparing every item to figure out what's worth equipping or selling. I don’t remember ever having to work this hard in the first game just to sort my loot. And don’t get me started on the trading. Absolute trash. You end up wasting hours sailing between provinces—or regions, or whatever they’re called—just to sell one item. Like seriously, how the hell do you mess that up? The only reason I can think of is they tried to make trading slightly more profitable? Maybe? But it’s absolutely not worth the pain of sailing halfway across the map, fighting the wind just to try to sell something, and then heading back empty-handed to do it all over again. I’m fine with the open map, though. The old checkerboard layout was nice, scaling difficulty the closer you got to the center—that was a solid system. Now it feels like difficulty is tied to your ship tier. I stomped everything on the starter ship, then immediately got bodied on the next tier up. Damage skill? Useless. Heal skill? Barely tickled the health bar, only gaining 2% health. Meanwhile, the enemy ripped half my ship’s HP off in one hit. There's also some weird armor mechanic now, but hell if I know what it's supposed to be doing. Overall? The first game’s better. Sure, multiplayer was a pain to set up, but at least the core game loop was solid. Haven’t tried co-op in this one yet—and probably won’t. Not gonna tell my buddies to drop nearly $20 on a game that’s gonna bore 'em to sleep. I’d love to see this game improve and build on what made the first one great, but right now? It’s just not worth the time or money. That said, I’ve got high hopes they’ll make some solid changes or balance tweaks down the line. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on updates, and if they fix this mess, I won’t hesitate to come back and change my review.

Kind of OK game but damn the pirates are just annoying. It's like that one mosquito at 2 AM in your bedroom. Doesn't do much but FOR SOME REASON, if there is a pirate ship ANYWHERE on your screen, well, you better go kill it or wait for a horde of friendly incompetent NPC ships to take it down. And here, have some repetitive anti-chill combat music while you are locked out of skill trees, town interfaces and what-not. Pirate dead? Good! Now wait another 10 seconds while we let the music fade until you can resume your activity. Just hurry up because another pirate ship is entering your screen in 5... 4... 3...

Visually, this game is stunning. Sailing feels smooth. The world is vibrant. The atmosphere is genuinely fun to be in, and early gameplay especially is engaging. When combat clicks, it really clicks. It has that fast, arcadey feel reminiscent of [i]Sid Meier's Pirates![/i] and that’s not just nostalgia talking. It’s a great direction for a naval game: quick, punchy combat instead of bogged-down turn-based nonsense. But then... the weirdness sets in. It’s a game that could’ve nailed the genre been the modern [i]Pirates![/i] we all wanted—but instead, it gets weirdly self-defeating in its design choices. - Want to note, that even though it's suggested that the game is built "with coop in mind" the game is in fact heavily built around multiplayer as a focus- which is why a lot of the systems and design choices are shallow, lacking or bad. Eg. XvX. Thus, these are unlikely to be changed/fixed or built upon. [h2]The Game Feels Great... Until It Doesn’t[/h2] None of the issues are deal-breakers in isolation. But they stack. [list] [*]The lack of failure states. [*]Unbalanced XvX combat. [*]An economy that collapses under its own systems. [/list] It creates a spiral where things that feel solid at first begin to unspool and start undermining each other. There are other things that I see others mention that I don't think are a massive issue, like no Pause feature- there's no failure states, it doesn't need one. Pirates constantly interrupting the player- this was more of an issue early game, that solved itself later, I'm unsure why. [h2]Item System: A Beautiful Mess[/h2] There’s a Diablo-style equipment system for your ship, and I love that idea. You can equip different sails, cannons, crew, captains, etc.—each with randomised stats. Hull, Armour, Accuracy, Diplomacy, Repair, Mobility... it’s all in there. But it’s also where I feel half the game’s balance goes to die. The scaling feels off. Really off, and I think it's partly due to this system and the level scaling. Ships sometimes randomly one-shot you, even if you’re built tanky and mobile. Meanwhile, if you invest in survivability (Repair/Armor/Diplomacy/Mobility like I have), your damage suffers so much that you can’t actually win fights. You become a tanky pushover. This is due to the game's inherent items [i]"Kiss-Curse"[/i] design, where if you take X stats, you are sacrificing stats elsewhere, so you can't have Damage [b]and[/b] survivability. Sure, you could swap out builds, run a damage-first cannon/captain combo for some fights and mobility for others but let’s be honest: that isn’t fun. It’s busywork. The result is that the system becomes a tug-of-war with no real payoff. The only viable build? Probably just max damage and hope for the best. This is made worse by the level scaling. If you buy a new ship, all the enemies upgrade ships. If you level- the enemies level, so it feels bad and you feel pigeon holed. [h2]Province Combat Mode: What Were They Thinking?[/h2] The province siege mode (XvX combat) is [i]the[/i] most baffling design in the game. You’re locked into it for 10+ minutes. Always. Doesn’t matter how powerful you are. Capture every point instantly? Kill the entire enemy fleet three times over? Too bad. You’re here for at least 10 minutes, champ. Only [i]after[/i] that timer do respawn limits activate. Then it’s 15 lives per side or 60 if you’re in a bigger ship. Why? No clue. There’s no player agency here. Just a chore. Why isn’t this mode based on lives from the [i]start[/i]? I don't think the mode is inherently bad, it's the fact you are stuck inside of it for 10 minutes regardless of what you do. Which means you can quite literally go AFK for 10 minutes- unironically. [h2]Failure States: Missing in Action[/h2] There are none. No, seriously: [list] [*]Die in combat? Respawn, lose nothing. [*]Crew upkeep? Doesn’t exist. [*]Provinces starving? They just... wait patiently. [/list] Everything just stalls. There’s no cost to failure, so there’s no pressure. Not even a hardcore mode. You’re never forced to respond to crisis. The world just kind of... keeps going. Which feeds into the economy problem. [h2]The Economy: Cool Concept, Poor Execution[/h2] At first glance, the economy is really impressive. Resources move. Provinces produce and consume. When one stops producing, another suffers. It feels dynamic. It fooled me at first—in a good way. But over time, you realize: [list] [*]Provinces don’t produce enough to meet their own needs. [*]Food shortages are constant. Beverages vanish instantly. [*]Growth never reverses. If a province grows, it never shrinks. [/list] So instead of a living economy, you get a one-way resource black hole. Provinces keep growing and demanding more, but there’s no correction mechanism. It’s not that the economy is bad—it’s that there are no counterweights. [h2]Province Management: Weirdly Limiting[/h2] When you found a province, it feels like you should own it but you don’t, not really. You can build a workshop but you don't own the resources it produces- it's not Mount & Blade, just a choice. You also can collect taxes but those taxes are tiny and only paid out when you physically visit the settlement. They’re more symbolic than impactful. It feels less about running your own settlement and more about trying to clean up the mess made by AI-generated chaos. You also can't create your own faction, you create like a "mini faction" within a pre-existing faction, so you wont see ships sailing your flags, or your own settlements giving you that "I own this shit" vibe. Existing provinces? You can’t touch them. You can’t assign or replace their workshops. You can’t guide their development. So when your world seed ends up with four Clothiers and barely any food production, there’s nothing to do but shrug and work around it. Why can’t I reshape a dysfunctional province? Why can’t I spend gold or use influence to fix its purpose? I like and have played Patrician, and Port Royale- the fact that I can't buy and run my own Workshops in a game that revolves around you shaping and profitting off of an economy just misses. There’s so much potential here but no real agency. It’s a sandbox you’re stuck reacting to, not one you can actually shape. [h2]Final Thoughts[/h2] There’s definitely more, there [i]is[/i] more, but this is what stuck with me most. This game [i]wants[/i] to be brilliant. And it gets [i]so close[/i]. The pieces are all here: exploration, dynamic trade, RPG-like gear, active combat. But the systems don’t mesh. They pull in different directions. And where there should be weight and consequence, there’s nothing. I don’t hate it. Far from it. I’ve sunk quite a few hours into it. And I get it, it’s indie. I don’t know the size of the team, and even if it’s a solo dev, what’s here is respectable. But it’s like brushing against the arsehair of gold. You can see what it could be. It just misses on enough fronts that I can’t recommend it, not for someone looking for a true evolution of [i]Sid Meier’s Pirates![/i], or for someone hoping for an improvement on that legacy. It’s close. Frustratingly close. But not quite.