This game is great. Brilliant little design, simple with a decent amount of things to do despite only using three buttons, and highly cathartic.
That said, it is not without its issues.
Now some might call this nitpicking, but there are a lot of small "What ifs" and "Whens" that drag on this game.
Namely; there is definitely a need for war to be reworked; as once you are at war with someone you lose all hopes of making use of any of their captains and such. This makes sense; who would work for someone who's at war with you? But then, what if you win? you've gone around the map and taken out each and every one of their bases. there's nothing left. Well... now you can't make peace because there's no-one to make peace with, you have a large amount of population from all the bases you captured, but nothing to show for it. That makes... war entirely un-fulfilling and straight up harms your gameplay. there's just no reason to do it.
Further to that; if you enjoy making sprawling cities - or cities of any kind - losing captains because you're aligned with one faction severely harms you as well, because it makes it impossible to keep up your trade routes.
What is really needed is for there to be make-up captains, where if some captains refuse to work for you, say because you wiped out a faction, you gain either more resources for each of your existing captains to make them more versatile or alternatives that are aligned towards you.

It's a matter of content, primarily; because this is an absolutely lovely little game but as i've found out quickly after about three hours of gameplay, i'm pretty much soft-locked to the point I can't really do anything else because there aren't enough captains, because trading requires captains and getting those resouces to and from an area requires more captains.

There is another potential way to solve this issue: Allowing captains to have their own routes rather than a single point A to point B. if you can assigne three or four harbours to a single captain, rather than assigning a captain to a single port, you would find that a lot of the issues caused by this are reduced. But unfortunately, that isn't how it works at the moment.

Overall, right now, I'd call this a 7/10. There's room for improvement, but what we have right now is lovely - but because of the flaws, you end up with only 3-4 hours in any one save before running out of things to do.

This game is great. Brilliant little design, simple with a decent amount of things to do despite only using three buttons, and highly cathartic. That said, it is not without its issues. Now some might call this nitpicking, but there are a lot of small "What ifs" and "Whens" that drag on this game. Namely; there is definitely a need for war to be reworked; as once you are at war with someone you lose all hopes of making use of any of their captains and such. This makes sense; who would work for someone who's at war with you? But then, what if you win? you've gone around the map and taken out each and every one of their bases. there's nothing left. Well... now you can't make peace because there's no-one to make peace with, you have a large amount of population from all the bases you captured, but nothing to show for it. That makes... war entirely un-fulfilling and straight up harms your gameplay. there's just no reason to do it. Further to that; if you enjoy making sprawling cities - or cities of any kind - losing captains because you're aligned with one faction severely harms you as well, because it makes it impossible to keep up your trade routes. What is really needed is for there to be make-up captains, where if some captains refuse to work for you, say because you wiped out a faction, you gain either more resources for each of your existing captains to make them more versatile or alternatives that are aligned towards you. It's a matter of content, primarily; because this is an absolutely lovely little game but as i've found out quickly after about three hours of gameplay, i'm pretty much soft-locked to the point I can't really do anything else because there aren't enough captains, because trading requires captains and getting those resouces to and from an area requires more captains. There is another potential way to solve this issue: Allowing captains to have their own routes rather than a single point A to point B. if you can assigne three or four harbours to a single captain, rather than assigning a captain to a single port, you would find that a lot of the issues caused by this are reduced. But unfortunately, that isn't how it works at the moment. Overall, right now, I'd call this a 7/10. There's room for improvement, but what we have right now is lovely - but because of the flaws, you end up with only 3-4 hours in any one save before running out of things to do.