Sid Meier's Pirates – In-depth (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Sid Meier's Pirates – In-depth (2017)

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168 pointsbenbreen72 comments

Ahhhh... The Pirates!

I had a brilliant idea to sign up for the local library (that was 20 minutes away by foot no less) and to get an A2-sized 3 cm thick atlas just to play this stupid game! I distinctly remember walking back, it was in the evening, already dark, clear skies, freshly snowed, -25C, the snow was making that squeaky sound and I was vividly imaging all the gold I will now be hoarding with a shovel thanks to this nice little trick... lol. Good times, not a care in the world.

Beautiful memory, thanks for sharing.

I remember how I caught the silver train in Cartahena, most of my pirates didn’t survive the onslaught. So when the time came to divide the plunder each pirate would get ~ -16000 gold, I immediately recognized that was 16-bit wrap around. Sadly nobody wanted me to leed the next journey so I retired as a freaking rich pirate.

A weird quirk in the game is that it's sometimes useful to cull your crew when they're unhappy- so you don't have to spend a few months idle after dividing the plunder.

I didn't play the original, but the 2004 remake was amazing. Particularly in an fps-saturated market.

the mini-games (dancing, the land battle strategy game) kind of ruin that version. it needs a modern version.

I liked the land battles at the time, though they were definitely limited compared to its contemporaries. Dancing and sword fighting were unfun for sure. A modernization would be awesome, the closest experiences for me have been AC Black Flag and Rebel Galaxy.

What's the Civ VII dev team doing these days?

Trying to finish Civ VII.

AC Black Flag remains the most fun I ever had playing a video game

It still blows my mind that Ubisoft didn't really continue that sort of Open World seafaring genre at all

I get that there's probably not a market for that game yearly but I'd play an iteration on Black Flag every few years

They did spend years working on a non Assassins Creed age of piracy game, Skull and Bones, but it ended up as a bad live service game.

They tried with Skull and Bones, but it didn’t hit well. Closest I have found is Sea of Thieves.

I dont know. When I first heard about their game, I expected a neat pirate ship combat sandbox game, but instead it turned out to be a lame ass arcade shooter.

I dont recall seeing anyone happy about this, outside white knights on reddit.

It seems like there are a lot of niche game concepts and genres that are falling to the wayside as the major devs and publishers are more interested in dumbing things down for a larger, more casual (or in some cases more competitive audience). Hell Civ7 is sitting at mostly negative recent reviews after pulling that shit.

You're thinking of some different game, no idea what one tbh

Assassin's Creed Black Flag is definitely not an arcade shooter though

> What's the Civ VII dev team doing these days?

Writing the last 80% of Civ VII I should think. I've never played such an unfinished version of Civ at launch.

Probably the iPad port.

There’s Yakuza Pirates if you haven’t tried it out.

I can't help but wonder if those parts of the game kind of work as a dirty bit, a fat friend, that makes the rest of the game feel that much better.

Port Royale (and many other games) kind of take the core aspects of Pirates (open world, combat, trade, pinnace to ship of the line, retirement, piracy/privateering, and so on) and then try to expand on it allowing one to operate multiple fleets, developing cities, and many other such things - with no particularly annoying aspect. And they're enjoyable, but somehow don't come anywhere near Pirates, and I can't think of any particular reason why not.

Actually come to think of it, most of every great game I can think of also had some really really terrible aspects. For a more popular example, the combat in Skyrim is some of the worst in any RPG. But perhaps these failings make the rest of the game shine that much more.

> For a more popular example, the combat in Skyrim is some of the worst in any RPG

The combat in Skyrim is much better than Oblivion though, and light years ahead of Morrowind

Honestly? I kind of prefer it to something like Witcher 3, too. It's much more fast paced and dynamic because you are locked into first person and you have to be aware of your surroundings and such. Whereas Witcher 3, once you learn how to beat a particular enemy you can pretty much just do the same every time without fail, for the next 80-100 hours

My impression of the combat in Skyrim got off to a shaky start because my first weapon was a thumping great two-handed warhammer, and I didn't realise how much that was slowing me down. I just thought it was rubbish and hard to control.

Name me one bad part of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.

Thumb blisters?

Dancing wasn't the greatest (though by no means does it ruin the game), but the land battles were awesome and made the game significantly better by their inclusion. I would love a new version of Pirates to see what they do with it (though maybe I shouldn't, considering how badly they ruined Civ 7), but the 2004 version is still incredible to this day.

My memory may be wrong, but weren't the sequence of dance moves in the original manual? I think it was a form of anti-piracy- though playing it enough you could memorise the dance.

At least in the remake, I think the dance minigame was randomized, but you could pretty easily play it perfectly. The dance partner does a little hand gesture to show you what to do next, and then you just hit he key in time with the music.

Yep, I believe the original didn't have the hand gestures.

> I think it was a form of anti-piracy- though playing it enough you could memorise the dance.

The antipiracy measure in Civilization was possibly the weakest ever devised.

After playing the game for a while (so the player gets a demo), it will bring up a screen that displays the image of a technology and asks you to choose the prerequisites to that technology. You answer by selecting one of four multiple-choice options listing technology names.

So right off the bat you have a 25% chance of passing the check.

The intent is that you consult the manual, which lists the prerequisites for every technology and also displays the images. But you don't have to do that. You can consult the in-game Civilopedia, which does the same thing. (You can't do that while you're being asked to pass the check, but nothing stops you from doing it in advance.) Or, of course, you're likely to have the answer memorized, because this is a fundamental part of the way the game works.

Quizzing you with information from the manual which was also regularly relied on in gameplay, IIRC, was common in MicroProse games of the time (before they started using actual copy protection measures on the disks), not unique to Civ; as I recall, some of their combat simulators did similar things with weapon stats, vehicle silhouettes, etc.

I have fond memories of the "Dial-a-Pirate" [1] and similar copy protection wheels of Lucas Arts Games such as Monkey Island. I think I have them somewhere in a box.

[1] https://oldgames.sk/codewheel/secret-of-monkey-island-dial-a...

We didn't have the dial-a-pirate wheel, because the owner of the game kept it. So we used a handwritten table my mother compiled from the wheel.

For LOOM, which was just a chart of arbitrary symbols, we had a xeroxed copy of the chart.

Sid’s biography is a great read if you are interested in the details behind these things.

What, did he intentionally sabotage the copy protection at MicroProse?

The 2004 Wii port had no land strategy but made some other compromises

imbriglicated

In 2004 I owned only my laptop, with no full size keyboard -- but the sword fighting minigame really benefits from a numeric keypad. And so I bought a USB numeric keypad, which is an odd little accessory which, every 5 years or so, proves handy for some reason or other.

And here we are in a world where mini and tenkeyless (TKL) keyboards are popular as a way to keep the two hands closer together on a desk.

Thing is, the keypad isn't used 24/7 (though it was great for multiplayer on same keyboard), and the mentioned variant is portable. This allows flexility. For example, (assuming right handed mouse here) it can be put on the right side of the mouse instead of the left. Or it could be used on an armchair of a sofa. It is perhaps a cheap one, not caring about dirt or wear, but you could buy a mechanical one or a physically more nice one.

If people can use one Azeron Cyborg with one hand (or two with two hands) as a way against carpal tunnel syndrome then 80% and 60% keyboards are likely just a hack to keep backwards compatibility whereas the better long term solution is likely a proper alternative (with e.g. chording).

That said, I'm happy with my 80% (not with the 60% due to it missing arrow keys which I sometimes use, for example with a shell). But vertical mouse with a lot of buttons are rare (Azeron Cyro is an exception), so for now I'm using a Logitech Vertical MX.

They'll have to pry my numpad from my cold dead hands. If you're entering numbers with any regularity there's no comparison.

Oh I'm sure that's true! I've never had to do enough data entry to learn the muscle memory for it, so for people like me it's just perpetually in the way.

I'm rocking an MX Mechanical Mini and I'm overall quite satisfied with it, though it's frustrating that the single-touch switching between multiple paired receivers doesn't take the MX-series mouse with it; this seems like really obvious functionality to have left on the table. At the same time, it doesn't seem like any of the other premium/gaming peripheral makers have tried to integrate anything like this. It's just 1:1 peripheral to receiver dongle, and "get a KVM" if you have more than one device to control.

Full keyboards with numpad are great but I wish the numpad was on the left side of the keyboard so that it doesn't fall between the alphabetical keys and the mouse (right handed). I always feel my right arm travels unnecessarily long distances to switch between the keyboard and the mouse.

For the original on my PC, I remember finding the sword fighting minigame hard to control. Unless I used a cutlass: the issue I had was in the fine grained control. So I built my sword fighting style around the coarser, heavier damage of the cutlass.

I wish they'd remake it for various platforms.

I liked the beginning of the 2004 Pirates!, but after a while the gameplay is too repetitive. In the end I found the game boring, and I think it could have used a slightly more realistic simulation of the ships and their battles - I remember that I was able to outmaneuver cannon balls after they were fired from the enemy ship - they moved so unrealistically slow...

The sword play with maps does get a bit repetitive, but it is a lot of fun and harder on harder difficulties

The difficulty system is boring too - the game was either way too easy for me, or I couldn't win a single sword fight.

Original was a bit short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKzjXCZfOH0

I loved this on the C64. This was my first game where I could explore a whole world (or a part off).

Also it left me with still surprisingly good knowledge of the geography of the Karibik ;-). Everyone who played this knows where e.g. St. Nevis is.

I absolutely agree! Pirates was my favorite game on the Amiga 500. You could really imagine being in the Caribbean. This was also one of my first exposures to classical music [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71NaLtFuiFo.

> The original Pirates came out in 1987, written by Sid Meier for the Commodore 64, using the BASIC programing language.

What the? BASIC!!! Astonishing that you could develop and publish a successful C64 game using BASIC.

It was not all BASIC. It used a number of machine code subroutines called from the BASIC with SYS. I made some half-hearted attempts at making changes to it when I was a kid but quickly got frustrated. I think because some of the machine code was located in the BASIC memory area, and so it took only very minor changes for things to get messed up.

Ok. So the article is not being entirely factual by saying it was coded in BASIC.

That was a common way to code in BASIC on the commodore 64. It's not 100% in BASIC, sure, but you can get it to list the program contents on the READY prompt. "8-bit show and tell" has a YouTube video on it.

I just posted the link to the 8-bit show and tell video, right before seeing your comment. I agree. The bulk of the logic of the game seems to be BASIC, with the bits that'd be too slow otherwise sped up with machine code.

No, not entirely, but you'd have needed to poke around a bit (pun intended - not sorry) to realise - if you stop it (I think just RUN STOP + RESTORE was sufficient at the right spots in the game, but if not, a freezer cartridge would make it trivial) and LIST, you get a huge BASIC listing, so a lot of it is BASIC. Here's a Youtube video going through some of it [1]. Especially at the end he lists a large chunk and you'll see there aren't a lot of SYS calls to machine code so it's not surprising people whould think so. In the comments to the Youtube video someone made this statement - I don't know whether or not it's accurate, but it seems plausible (you probably could do much of that in BASIC too, but especially the scrolling would likely be really slow and janky):

> It is mainly the text screens that are programmed in BASIC. The battles are all in machine code, including the sword battles, the ship sailing and the ship battles, the drawing of the terrain and the men walking on the land; basically anything that involved reading the joystick input and displaying sprites is all programmed in machine code and are called by SYS routines from BASIC. I spend many hours exploring the code and hacking the game by changing variables and memory locations.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJOjSQ0yv8U

> As legendary as Civilization was, who's playing the original anymore when so many have come after it?

Me! I love the original civ.

Several years ago I went back and played a game to fully develop the castle, something I never achieved as a child.

It's easier when you know the rules of the game.

I played a bunch of Civ 1, but the newer ones are just too complicated for me. Like, at some point I tried Civ V (with the expansion pack) and there's just so much _stuff_. World Congress? Civics? Great Missionaries? How am I supposed to fit all of this together into a coherent strategy? I ended up mostly doing random stuff with many of the mechanics, which made the thing eventually not much fun, and I don't think I ended up completing a single game.

Give them a try without any of the expansions/DLC, if you want a "simpler"/leaner experience. One of the big complaints you'll see for every new iteration of Civ is how parts from the previous one are missing, which is usually fixed through DLCs later on. So this might be right up your alley (or at least closer to it).

The biggest problem I have with Pirates is the difficulty scaling

Once you start to really succeed at the game it starts to push you up the difficulty ladder with each iteration. Some things are only available on higher difficulties, but the timing in the minigames becomes inhumanly difficult to keep up with.

I'm a long time gamer and my reflexes are pretty good, but I could never keep up with the higher difficulties. It was missing a difficulty sweet spot for me, where the difficulty I was on was too easy, and the difficulty above was near impossible.

No, you misunderstand. As you get older or sustain injuries in the game, your reflexes become slower. Also, if you are outnumbered, your reflexes are artificially lowered. So in effect, you can't win anymore and need to change strategies. For example, by shooting up a ship and waiting for them to strike their colors rather than boarding for a sword fight. Consequently, if you haven't taken out the other pirates while young-ish, it becomes impossible. Some swords are faster than others, too.

I didn't say it didn't make sense

It just wasn't very fun and it was too difficult to really engage with past that point

I played the heck out of the Mac version in the 1980s. I was only able to max out the score once, on a perfect run with the stars aligned. The key tactic was to delay the relative rescues until very late in the game, and to find one treasure per relative - that is with just 1/4 of the map. I had basically memorized the game's bitmap of the Caribbean. I suppose if you tried it today, you'd probably look for a data-mined version online.

This brought back so many memories. I loved this game on the Amiga in the early 1990's. Trying to work decipher the intent of the game, without the ability to research it on the internet was really challenging. The graphics were "good enough" to inspire imagination about the characters. I loved it.

But.... i never worked out the intent of the sun height measurer. :/

It was explained in the manual, if you didn't warez the game. :-) (I looked it up many years later, you can find the manual online these days.) But it's not that useful, since it only gives you latitude and only a rough idea at that. IIRC, if you have “skill at navigation”, the sun moves a bit slower, which makes it easier to get a good measurement of the peak.

> It was explained in the manual, if you didn't warez the game. :-)

No Comment. :`(

I did not play the original but the Gold! revision makes me think of idyllic watercolor imagery and Bach; e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTALJO2COPk

Pirates IRC is based on Sid Meier's Pirates to an extent. If you're still on IRC, it's worth playing. https://www.piratesirc.com/

In contrast to Pirates IIRC, which is me trying to remember the name of that one Sid Meier's game

as opposed to Pirates Aye Aye Arr Sea, which is me doing some basic word association

ahhh fond memories of playing the original.

i had no idea they did a re-release of it.. might have to have a look at that..

There's two remakes to try: 1993 and 2004. I actually prefer the 1993 remake/update to the original.

Funnily enough, the girl looks almost like a mirrored-and-modified copy of the protagonist.

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