All of the pirates in Hooded Horse city builder Corsair Cove hate me because I can't make them eyepatches fast enough
Stories of pirates are full of swashbuckling, daring-do, and grog. But Limbic Entertainment's city builder Corsair Cove reveals those hijinx are only a sideshow: logistics is the star. As the proud owner of a tropical island surrounded by high seas dotted with patrolling Spanish galleons, pirate hunters, and kraken, your focus is squarely on building the infrastructure to support pillaging, rather than taking a firsthand approach to the scallywaggery.
To keep your pirate populace happy, initially they'll only need basic food, drink, and shelter. In time, though, they'll start asking for finer things, like leather boots, jolly roger flags, and turtle soup. All of which you'll need to produce by rinsing the resource deposits on your island. Keep them happy, however, and they will set out on the ocean, crewing your vessels, and risking their lives against the threats that circle your enclave.
As a fan of the Anno series, the first hours of Corsair Cove were enthralling, but the sheen did begin to rub off after eight hours or so. Right about the time my pirates started to hate me.
Vertical Growth and Complex Logistics
In Corsair Cove, instead of spreading your town out, as in other city builders, you must construct upwards. Space is at a premium on your island, with only a few flat beaches and level clifftops. That's not an issue for your pirates, though, as these are people who spend half their seadog lives climbing rigging and swinging on ropes between ships.
As your city grows, you'll litter the cliffs around your island with cobbled together cabins, galleys, sawmills, all connected together by rope bridges, ziplines, and rickety pulley-operated elevators. It's a canny choice artistically, making Corsair Cove look distinct from everything else in Hooded Horse's growing catalogue of city builders, but it has function, too.
As you sprawl across the island, exploiting the land's natural deposits, you'll quickly find that for your pirate sanctuary to thrive, you must optimise the pathing between your resource mines, refineries, production facilities, and distribution areas. If you have a woodcutter on one side of the cove and a lumberyard on the other, you could have your workers skirt the cliffs on a path, but it's much more direct to string a rope bridge across the bay.
This is how Corsair Cove becomes increasingly complex. The more buildings you unlock and the more resources you need to collect, the further you spread across the island, and the further your goods have to travel. Limbic have done a great job of communicating efficiency, showing the route your items take between buildings, highlighted in green, yellow, or red to indicate how good (or bad) a job you're doing.
If your pirates' satisfaction hits zero it will start a timer. And if you don't satisfy their need before it reaches zero then your whole island's cohesion will fall. If that hits zero then it's game over for your camp. Early in the game, dissatisfaction is usually a fast problems to fix: you've built too many resource structures, but not enough shelters for the workers, or you're not producing enough food for all the hungry mouths, or your grog supplies are low.
It's only when you start building more advanced ships – ones which are crewed by specialist sailors with fancy tastes – that things get challenging. After making do with a single ship for a few hours, I decided to expand my fleet. With each pier only able to support a single ship, I built a series of pirate camps to expand my settlement over more of the island, constructed additional docks, and set my workers to building three more vessels.
Each ship's crew demanded special goods – boots, eyepatches, hard tack, rum. While I had buildings producing these goods on the island, none of the buildings were placed with thought to the future, and so they were nowhere near the piers where the ships and their demanding crew were docked. The satisfaction in the pirate camps began to drop as my picaroons, bombardiers, and buccaneers stared into their empty holds.
The challenge is not just making the goods and getting them to the pirates, but doing it at a rate that they don't get through them all before you've been able to restock. Currently my island is a constant stream of alerts, telling me my pirates are unhappy.
Дурик
