Pirates of the Burning Sea

A friend of mine pointed out that FLS' only success to date is the game called "Rails Across America", in his opinion basically an updated rip off from old "Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon".

Now, after trying POTBS his opinion was that the game is a rip off from "Sid Meier's Pirates".

If that is so and FLS simply pinched two of Sid Meier's concepts it would help explaining the dry approach to POTBS, lack of creativity, and failure to make a workable game.  

I thought it was an interesting point.

to answer your title:

yes i remember Sid "the god" Meier.

those who dont remember him, should have a spanked bottom

Originally posted by gruminator

to answer your title:

 

yes i remember Sid "the god" Meier.

those who dont remember him, should have a spanked bottom

Definitelly! :D

I have not played Sid Meier's Pirates (yet).  Are there great similarities between this game and that one?  Did  Sid's Pirates game have a good story line or was it a sandbox type game?

Sid Meier's pirates was actually better

Last I heard about the venerable Sid, he was thinking about making a Civilization MMO...

This game is essentially an MMO version of Sid Meier's Pirates. Which is certainly not a bad thing.

Also anyone rember a game called "Sea Dogs" from years ago? PoTBS is even more similar to that.

Yes, this was a "take off" of Sid's Pirate's game. H owever, it is a badly done knock off version. Had they adopted Sid's design, especially for boarding, it would have been a MUCH better game. Had they made missions a bit more solo friendly, It would have been a much better game. Had they had servers with much more limited PVP it would have been a much better game. Sadly, this was not the case, and the game will retain a very small segment of the MMO audience,which is too bad because it really did have potential.

It does bring up memories of "Pirates", but it's definately not just a copy of that game.  You have to take into consideration that we're talking about a VERY specific genre and game type here.  How much variation can you have in 2 games about being pirates in the Caribbean (at least one that has SOME historical accuracy)?  And as someone said, even making an MMO version of Pirates isn't necessarily a bad thing.  I can agree that there are elements they could improve on, like making the boarding process more interesting.  But I don't think most of the quests are difficult for a solo player, at least up until around level 15.  And the PvP seems comfortably limited to me.  There are only some circles of PvP areas on the map, and these can be avoided by a player by simply going around them.  Granted, you can't take a shipment to a contended city in turmoil, but that makes complete sense to me.  What merchant in their right mind would sail into a harbor beset by cannon fire and unrest?

Originally posted by brihtwulf

  What merchant in their right mind would sail into a harbor beset by cannon fire and unrest?

One who has seen the port in which he builds ships in that red ring for a week + on end and has no choice because resources are spread out in such a way as to make in necessary.  On active servers the entire antilles can be permanently locked in red rings.   Your port does not have to actualy be the port being contested to be in the red ring it just has to be in the area.   Resources required to build ships such as deep harbours and lignum vitae and the resources necessary to make say brass (anything that goes in a ship beyond a certain size and level .. ) are located in those areas.  It is in fact possible to be locked in an almost permanent pvp zone and just have to sail through it because ports nearby are contested in such as manner as the keep the area "perma red" as some of us call it.   If your map doesn't look like someone spilled their ketchup bottle on it its due to the fact that the server population is far to low and everyone has taken a break after a month of keeping each other in perma red zones.