Once again, I'm left wanting a "meh" button instead of a thumbs up or down...
This isn't so much a bad game as it is the complete stagnation of two different good series. As someone who loved Patrician III, I can say that this game basically just copy-pastes most of the good ideas from that game, dumbed some of them down or made you arbitrarily incapable of trading trading certain goods until you unlocked them, and went piddling on ahead with them.
Like Patrician, you basically just get a boat to buy low and sell high repeatedly until you can afford to buy more boats or build a business that lets you make things directly for less price than buying them, then turning around and selling them for even more money you can use to buy more stuff to make MORE money... Like Patrician, if you're the sort of person who likes managing an empire, and seeing your assets grow and grow while you build up towards even larger steps of growth, this can be fun. This system is dumbed down compared to Patrician, however, with less interconnected supply lines and with prices much more strictly tied to an "average" price to the point where you don't need to do anything but look for whether something has two or more green bars before you buy it and only sell when it has no green bars.
To this, it adds Port Royale mechanics that make no sense in a game supposedly about the RISE of Venice. Venice rose in the 9th Century, due to its heavy trading with the Byzantine Empire, but the game starts during the period of the fall of Venice after Constantinople was conquered. Why focus a game on the "rise of Venice" on a period where they were actually declining?
Because that's when cannons were brought to Europe, and Kalypso didn't want to have to rethink their pirate combat system to work with ballistas...
Additionally, enjoy such traditional Venetian activities as collecting pirate maps to search for buried treasure that totally aren't just ripped straight out of their pirate-themed Port Royale.
Combat is poor, but this is pretty par for the course for naval combat. There is almost no strategy in a battle with few units on a featureless plane and only a few attacks to choose from. Add to this, however, that any ship you aren't manually controlling (one at a time) will flagrantly disobey your wishes, and charge headlong at the wrong enemy (no control on who it attacks) even when you want them to retreat. You can, however, tell your other ships you want to fight solo, and it's bizarrely much easier to win fights unscathed when outnumbered 5-to-1 than even odds. Further, the fire arcs are TINY, (and slightly behind your ship, so you often have to be sailing slightly away from the enemy to hit them), so you have to get EXTREMELY precise with aiming, but the only way to steer is to right click somewhere on the ocean you want the ship to go, and hope your ship interprets that as going the same angle you wanted it to go. The game doesn't tell you this, but merely left clicking fires cannons (instead of having to click a ship, which meant juggling two places your mouse needed to be at the same time), but you still may want to just repeatedly pause and unpause until you're sure you're near the "green ring" before firing. Don't think that combat is difficult because of this, however, because it's most certainly not. The AI is blindingly stupid, and will follow a predictable pattern of sailing directly at you until they get within a certain distance before turning to broadside to actually fire. You can simply sail away until it triggers this charge at you, turn broadside at them, fire when they get within range, and turn away to create more distance before they can manage to get to broadside and fire back, forcing them to chase you again. There is no limit to the size of the battlefield (no shore in spite of it being painted on the skybox), so you can kite enemies forever. Fire chain shot until they have no sails and are helpless. When no enemy has sails, canister shot them to tiny crews and then board to ensure you capture basically every ship that ever fights you (besides maybe galleys, where it doesn't matter if you shred sails) and sell them for massive profits. It's the most tedious, but most profitable part of the game. You CAN auto-resolve battle, but that just gets your ships sunk, and auto-resolve never captures ships, so it's a choice between either your patience or your profits. Also, because of the fact that combat is best performed out-maneuvering your opponents, the giant carracks that are presented as the "best ships" are actually some of the worst, while tiny but maneuverable barks that are the third ship you get in the game are the best combatants.
The game also completely lacks even the stakes that even Patrician managed to have. You have "rivals" in Rise of Venice, but they don't rival you in any meaningful way. This isn't a 4X where territory they take is territory you are shut out of, the "rivals" are just other random ships with colored flags that trade and build things, occasionally getting to a good deal before you did. Since the Patrician-style mechanics where all developments help improve economic development and "rising tides lift all boats" are in play, however, the existence of your rivals actually helps you, instead of hurting you. When you can't afford to keep pumping money into expanding housing, the rivals occasionally will, and that just creates a larger market for your trading empire to profit off of. Likewise, this isn't even a race to be doge first, those other guys are just THERE. They hypothetically can sabotage you, but only do so if you drop relations with them, and that only happens if you sabotage them, first. They have no personality, and there's not even any clear reason WHY these three other random yahoos are your rivals rather than any other random trader. Well, no, it IS clear - because "rivals" are just slots for multiplayer players, so in singleplayer, the bots replacing rivals are there, but they have essentially no relevance to the game outside being somewhat more likely to build housing and industry.
Add to this lovely quest-breaking bugs, where you can complete a quest, but still fail it because the game doesn't recognize your success until time runs out, and you've got a very frustrating experience.
This is a game that should have taken tried-and-true mechanics into a new setting to make something new and interesting, but instead, it's just a Frankenstein's monster with no identity of its own since these pieces of existing games were cobbled together with no rhyme or reason. It certainly can be fun, as I wouldn't have played it this long if I didn't still love the basic premise behind the series, but it's fun because of what was done better in other games. The city building and trade route management was better in the now MUCH cheaper Patrician III. If you like the piracy and combat, you should be playing Port Royale, because your opportunities for piracy are severely limited.
