1602 A.D.

wildly inconsistent resource management. I'll have plenty of food and resources for my populace and then all of a sudden, without warning, it's all gone and everyone is destroying their house in frustration. For some reason, your settlers take building resources from you...? Very hard to have a handle on your in- and out-flow of resources and money since there is no record or indication of time, so your balance sheet is unspecified. I just feel like there's no sense of control over anything. In some maps you simply don't have access to certain resources that are required, such as: iron for cannons. You don't have what you need for basic equipment until late in the game, by which time your opponents seem to have everything they need and are expanding smoothly. until you have cannons late-game, you cannot outfit new ships with a means of defense, and until you can do that you can't effectively connect settlements on more than one island because pirates will stomp you after a few minutes of being in the water.

repairing ships requires advanced structures you won't have until late-game. The pirates automatically regenerate, appear out of nowhere, and are about as strong as your initial ship. It's a foregone conclusion that you will lose your first ship bc no matter where it's moored, pirates will find and attack it. After the first battle that ship will be nearly sunk, and since you can't repair anything until several hours into a match, you will be sunk during the second attack (which happens pretty early on). It is an old game and it seems a lot of these problems are the fact that it's the first game for this developer. Very unbalanced and unsatisfying gameplay. The UI is a chore, too. There literally isn't even a 'quit game' button anywhere in the menus. Lmao you have to ctrl-alt-delete and exit this game through your pc's task manager. Can't pause the game, either. Oh, and also: the tutorials don't cover nearly everything in the game. You just sort of have to figure it out on your own, or look it up online.