I like city-builders as much as the next guy, with options like Cities: Skylines II, Once Human, New World: Aeternum, and more, ready at any moment. None of them scratched a particular pirate-y itch, though, so I was always left wanting. Corsair Cove aims to change that by combining city-building, supply chain management, and strategy into a single game. Plundering has never been more fun.
Limbic Entertainment (Park Beyond) are very good at what they do: strategy and world-building. Make no mistake, however, Corsair Cove is not a walk in the park, even for those familiar with the genre. We start off by “discovering” a small island to call the home base, and you build your town around that by placing a ‘camp’ down initially. Every building that you subsequently put down needs to be within range of the initial camp building. Thankfully, the area in question is highlighted in green or purple, so you know exactly what your limits are.
Things can quickly expand from there as your camp needs to make sure there is enough food and drink (see: rum) to go around, enough work for the people in the camp (which is where things like wood and stone gathering come into play), as well as providing the resources for your ship’s crew to consume while they’re out on an adventure.
Sailing the seas is one of the best parts of Corsair Cove as it allows you to go around completing missions, sacking towns, gambling, whaling, and more. Once you build a ship, you have to crew it with spare people from your camp called drifters. This stock of drifters is also used to work at any new buildings that you construct, so you’ll need to be careful with how many are on your ship and how many are needed at camp.
“Sailing the seas is one of the best parts of Corsair Cove as it allows you to go around completing missions, sacking towns, gambling, whaling, and more.”
Every ship also needs a captain, and you’ll have a number to choose from. Some of which hint at being among the most famous pirates in history, like Teach, clearly inspired by Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, and looking just as bloodthirsty. All told, there are 11 different captains to choose from, although you’ll have to unlock most of them through quests on the seas.
To start off, most games give you one or two things on your map to do to familiarize you with the gameplay and how things work. Corsair Cove does the opposite and gives you between 5-10 things to do right away that you can do at your own pace. Overall, you have 4 different “Principles” (Notoriety, Empire, Seafaring, and Wealth) that progress your Path To Victory, where if you complete all five Principle Quests for a given Principle, you then win the game. At no point did I have fewer than 8 quests in progress awaiting completion.
With pirates, there is bound to be some unrest, and in Corsair Cove, that is measured by two things: camp satisfaction and Cohesion. I will explain the latter first, as it is always visible on the screen. Cohesion essentially measures how well your pirate gang sticks together. It allows you to be more reckless when choosing what to do with new drifters who wash up or how to handle a disease outbreak. However, if your Cohesion drops to zero, you lose the game. It starts at 100 and can be increased by completing quests. Losing the game does not mean you die and respawn to continue. It means your camp dissolves completely, and you have to restart the game.
This happened to me once during my time with Corsair Cove, and when I learned that I would be starting from scratch again, I reloaded my save and immediately focused on raising my Cohesion. I realized that I had been draining my supplies by using most of my highest-performing pirates on my ship, which strained resource production and caused my camp satisfaction to drop to zero. Once I figured out that I needed to prioritize resource production and manage who was using each resource and how much of it, things got a bit easier.
Camp satisfaction is very important at Corsair Cove, as it measures how happy the camp’s residents are at any given time. If you are unable to produce enough of a required resource, such as housing or food, to meet demand, satisfaction will drop. When it reaches zero, a status called Outrage begins. When Outrage begins, you need to find a way to bring that resource production back up to the required level, or Cohesion will drop, escalating the situation until the issue is resolved or you lose the game. Needless to say, it is vitally important to keep your camp satisfaction and Cohesion as high as possible.
When it comes to missions, there is an abundance to choose from. Things like taking down the Crown representatives, looking for the Fountain of Youth, searching for lost treasure on uncharted islands, etc., there is always something interesting to do on the seas. The map is absolutely littered with waypoints that you can sail to, and the waypoint tells you what kind of ship and stats are recommended to complete the mission. So it gives you a bit of a guide to make sure you’re not attempting something way out of your league right away.
Completing missions can award you with points to use inside the Compass, which is where you can spend those points to upgrade production, gain more drifters, unlock different ships and more, so it’s in your interest to do as many missions as you can to maximize your camp production levels and capabilities.
What is a pirate game without a bit of combat, right? Well, Corsair Cove handles combat a little differently. Combat encounters, searching through the jungle and gathering information all use a dice-roll system to determine outcomes. It is a little complicated to understand at first, but once you get the gist of it, it is pretty easy to work with and keeps things interesting when you are trying to protect your crew or supplies onboard.
“I have had so much fun playing Corsair Cove and keep coming back to it, so I highly recommend getting out there, sailing the high seas and creating your own pirate empire!”
Speaking of the crew onboard, during combat, you need to keep your crew count above zero. Otherwise, the ship will sink, and you will lose the encounter. When your ship sinks, you have the option to save the crew or the captain. I usually choose to save the captain because if you do not, you cannot use that captain again for a predetermined amount of time, much like a cooldown.
Not to mention, you will have to return to your camp, build a whole new ship and hire a whole new crew. If you do not have enough drifters to crew the ship, which happened to me a few too many times, you will have to wait until a group of drifters washes up on your shore before employing them.
In terms of graphics, Corsair Cove is not exactly the best-looking game, but it does not need to be. You are almost always operating from a bird’s-eye view, so as long as you can see which buildings are there and where you are going, things do not have to be photorealistic. Some of the animation in the combat sequences and cutscenes is fantastic and gives real weight to what you are trying to accomplish, rather than having you simply read the text on screen and click through to the next part of the map. This is especially true during the whaling missions.
As your camp grows, you will unlock new types of pirates to crew your ship, meaning you will need to build new structures to produce the resources those pirates require. It is a bit of a cycle, and learning the threshold at which your camp can operate most efficiently will take some tinkering, but it is well worth it. I have had so much fun playing Corsair Cove and keep coming back to it, so I highly recommend getting out there, sailing the high seas and creating your own pirate empire!
