ACRA'S PLAYTESTING TOPIC

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Port Traventor: Session 1
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Tw0Face privately sent me a request to review Port Traventor, and while I'm not particularly a fan of RTS'es, I thought it was at least worth checking out. Unfortunately, Port Traventor is not a RTS, and, after looking back through stuff, I'm not sure where that claim was actually made. It's a game about gathering resources, that much is true. But very, very, very little else.

The game starts out with one of my most-hated things; being given a defined character without a default name. After a couple minutes of thinking, I was gonna go with Reginald II, after the character's father, but that's too long, so I guess I have to be Prince Randy. About an hour in, I realized that the far better gaffe would've been to take it more at face-value, and show why these 'name-the-character-after-yourself' personally don't work for me. Alas, I'm too lazy to replay the first hour with a new name, so the reign of Prince Betty will have to wait for some other day.



Anyway, that personal nitpick aside, you're given about five-ten minutes of decent enough tutorialization about building, er, buildings, gathering resources using single-use Sickles/Pickaxes/etc., and murdering non-aggressive orcs in cold blood after stealing from them. I had a longer bit about how much of an invader and overall bad guy your actions seem, but the game aggressively does not care about a story, so I nixed what I had. In short, you'll be killing the same two kinds of Barbarians, Orcs, Dwarves, and Skeletons again and again and again.

After Tristan leaves you be, the game opens up. As much as it is able, anyway. There's a few more loose story bits, like rescuing Anglers to turn them into Lumberjacks and fighting Vivien the witch who for some reason is aligned with the Orcs, but they're like two sentences long. From then on, it's pretty much mute for a long, long while.



Here's where things stagnate tremendously. You start an incredibly slow and long process of spending several days to gather enough wood to build a quarry to build stonemasons to mine stone, then build miners to mine ore, then to build blacksmiths to refine iron, then finally use all that crap to build a Watchtower to build soldiers. To give more context, fighting the Witch took place about twenty minutes into the game. Literally nothing else happened until the Watchtower was built, which took almost three hours and about two in-game weeks.

That three hours consisted pretty much exclusively of wandering between three boards; the castle to pick up new villagers to train, and two other boards adjacent to harvest all the stuff. Despite the map being littered with a multitude of forests/mountains/farms to harvest the appropriate materials, you can harvest an infinite number of goods at one spot (assuming you have enough Lumberjacks/etc), making them seem a little pointless. As mentioned earlier, though, you need Sickles/Hammers/etc. to farm, so you need to constantly redo enemy encounters to get more Sickles and such, so you really have to constantly do fights; about a dozen a day to stay on track with your unit production.



I realize I've said nothing about the battle system yet, because it's extremely basic. You have just your Prince, and you fight two-three enemies at a time. You have basic attack, two worthwhile skills that you can use based on how much you get beaten up (there are buff skills, but they're mathematically self-sabotage; boosting your attack by 20% for three turns is less damage than just attacking one extra time). And then you have elemental magic, which is slowly given to you as you level. Dwarves and Skeletons hate Fire, Barbarians hate Dark, and Orcs hate Water. Apart from Orc mages becoming immune to physicals for a bit via Ghostrick, enemies have nothing going on. Except Orc Archers; they sometimes attack for 100 x 3 damage, which in groups is a death-sentence. Oh, and you also fully-heal after every fight.

The ceaseless grinding for resources was bad enough and would've been enough for me to not want to bother, but I didn't want to end without at least reaching the soldier/army phase, just in case that changed things at all. And so three completely wasted hours later, I had a Watchtower.

I still had to make the units, but fine, whatever, at this point that's barely anything more. Now, on two of the boards I've been allowed to access early, there are these black knight dudes on the map. Later on, I'd see three more. There's eight total. Apparently, killing every last one of them is the big goal of the game.



Talking to them lets you choose between three formations; one favouring knights, archers, and, soldiers with slings because apparently they're too hip to use spears like normal-ass soldiers. There's no actual difference between them, just one wants iron, one wants lumber, and such. After building up this army, you select one, send them in, and.



A cutscene plays and they auto-kill each other, with you having no input and your Prince taking no part in the battle. And yes, all the soldiers you sent in died, so you got to build up another army. All enemy armies seem to need the exact same unit amounts to conquer, so it literally would be just repeating this process another seven times. The town gives me 3-4 peasants a day, and the least human-heavy formation needs 15 soldiers, so that'd be another 35 days of grinding to get enough human meat to get rid of all these armies. It took me about 3 hours to get through 2 weeks of completely brainless and monotonous grinding. Yeah, no, that's a wrap for me.

The easy thing would be to leave it at that, but the better question to ask would be 'how would I improve it?' Well, the first is pretty obvious, which would be to simply reduce the numbers of garbage to you need to build stuff. The enemy variety obviously needs a tremendous boost, too. The Prince being by himself also makes battles innately basic. Tristan the tutorial soldier and, uh, green priest dude could be additional party members instead of just letting him wander and murderhobo around all by himself.

But what I think is the most noteworthy area to improve would be to do something more worthwhile with multiple gathering points. In concept, it's a bit of unique flavour. In practice, it's pretty nothing. Maybe instead of being able to do all the gathering as soon as daybreak hits, limiting each spot and making the player wander more. If you got rid of full-heal after battle and made enemies not opt-in, then you now have to be aware how much you're capable of handling in a day, so then maybe one day you worry about going to the mountains to mine, then the next to the forests to chop. Then there's something to be said about the timer. As far as I could tell, there was no penalty for taking weeks to get anything done. I feel something could be done with this, to put pressure on the player and set goals for the day.

I realize that any one of those are drastic changes that'd result in a completely different game, but I had a loooot of time to idly think while grinding. And this doesn't even touch on the whole army aspect, which definitely feels incredibly lacking. It definitely should be more than spending resources to insta-end a fight, though. Maybe have the Prince fight the enemy leader, and the faster you can kill them, the less of your units die.

Lastly, actual concrete existing issues. There's no way to directly see if your Farmers/Stonemasons/etc. have been used for the day or not. Towers can be done to do more grinding in one-go, but all they give on completion appears to be common items, nor do they stay finished, so they feel a little pointless and undercooked.

I won't be coming back to finish Port Traventor. I simply don't see anything more to get out of it at all. It's about 25 minutes of game stretched paper-thin by grinding and nothing else. Next'll be back to Notes from Province, but even that might be a while.

I only actually played for two in-game weeks; that additional 35 day assumption is based on the capital giving +3 villagers a day (it gave me a +4 only once, I think), and with a minimum of 15 villagers needing to die per army, that's just what the math gives you. So, by that estimate, the last day of the game would be around day 45-50. I'm also not particularly wont to call any part of not 'grinding'.

I'm aware that math leaves out those odd villagers you take when razing villages, and perhaps you get a significant amount from places like that dark castle up north, so it's possible that's an excessive number, but previous experience has made their contributions kinda weak.

And yes, I'm probably mostly at the point resource-wise where I could spend days just running around in circles doing nothing, as I'm sitting or nearly on max of the gathering tools (axes/sickles/etc.), I just need to waste days until I can harvest again. Getting through a day at this point would be relatively minimal work. I just have absolutely zero desire to continue.

Those resource chance boosts seemed incredibly paltry for the coin they require. Something like 800 gold for a +40% chance to get +1 item from killing one kind of enemy? That's just not even remotely worthwhile, especially when money has been tighter than gathering tools, with me needing to dump 5000 apiece on a caravan and boat, and possibly more later on. And also to need to save money to buy gear/Beer for the Prince, in case better gear and harder enemies would come along.

Basically, I spent days 3-14 continuously walking on-and-off screens, farming dozens of barbarians in the day and orcs at night, getting a ton of gathering tools and money as a result in little in-game time, as I was worried that I might get locked into a fight based on number of days, as the way things landed, the orcs attacking the castle seemed to coincide with a day change. Also, all that grinding put me to level 13, enough to get Earth magic. Still not enough to not get absolutely slaughtered by the triple archers at the top of north tower, though.

I pretty much spent the workers on whatever the most recently built building was, since that's what required the most material to build the next building. So when I built a Quarry, I turned guys into Stonemasons until the Ore Miner training camp was almost ready. In the end, the count was: 10 Farmers / 9 Lumberjacks / 10 Stonemasons / 13 Miners / 6 Blacksmiths.

So I don't really think there's anything with that balance, nor do I think the time itself to assemble them is bad. I just had to kill the same 8 incredibly similar enemies a bazillion times to get enough tools and grow and level the Prince incredibly slowly. The fact that encounters in the 'back half' of the game (or at least what I saw of them) had the same enemies with maybe 3 or 4 in a fight instead of 2 changes very little.