Long Loads + Long Scenarios = To long of a game
Trading is one of the huge things in this game. To get anywhere you will need to setup trade routes with numerous ships to different docks on the map, buying or sell. You can also open your dock to other players in the map to buy and sell to you which will sometimes make you some quick gold.
In DoD you rank up in civilizations by appealing to your settlers. You make them happy by building special buildings that work to their needs wether it be food, clothing, spices for the food, better clothing, religion, fun and games. Ranking up does take up a ton of time since you have to set fourth to another island to get past rank 2.
Quests are also given throughout the game that will increase your honor and give gold. Honor allows you purchase special abilities for your ships (each ship gets slots of special abilites such as speed increase, less damage, more damage, instant repair etc.), it also allows you to increase the rarity of the items that the main npc docks sell.
The scenarios in the game range from easy, medium, hard - easy gives 1 extra player with lots of resources, medium will give (I presume) more players, less resources - hard gives a nice 4 players with very low resources, sadly you cant mix and match these. Going for hard on the first try, it didnt work out at all for me - after about 3 times I said forget it and went to easy. Easy difficulty just seems more boring and bland than hard does, there is only 1 other computer on the map is a lot smaller
So why did I give this game only a 7. Well its the amount of time that has to go into it plus the whole way they setup the gold system. I can see my current scenario going on for at least another 3 weeks. Which is fine, I do enjoy games that take loads amount of time - though the main resource (gold) is an extreme hassle to keep up with and brings the game down unless you know exactly what you are doing. Each building costs an amount of gold per a certain time, much how tax's work with your civilians. You will almost always be in the minis range even if you raise tax's. So the game makes you trade whether you like it or not, and even still early items barely give enough gold giving no point in even trading them.
Loading is also another issue for me, each new scenario takes at least 10 minutes for me to load, each loading scenario takes around 8. (Quad Core 2.4ghz, NVIDIAGTX295 SLI enabled, 4GBDDR3Ram). On top of that loading when battle commences it has to load again, you can see the game pausing and loading just as your boats about to fire and hit, then it runs smoothly.
If they fixed up the way gold works the game would of been much better, for me anyways. I'm sure if they mixed this game with the Stronghold series it would of been one of those best games that we barely see anymore.