how long is a playthrough?

[Gopher]

title

[Davypi]

Well... the game has an aging mechanism and also crew morale will degrade over time. When morale gets too low, you will eventually be forced to divide plunder or risk mutiny. If you divide or mutiny when you are over 42, the game forces you to retire thus ending the game. However, there is a way to ensure that you never have to divide plunder and you can play forever, but it requires very careful wealth/crew management. However, the game kind of becomes sandbox at that point. So play time can vary depending on your ability and desire to prolong the game. Your skills will also atrophy over time until they hit a floor and unless you've master the gameplay, you may have force yourself into retirement anyway because you the game becomes too difficult.

When I play the game on easy or normal modes, circumvent forced retirement, and go for max score, it usually takes me about 30-40 hours on easy or 40-50 on normal. (Normal mode requires you to locate more map pieces.) The game does force you to hunt certain ships down as part of the main quest. If they force you to go to the far west, it tends to slow the game down a lot as you have to sail against the wind in order to get back to the "main" part of the map. So bad RNG in this respect can sometimes prolong the game. I've never figured out how to dodge forced retirement on higher levels and that usually means a 20 hour game. I lot of people on the old Firaxis forum can play this better than I and are able to either hit max score before forced retirement or circumvent that mechanic on higher difficulties, so my times may be a bit long in that respect.