It'd be nice if they actually did something, wouldn't it? Like the one for the god of the sky and wind? I immediately assumed that it gave me better winds on the map. Unfortunately not so..
<rant>
The winds were the thing that pissed me off the most in AOP (and pretty much any other top-down pirate sailing game, although I
think POTC didn't have it). In COAS, rats take the cake, but they can be dealt with easily if you know how. Winds, not so much.
Every single pirate game I've played makes it so that if you go against the wind on the map, your ship goes slower. That. Is. Just. Frustrating. If you want to model different wind directions at all (and a good case can be made against it, since in COAS the point of sail attribute doesn't apply on the map, so wind direction is completely pointless as far as ships pursuing each other goes.... which is all that goes on in map mode). But if you do want it, the correct way to go about it is to make the ship icon move at the same speed but
make the time go by faster. I don't give a $#|+ if it takes my ship a year of in-game time to get from one island to the next, but I do object if it takes five minutes of staring at
nothing happenening in real time.
The purpose of the map mode is to enable the player to skip the boring bits, to make travel quick and easy. Slowing the ship down to a snail's pace undermines that and makes the travel long and therefore frustrating.
</rant>
