Anyone remembers this game? it was a classic but I suck at it. I installed it a few days ago and I still can't undestand the basic and how you get money in the early game.
 Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
 CRIME Shirt $21.68 |
Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
Buy low & sell high
buy high, sell low
Build your own business and sell higher
https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/33570/manuals/manual-patrician3.pdf
do pirate stuff
>I installed it a few days ago and I still can't undestand the basic and how you get money in the early game.
It's not that difficult. For starters, you should know that while there are many kinds of cargo, you can divide them into heavy and light. Heavy (looks like a huge pack, examples are wood, meat, iron ore) takes weights 10, if my memory does not fail me, while light (depicted as a barrel, examples are wine, tools, spices) weights only 1. You can safely peddle both kinds, just be aware of that distinction.
Now, you should check what every city is producing so you know what you can buy cheaply from them, and what they will want to buy from you. If a city is producing tools, they will pay premium for ore, for example.
Later you will start your own businesses to cut the middleman, you might also take a long voyage to the Mediterranean Sea to buy wine and spices for pennies. Just be aware that your stores will be full of them and if you sell the cargo all at once, you will oversaturate the market and lose in the end. In one of my playthroughs, it took me many months before I sold out my spices but with a very big profit.
You can also try boarding pirate vessels and auctioning them but I never found it worthwhile.
Thanks! Yeah I guess my mistake is selling everything at once, losing profit. The tedious part is knowing which products the cities produce/consume, and remember it. I guess it's the kind of game that requieres a pencil and paper to take notes. And I'm pretty sure very long trips can't be lucrative.
>I guess it's the kind of game that requieres a pencil and paper to take notes.
Yeah, do that. Later you will have an option to open offices in other cities than the starting one, which allows you to auto-buy/sell cargo that you are interested in, which streamlines the process.
Doing business with pirates generally is not a good decision. You will get some money every now and then but after some time your business partner will likely get caught and spill the beans, harming your reputation.
Visit taverns, sometimes you will get a mission from there. They are often a good way to get some money at the start of the game, plus sometimes they also spawn pirates if you need to board a vessel.
After becoming a renowned merchant, you will have the opportunity to take special orders from the town hall. They are quite good, if I remember correctly they often ask for like a dozen packs of meat for a good price.
What I noticed is that manipulating a demand is possible, to an extent. I remember that in cases when there was absolutely no meat in the city, it could be sold for around 1k, so I would sell like 3 and wait a few days. Then the price would go up to around 1,4k and I would sell more. Keep in mind, I played it long ago so these values might be a bit off.
Lastly, a small list of cargo I liked to peddle. Spices and wine were always good even if selling them at optimal price took time. It is sort of a long-term investment.
Iron goods (misremembered as iron tools in the previous post), meat, pig iron (misremembered as ore), skins and wool were my favourites and producing them was profitable. I also meddled in other cargo, like timber, but for some reason, I remember losing on producing it, compared to just buying in bulk.
>Remember
Black person, I've been playing it literally last weekend.
>but I suck at it
The trick is doing chain trading, for which you need to figure out which town produces what and then just always making sure you aren't making empty runs.
Except for what already have said, remember this: when building your own business operation, keep in mind following:
It is only profitable to build specific business in a town that already specialises in it. They are making beer? Build brewery, rather than smithy. If building match specialty of the town, you gain efficiency bonus.
When building your business, don't rush like a madman and build 3 or 5 instances of it. You need 1 to start, and it will take a while to build 2nd. Otherwise, you will frick the town's economy, draining its manpower and making too many goods to sell them, due to oversaturation
Business requires labour. If you build like crazy, you will drain local manpower and cause the town to build on its own housing, usually the shitty ones. You don't want that. You want to be able to build your own housing, to further profit on the rent. Company town is unironically a perfect thing in this game.
All of those are like the basic rookie mistakes, so avoiding issues with buildings and running too many businesses in too many towns will save you a variety of problems long-term.
Captcha: Gaang
Thanks!!
Oh that look usefull, thanks
do you guys know which are the best cities to start? I really dont like Luebeck even though i'm pretty sure it must be one of the easiest cities to start.
I like Torun for wool and meat, and Stockholm for pig iron and iron goods.
Lubeck is pretty much the best town out there, since it has good position and easy access to other markets. It is HIGHLY advised you start there and learn the ropes using it as your hub. There is very likely that as a new player, you will cause a death spiral in towns you will import from, and if you are in Lubeck, this is still reversable due to short distances.
but it feels so shitty, it has good position yeah but the city sucks in my opinion, bricks and wood are nice but selling them in other cities gives you very little profit
>bricks and wood are nice but selling them in other cities gives you very little profit
The point is how great it is for building your business. It doesn't seem like a lot early on, but eventually having steady supply of construction material (and especially one you cna get from your own buildings) is a massive help
If you expand or start building local businesses, you should build housing, too. If you are heavily supplying given town, you should also build housing.
Keep in mind that if there are at least two of the trio of housing, jobs and well-supplied market, you WILL attract people to the town and they WILL increase demand. And despite it sounding like a great thing, it might not actually be the case. One of the most common rookie mistake is to oversaturate local market and to build bunch of businesses, which cause a massive drive into that town and as a result, skyrocketing demand that you can't satisfy even if you wanted to. Which in turn cause collapse of the market, migration OUT of the town, lack of manpower for the businesses and eventually a death spiral.
Sounds fun
I bought some cutlasses and catapults at the weaponsmith but they went straight to my trading office. How do you transfer them onto your ships? And I'm assuming you can't win in hand to hand combat unless your crew has cutlasses?
Use the dock, transfer the weapons like you transfer the resources
Found it, thanks. In the dock window you switch from ship > town to weapons.
My download came with this cheat sheet. Haven't used it though. I'm having fun playing blind. What an absolute gem of a game. Have never heard of it until now. Took a bath in Riga after playing for hours last night and it was one of the most satisfying video game experiences ever.
Eh, I think I'll reinstall it. I should have the CD with Patrician 3 and 4 somewhere. I'll guess the first one I find will be the only one installed.
>Malmö
>Luebeck
wtf is this?
The absolute state of burgers
>And I'm assuming you can't win in hand to hand combat unless your crew has cutlasses?
You assume correctly. Also, for your pirate hunter ships (or if it is your only ship), hire max crew and find a captain. Max upgraded crayer with a full crew and a decent captain can board almost every ship because pirates often run with a semi-skeleton crew.
Stockholm my beloved, tool business is OP
I only played Patrician II. Can somebody explain how different III is from II? When considering playing should I move to the third or just stick with what I know?
Patrician 3 is essentially Patrician 2 + its expansion pack, along with few QoL changes.
In other words - you know how to play it and it is a genuine all-around improvement over 2 without doing some revolutionary changes to the gameplay. Move on to 3.
In which speed game do you guys play?
are houses profitable? when should I start building them?
I think I messed up my first game because I built too many trading offices and buildings. Their tax liability is huge. Even though I was raking in the money my tax bill was $17,000 per week. It's hard to keep up with that.
I've been doing that and at least you get a ship from most debtors who default.
forgiving loans increases your reputation, granting loans with high interest decreases it
Hmm... I always impounded the ship. Is reputation really worth $20k or should you take the ship and throw a festival to make up for it?
Just completed the first campaign mission and holy crap it seems long for a campaign. The first time I failed because I had way too many buildings and too much tax to pay. The second time I ran lean with only ships and no buildings other than one warehouse to eliminate rental costs. Won in one year. I don't really see the point in paying $30k or whatever for a workshop that will cost tax and wages and yet only produce iron goods for $276 when I can just hire a trading office manager and buy it from town for $300 with no overhead.
Do you guys give loans? In most of my cases, these incompetent morons begged for a loan to go completely broke after which they would ask for money again. To me, it seems to be a very unreliable way to make money or maybe even a noob trap.
Pirates frick my convoys
What do
get those big ass cannons and fricke em up
or better, capture the ship and use it, i've seen people saying if you auction the ship, the other merchant in your city will get it and he is your competition of course, maybe you can auction it in other city far away
Is there any modern game that plays like this? It’s kind of dated.
Friendly reminder you must be at the very least 25 to use this board, and preferably another decade older.
I’m referring to the game not even having a 1920:1080 resolution option and shitty mechanics such as having to fight pirate fleets with one ship at a time.
>and shitty mechanics such as having to fight pirate fleets with one ship at a time.
That's literally a standard, what the frick is your problem? Except maybe thinking this is Pirates!, and not Merchant game.
It just seems like artificial difficulty. I should be able to put multiple ships in a trade fleet to defend each other against pirates.
what is convoys
There is none. I hope it helped.
Bout to play it as well. Got it for 99 cents on GOG. Capitalism, ho!
Got it for free from gog-games. Piracy, ho!
Got previous version from the newspaper, but the disc is too scratched to work anymore.
Well, that was fun for about an hour until my game crashed.
autosaves every few minutes