Greetings Fellow Patricians!

I'm still relatively new to Patrician 4 and I've been trying to work out a way to coordinate auto-trading with manufacturing. With the goal of balancing growth of hanseatic towns in mind, here's what I attempted to establish:

First: Autoconvoys to ferry raw goods I produce in various towns to the appropriate destination towns to be finished off in the associated manufacturing facilities. I built the required number of raw goods facilities so that they would match precisely the needs of the associated finished goods. For example - three smelters and one saw mill supplying six smiths to yield 12 metal goods. In order to make sure exactly the right amount of supplies got where they were supposed to, no one town supplies the same raw good to more than one other town unless the raw good is itself what I intend to sell to the various towns.

Second: Once I had all the appropriate supply lines in place to produce everything I used a hub city and created auto trade routes dropping off manufactured goods and picking up appropriate supplies for each town I was making things in.

Third: I also built a couple convoys to carry any excess goods to the other towns whose guilds I had not yet joined. This was essential as I was getting everything set up since until all my producing towns were develeoped they could never hope to come close to consuming everything I was making.

For now I'm using Malmo as the hub, servicing everything East of Denmark except Thorn and Novgorod. Later I expect to set up another hub in the west to service the remaining towns. Is this strategy something that will cause problems for me later on or is it as sound as I hope it is?

I also have a few other quetions:

Does not getting married have any adverse effect on the game?

If I replace my trade ships with caravels will they be able to escape these irritating pirates, or is their speed effectively useless since they have to travel at the pace of their armed escorts?

I've noticed pirate hideouts sitting on riversides and convoys that are too large for rivers. So far my solution has been to ignore the river towns because of it but, keeping in mind that I find manual combat tedious and as entertaining as watching a rock, there have to be better options, right?

Hi,

what difficulty do you play ?
On "professional" ports may freeze, taking your autoroute out of business for a couple of weeks, so you may need to store some goods ahead.

First: Some goods are not only needed for production.
I.E. wood/grain dissappear also, even if you do not produce beer or pitch,
to provide food and fire wood. So you'll need more that just the stuff to supply the production.

Second: Well, if your hub has a frozen port ...

Third: nothing wrong with that

Getting married provides you some ships, depending on when you do it.
Mostly I try to get a cost 40 marriage with the offer of three or four
ships. These are usually small, but it helps when you suddenly need 4 ships for the next promotion.
Also the small ships make a more trouble in fights, so I usually capture the cogs and sink the others early. So if you like to have smaller ships, to supply river towns, a marriage giving you 2 snaikas and 2 carayers
is rather effective.

Just my 0,02€ input
Studi

There is many ways to set up the trade system with different pros and cons.
The best system is the one that gives you the most fun.

The way you describe the raw material production is what I always do. However, some raw materials has more consumers than producers.

You will have to store enough raw materials where its used to have enough for the convoy sailing time and repair (and frozen ports on higher difficulty).

To use hubs is a very common way to play and what I used to do.
However, by using the fact that you never can produce enough goods I generally just let everything float around.
This requires that you never produce more goods than what you can get rid of. If you produce too much it will get stuck somewhere along the route.
You also has to make different routes for each goods so that it aleays get to where its needed for production first and so that you don't get a few cities that is in lack of everything.