Hi everyone.

I'm new to this game, and slowly starting to understand the depth of it.
When I was in this spot on another game (Pharaoh), I found a forum thread about the "3 things you wished you'd known as a beginner".
Reading it helped immensely in moving from build-at-random into 'nearly competent player'.

Is there anything like that for Pat4? (At the moment 'nearly competent' looks a long way away! )

I've played through the campaign far enough to learn -how- to do things, but I'm still clueless at much of the when/why parts.

For example:
* Why get married? At easy level, town rep isn't that hard to gain, and I'm not that fond of nappies.
* When do you build houses? ASAP, or after some other circumstance?
* For that matter, housing seems expensive to build. I can build 2 farms for the cost of 1 house. Do I build businesses and let the AI pay that cost for me?
* Do you focus on building up one town first, or aim for a foothold in many towns?
* At basic level, I've played a couple of game years without meeting a pirate. It looks like there's no point in having guns ... ?

The last one isn't a strategy question. I've turned P4 on 4 times, on different days. Each time has wanted to download something, and 3 of them have been about the same size (53mb). Is this going to keep happening? I'm not seeing release notes newer than 20-Oct. (I bought the physical game in a shop, it's not a Steam, etc version.) EDIT: this time it upgraded me to 1.21, so at least something happened.

Any advice, or pointers to other threads, would be most welcome.

Thanks in advance,
Jay.

I wish I had known about the "top-up inventory function" for trade route creation. See this thread and read post #4. It was really helpful to me!

I treat housing as kinda of a way to null the cost of having the bean counters hired in the counting houses, typically put two or three down in a city and meh its guaranteed incoming forever.

I also definitely found that the old 'pirates count cannons not sailors' trick works quite well, ie ensure your convoys have more cannons then the average pirate group and they won't even be harassed. (no need for expensive sailor salaries, pirates seem to only see the guns)

For economic build up I also found that basing your industry on first installing counting houses in cities you want goods from and using them to buy up the supplies your convoys sell is a good way to get started. Ie my first expansion is usually in bruges so I can have a relatively consistent supply of wine and spices: The counting house buys them up and a convoy passes through regularly to collect it and bring the goods to my central trade hub (usually lubeck) where the rest of my sales convoys pick up their inventory to sell in their respective territories. Do this for several of the major wares and then once you have a decent profit going you can start on the greater control like putting down your own industries and creating internal supply chains to feed them and shift the products back to the central hub to again get drawn upon by your sales force.

(and yah, now that I know P4 lets you actually top up counting houses they can become very useful methods of keeping a city well supplied as you slowly shift your travelling convoys from pure sales to more supplying those counting houses who do the selling instead)

(26-10-2010 08:05 PM)Julianb3000 Wrote:  Hi everyone.

For example:
* Why get married? At easy level, town rep isn't that hard to gain, and I'm not that fond of nappies.
* When do you build houses? ASAP, or after some other circumstance?
* For that matter, housing seems expensive to build. I can build 2 farms for the cost of 1 house. Do I build businesses and let the AI pay that cost for me?
* Do you focus on building up one town first, or aim for a foothold in many towns?
* At basic level, I've played a couple of game years without meeting a pirate. It looks like there's no point in having guns ... ?

The last one isn't a strategy question. I've turned P4 on 4 times, on different days. Each time has wanted to download something, and 3 of them have been about the same size (53mb). Is this going to keep happening? I'm not seeing release notes newer than 20-Oct. (I bought the physical game in a shop, it's not a Steam, etc version.) EDIT: this time it upgraded me to 1.21, so at least something happened.

To marry early in the game is an advantage. Have a look at the offers. The more ships you can get, the better the offer. Take care that you have the needed goods in your warehouse and try to marry the first who offers you more than one ship. That will speed up your game.

Well houses are expensive. I don't do it that way, but the best strategy for a beginner is to build farms without houses at the start. If you can sell the production the income will enable you to rise faster and earn more money. After having more than 20 farms and other facilitys you should build houses too. Otherwise the AI will become to strong.

To rise in rank you have to open counting houses in other citys too. That is good for two things: First you can use the managers in that counting houses to sell your production there, and you can use this citys to produce goods you can't produce in your hometown. So a well balanced expansion is the trick to gain reputation and wealth.

Well in basic level the pirates are few. But even ther they can become a pest, if you let them have their go. Since 1.2 the pirates have a look at every convoy that comes their way and count the worships, the cannons and the crew. If they think they can match, they will attack. So you will need cannons later on to protect your convoys from beeing plundered.

For the Updates (Patches) you have started in a time a lot of patches where published. After your first start your game was updated to 1.1.3 At your second start the new patch 1.2 was available and two days later the Patch 1.2.1. Normaly you can count with one patch a month at the moment.

Have fun and prosper

Hein

1) One thing I have learned over the year is that no matter where you start, you should get into a city (within the first or second counting house) where you can produce some wood and brick. Those two items are extremely important in doing most everything you want to. Having a reliable supply is very nice. You will run into countless situations where you are cruising around the Hanse looking for these two if you don't produce it yourself. If you can build houses along with these businesses, it will help. It should be delayed until you have a few profitable businesses or routes, since it is not a big money maker.

2) Read up on the administrator and how to drop off what you produce for sale in various cities (previously referred to as "topping off"). It is way easier than manual trading and can make much more money than auto trading. With trading, you trade only when your ship is in port. The admin trades all day and will clear out any good not produced in that city eventually. We all get doing this at some point, but sometimes the sooner the better. I just spent my time through the "tutorial" always being out of money and making lots of work for myself. If you are new to the game and feel the game is tedious, it is because you should be transitioning more into managing than actually doing.

Thank you for all the thoughts!
I admit that I haven't quite got my head around the "topping off" concept. I think the idea is to maintain a certain stock level of a commodity in a counting house and let the administrator sell it whenever the price is best. Is that right?
If so, the part I haven't figured out is how to configure the locks to make it work. I suspect that part comes with practise...

Had problems with the topping-off concept too!

Here is another try at explaining it

Counting house Administrator:

selling to town remains the same
Purchasing: set price to minimum (unless you want him to buy stuff)
put lock and stock level you want to maintain

Ship:

Put commodity to unload and load at max to counting house in the trade route setting

What happens:

Ships arrive at the town and unload all of the commodity to the counting house.
Then, the ship tries to load back all of the commodity back in, but the lock in the purchasing side keep the desired amount in the counting house.


It's not really topping-up, but the result is that. And the reason why you put the lock in the purchasing side is so that you can sell everything.

If you put the lock with the number on the selling side, you will have the desired amount but nothing will be sold.

I hope it helps!

Seems clear to me and I don't even have the game. I guess playing the demo and a little P3 experience goes a long way.

I didn't think this was possible, never paid much attention to the little lock next to all the goods.

I have started to convert my counting houses, but its an awfully long process. Is there not anyway to save counting house settings, similar to trade routes?

No it is one of the things on the verry long list the users here and on the german board want to have.
But if you set the prices for one administrator the prices are next time the default prices for the other administrators.

Hein

Quote:But if you set the prices for one administrator the prices are next time the default prices for the other administrators.

Right, furthermore, when you start a new game you can create a traderoute and ajust its selling and buying prices. Those prices will be assigned to your countinghouse, so you do not have to set any prices in the game.

the problem is when you want to change the values, or you insert values wrong and then the default is always wrong.

Not always only once.

Just found something that I WISH I knew AGES ago. Accidentally hit the "Ctrl" button and found that it toggles name plates and which businesses are yours.

(29-10-2010 02:03 PM)Stackmo Wrote:  Just found something that I WISH I knew AGES ago. Accidentally hit the "Ctrl" button and found that it toggles name plates and which businesses are yours.

ORLY? Awesome thank you for that heads up!

@Antigens: Thanks - that's clear enough for even me to understand.
@Stackmo: Now that's really cool to know - I've been really frustrated clicking every building trying to find my own ones!

(29-10-2010 06:51 AM)Bagaluth Wrote:  No it is one of the things on the verry long list the users here and on the german board whant to have.
But if you set the prices for one administrator the prices are next time the default prices for the other administrators.

Hein

It would be very very nice if the game would start off with the default buy & sell prices at the 2 green for buy and 1.5x that for the sell instead of whatever random numbers it begins with.

Establishing counting houses costs more every time (or actually guild membership rights). But what I would have liked to known when I first started is that there is an enourmous hike in establishing coasts when your personal wealth exceeds 10 million gold. As soon as it does, you pay a million gold more (in my case from about 950,000 gold to 1,950,000, only because my wealth exceeded the 10 million mark by 25,000).

After that, I first focussed on building fleet and counting houses before focussing on building businesses. Downside is that my trade volume and profits are lower because of it. Still not sure what approach is the best...

Well best start with a map of 20 citys.
Start to research new towns only shortly befor you get your 15'th counting house.
Don't found a new city before you have a counting house in all 20 start citys.
You will have to start production early on to generate enough money to pay the taxes for your counting houses, so concentrate on facilitys to feed the population in your towns and on bricks and wood. You will need wool too. But go easy on the facilitys till you have all 20 start citys included.
Build ships and establish automated trade between all 20 citys first. Concentrade on grain, cheese stockfish, meat, wool, timber beer and mead. That generate the most reputation in the start phase of the game. If you do it right you will have a problem getting more than 1 Mio. gold cash, because you can invest the money much faster than you can generate it.

Hein

Things I wish I knew before:

1) How to keep pirates in check. Fully arm and crew one Crayer and practice killing pirates. It doesn't take too long to get good at it. And then you typically get to keep the last pirate ship when the crew is down to 0 and the hull down to 15%, the sails don't matter, so there's no sense in using chainshot.

2) Use the CTL key on the city map to see your buildings, CTL on the Hanse map brings up the names of the towns.

3) Use the down arrow button on the TRADE menu (when creating a trading route) to move ALL THE COMMODITIES to the lower window. If you select one item it moves one item down, if you don't select any, it moves them all.

4) Your ships UNLOAD first. Use that fact when building your trade routes.

5) The AI builds houses when housing occupancy exceeds 60%. So if you want to outbuild the AI. Keep housing occupancy below 60%.

6) You will get missions you don't know how to complete. Search the forums or risk failing the mission.

I think that's 3. If not combine a few until it reaches 3.
~Bogi

1) It's better to use just ONE armed vessel to do Manual Combat.
2) That one armed vessel only really needs to have a 60% (> half) Crew to effectively fight enemy ships.
3) Getting to the level (not sure what rank that is) where you interact with the princes is NOT such a Good Thing. Paying off their extortionate demands is pretty much a way to lose a LOT of money for which you get damn little in return. Best to deliberately delay getting that promotion and perfect the towns that you already have Counting Houses before getting that next, fateful promotion.
4) Learning that Cloth can be found ONLY in the English towns and the Med.
5) If you want to force the Architect to start a given project, supply all of the currently demanded building materials that are missing, then add another 20 Bricks and another 40 Wood (or is it the other way around?) and then order a small business. Both projects will then immediately start. (No shortages any longer delaying construction.)

(22-03-2011 03:03 AM)CaptainPatch Wrote:  5) ...then add another 20 Bricks and another 40 Wood (or is it the other way around?) ...

the other way round!

20 Wood/40 Bricks

Lebe jeden Tag, als wäre es Dein Letzter! / Live each day as it would be your last!

Thanks Cap'n Patch! I didn't know about the 60%. I'm anal about keeping my Crayer Pirate Hunters at 100% and >98% Hull health.
I agree about the Prince thingy, but now I PLAN my cities and ONLY pay off the ones where I depend on my businesses built outside the walls. The rest (AI) get hit by the prince so I don't mind the sieges. And when the prince sends pirate fleets I jump them! Woo Hoo.
~ Bogi

Sea Battles:
The battle starts with normal cannon balls as ammo. Take out the two ships you do not want first. Take the 3rd ship you want to keep down to 50%, then switch to "shot". This will take out the crew without destroying the ship. Then go back to "ball" and you will capture the ship at 20% health. That avoids any emergency sea repair jobs.

Does anyone use "chain" effectively to take out sails? I tried it, but it didn't seem to make much difference. I find the snaikkas to be the hardest to deal with as they can turn a tighter radius than my crayer and it would be nice to cripple them.

chain will have effect when sails gets under 50%

Lebe jeden Tag, als wäre es Dein Letzter! / Live each day as it would be your last!