Patrizierforum

Hi,
My first post on this forum. First thing, I’d like to give a hearty thank you to all those who have made and make this forum possible. I am new to the P-3 after some experience with PR-2. I have only played thru the first campaign and almost 1 year of a single play game. After some discussions with another member here on this forum, I have decided to give the 2007 contest a try. I mention that so that others out there who are like me will know that they are not alone. What a great game! I look forward to sharing with you my experiences from the beginner’s point of view and welcome your thoughts and experiences as well. I’ll post here and in the 2007 game area. Thanks to all the folks who have written so much information on the various boards for P-3. It has really helped my learning curve and made the game experience much more enjoyable. When I first started to play, it was a bit daunting to try and figure out the big picture, but the many, many posts on the various topics has really helped me. I really apprecaite your efforts. See you in the Hanse!
Thanks.
Man of the C

Well, here are some thoughts of what I’ve learned so far in playing the 2007 contest.

You can capture a snaikka with only 2 crew members and some cutlasses on your ship.

When you are planning on engaging two enemies at different locations on the map, the AI seems to enjoy playing one for you while you battle him in the other encounter manually.
You exit the battle screen to find he has abused your ship and sailed off when you know if you could have done that manually, you could have won the day.

Taking an escort mission and going up a river can yield a crayer rather than a hulk.

Setting up just outside of Oslo is also a good place to take a tavern mission and use a cascade, since the narrow channel doesn’t allow the AI room to escape.

A unarmed snaikka, with 20 crew, 15 cutlasses and a 0-3-4 captain can take down an armed crayer with 24 crew, if you can get to it without any losses.

Manual arbitrage is much better without trading offices present.

I need a softer mouse pad, my right palm is very red for some reason (Yeah, I know Bizpro I should get a trackball!)

The thread on the Ascaron site for the ship naming is great. Somebody should have started a thread years ago on how to label you convoy routes (not just the ships), and the labeling of your game saves. I wonder what the maximum number of routes and game saves is that you can have?

Speaking of saves, I am looking forward to see how BT plays. I almost tried the game as total peaceful trader but after a few emails with Bizpro, I thought I would try a more aggressive approach, especially since my campaign game was as a peaceful trader.

Right now I've got to decide 1 hub or 2, and where to begin construction development. I didn't use the Med in my last game and I think that needs to start soon.

I've never moved either but I have a hunch that it is important to get the rank so you elevate faster to Alderman missions. Building other towns to meet the lacking production needs for the Hanse is starting to gain interest to me, besides for the scoring for the game.

I never married in the other game but I'll try to do that to get 2 ships when I get the right offer. Ships do seem to be at a premium. One interesting thing I noticed in reviewing the saves was that one player uses the captured hulks as auto arbitrage ships before they are even repaired. It has enabled him to keep his good fleet on the move and get arbitrage going as well. In 1300, Ugh has all his ships doing arbitrage it in one port , while others choose two, and others all over. Lot's of interesting strategies!

My capital and concrete reserves are on the rise so construction and expansion begins soon! There sure are a lot of ways to play this game!
What have you been experiencing?

Well, here are some more things I've stumbled into this month or so of the game.

Loans- My wife is a CFP (Certified Financial Planner) wealth planning specialist and was asking me about the game last night. We got to talking about loans and she said, show me how you do that. I went to the money lender, got a loan prospect to show up, started the process and then said to her, "See, then you can charge him a high interest rate." I went to click on the + sign to change it to high. I accidentally double clicked and it went to very high! Hey, I didn't know it would do that. When I was given an email from another player concerning loaning they said to me, charge the highest rate you can get. I thought that "high" was it. All the loans I have made so far could have been higher! I bet my default rate is going to be pretty low on the many loans I have already given out!

I was checking the progress for a Med exploration with a snaikka and wanted to see how long it would take. It was late July when I started. I noticed there was no announcement in Aug of me advancing to the next rank. Problem? I hadn't joined the guild. I remember reading a thread about a guy who was asking why he hadn't made any promotions and that was the reason. He wrote "I'm an Idiot". I must confess, I felt the same way when I realized my error. The game has so many facets that you can get narrow minded on some particular sets of tasks and then forget to do the simplest of others.

Here's another. I had a ship finish repairs and sent it out to do a mission. I reloaded the sailors but I forgot to reload it with cutlasses. No wonder I lost so many sailors!

Concerning ship battles. I have found, if the wind direction is right, that there is a way to do a circle maneuver in the beginning of a battle that enables your cog to dodge the majority of the enemy fire and allows you to board before the faster enemy can flee.

Some questions:
Concerning battles, I'm not so sure I understand something regarding the cascade technique. If I am the aggressor and provoke the attack(pre battle screen), I have not been able to use the white flag option for any of my ships in the attacking convoy.
Is this the same for you?

If you move to a new town and your status is going to go up, does this show up immediately in your personal profile in the trading office after the move?

What brand name of beer is being produced in the Hanse? Based on the slowness of some town populations to respond to donations, supply, and building, it must be the beer! Too many hangovers and they don't go to work!

I've had the same problem with surrendering on attacking ship battles; reading somewhere about Baltic's adaption of the gold nugget trick which said to attack a pirate with a ship laden with goods, and click surrender so it gets pillaged ... then pillage the pirate, etc.

But I never had the surrender option whenever I tried setting it up, even if the pirate was chasing me (ie not fleeing). Eventually I gave up; arbitrage is soooooo much more effective anyway .

The white flag (in order to surrender) is only available if you are not the one who started the battle and if you have not yet hit the opponent with your weapons. Otherwise, it is inactive.
If your opponent is fleeing, you can click "end battle" instead when you do not feel a need to chase the fleeing ship.

If nothing of the above matches, neither white flag nor "end battle" are available. That's at least what the manual and most players' experiences say.

Some random notes on beer donations and how to "grow" small (eg <5k pop) towns quickly early in the game.

Proviso: Apologies if all this is known and posted before. I've never seen it anywhere, so it may not have been written before in English at least. Most guides seem to stop at the "donate some beer to get faster growth" point, or go back to the "donate 100 beer on day 1, then 1 beer every subsequent day" adage. The latter never worked for me - you get beggars on day 2, but the 1 beer donations don't seem to do anything; I don't know where that policy came from.

Some basic observations:
If a small town is growing, it only has </~20 beggars. More than this means it's not growing, or a donation has gone through the church.

There is some basic amount of immigration to the town, I. If there is a school, immigration becomes roughly 3I/2. The size of I does not depend on happiness.

If the poor are unhappy, there is some emmigration from the town E, which is similar or slightly greater than I. I think E gets bigger if the poor become annoyed but am not certain. I also think (but am not certain) that happiness of wealthy/rich only affects population composition, it doesn't cause loss or gain of population overall - ie, only the poor count.

If a donation is given to the town that is successful ("beggars will come from far and wide"), there is some extra immigration, D. D is considerably bigger than either I or E.

Lesser donations which don't get the "from far and wide" message do not cause any immigration. Multiple "from far and wide" donations on the same day do not have a greater effect than a single one.

Beggars get converted into workers at the end of the day regardless of happiness - annoyed towns will still grow a workforce if they have a sufficient supply of new beggars from ships or church donations.

Some intermediate observations:
I only really looked at beer donations since they were the most efficient for me. I think grain, meat and wine could all be useful in certain circumstances as well, and I think they behave simarly.

The amount of beer that needs to be donated to get a "from far and wide" message depends on two factors that I have found - the price of beer on the market (the more expensive the beer, the less you need to donate) and the happiness of the town (the happier the town is, the more you need to donate).

The minimum amount of beer that can be donated to get immigration is 6, which occurs when beer is expensive (I bought it all off the market, although possibly you could leave a few behind) and when the poor are unhappy/annoyed or at the low end of the "satisfied" range.


Some conclusions:
The best way to grow towns depends on circumstance - how fast you want to do it, whether I is sufficient or too slow, and the availability of cash, beer, grain etc.

The only case I considered was when there is plenty of cash, but a shortage of goods (contest 2007 with arbitrage), and a rate 'I' was too slow to fill businesses. The best way to do this is to get the population barely satisfied. Then, for a cost of 6 beer per day, you get a net increase in town size of:

I + D ~ 75 (in my circumstances).
This is best done by first buying all beer on the market, then donating 6, then selling any beer you want to.

If you forget to donate one day, this reverts to the usual:
I ~ 15 (in my circumstances)

However, it's difficult to stay at this mark as happiness will drift over time. If people become happier, it will require 10+ beer to get new beggars; if you plan on doing this for 20 or 30 consecutive days (or more, if like me you find you need a lot of extra timber production NOW) then that adds up to a lot of extra beer wasted. If the town becomes unhappy, then you can still donate 6 beer per day, but you now get a net increase in town size of:
I + D - E ~ 50
If you forget to donate, you get:
I - E ~ -10

Because a gain of 50 beggars per day is still a lot at a cost of 6 beer (enough to add the maximum allowed 12 workers to one industry type) I found that growth is most simply achieved by making people unhappy, rather than by risking their becoming happy. So a basic growth plan would involve, every game day, my doing:

*save the game
*buy all beer on the market, and donate 6
*if this doesn't produce a "from far and wide" message, your population is too happy, so scream, yell, then reload and donate a bit more beer until you get the right message
* if your poor are unhappy or worse, sell the beer down to a price of 42 or lower to keep their spirits up. If they're satisfied or better, then don't sell any beer as they can clearly do without, and by not selling it you both save the beer they would otherwise drink, and make them a bit less happy into the bargain.

The cost of buying all market beer then reselling it is actually quite small, from memory only 2 or 3 thousand gold.

This allows small towns - in my pre-rerun game under 1000 people in Ladoga - to grow very quickly; 50 people a day is 1500 people a month if jobs are available. Total cost: 180 beer per town per month, and of the order of 60-90k cash.

If you were beer-rich and cash-poor, you would obviously be willing to donate more beer instead of buying beer off the market. Still, you will need a lot less beer if you can get your population satisfied or unhappy, rather than very satisfied or higher. If you were grain-rich and beer poor, you might prefer to do this with grain instead; the same principles apply, although the minimum donation amount would be less than 6. By 1302 in my contest game I expect to need to use this in a wine-rich, beer-poor environment, so you can guess which good I'll be using then. I think the minimum wine donation is 15, valued on the market at almost 20 times the cost of 6 beer, but if you have arbitrage then your economy is more about preserving goods than preserving cash ...

[edit] Note, just for comparison, that building a school increases immigration to 3I/2, which would be an increase of ~7 to 22 beggars instead of 15 using the numbers above. This is a much smaller increase than beer, though still potentially valuable - and it doesn't require unhappiness to be effective so will still work when you need your people to be very happy.

[edit] Rechecking the manual, it says schools bring a 30% increase in beggars ... so immigration with a school may only be 1.3I. Whatever ...

Starstruck- OUTSTANDING!! I had know idea about this and I was joking about the beer in my last post! Well maybe now I can get some these brickworks plants up and running. I've been buying surplus beer from traders in Bergen, Oslo and Stettin so now it's time to put it to use.

Amselfass - Thanks

Well , I’ve managed to make it to Sept, but not without another learning curve.
On problem I was having was trying to get workers for the production facilities. Starstruck post earlier on donating beer to get the poor and I have been utilizing the tactic. What a difference! I have had a very favorable results form it. There does seem to be a downside to the satisfaction level of the town, but I am not able to supply the towns with all the needed goods per week yet anyway. I think this is why I didn’t go up in rank in London from traveling merchant to councilor. One added bonus to the beer donations is that there are more sailors in the taverns to hire.

Having a plan for the game is very helpful. I was struggling trying to see what I should do week by week. I took the spreadsheet offered on the forum and took some time to learn how to apply it. I am now aware of my needs per town per week and can begin the convoys to supply the towns from a central hub as the ships and captains become available. Thanks Bizpro for the help.

Not having any experience in the Med trade, I’ll get my feet wet this game month.

Currently I’m still concentrating thru Sept in construction materials, fleet expansion and making money. I am going to have to watch the amount of working capitol as well. I’m hoping some arbitration in between all the ship battles, donating, building, and other things will benefit more than I anticipate. I know that sending convoys to the med for goods requires a lot of so that’s why I mention it here. Getting the wealthy and rich to come to the towns is going to become more of a focus starting in October.

The increase in ships captured this month has a lot to do with having better ships. I was surprised you can’t do a patrol with a level 2 crayer. I’ll started getting some level 3’s from the shipyards and have begun doing those missions.

There is a discussion on the smalltalk thread regarding the use of Hot Keys. I started using them and it has improved my game speed . I read the last post regarding these three:

Ctrl + 1 – 9 assign hotkey 1 - 9 to selected ship
1 - 9 (first keystroke) select ship on hotkey 1 - 9
1 - 9 (second keystroke) center ship on hotkey 1 - 9 to screen

As Starstruck mentioned, they are not in my manual either. Pg 62 is my manuals page for the appendix and hot-keys. I have tried this briefly before posting and I think my manual arbitrage is going to get a little easier! Thanks Amselfass for the tip!

Currently the most frustrating part of the game for me is the house building techniques. I’d like to just see the need for a house, select the home, and place it to be built. I have enough experience now to see that if you don’t do it right, you’ll run out of space behind the wall for placing new homes. I just don’t like the time it takes to figure out where to place what home. I’ll be transparent here, it took me over 2 hours to figure out where to place the beginning HTH homes in Bergen. More for the homes in London and Oslo. I took Wasa’s 1300 game save (Thanks for your help eeryone who has submitted l), re-routed his builder convoy to Memel each of these towns and experimented. I have the downloaded stuff from the tipps section of the German side, translated it, but the translation isn’t good enough to let me see the details Ugh is talking about. Especially the pages concerning the “when does the AI build a road portions and how to avoid them” sections. PR2 is a major improvement in some regards to the P-3 method. But hey, it’s what I got to play with so I’ll learn to play it that way.

One question I do have regarding the Med. If I select the contract button, my captain will trade as well as try to establish a contract in that city. Is this true or false?

Sailing on toward Octoberfest!

My experience in the med is different.

If you select "contract", the ships captain will sign a contract at the earliest port he stops at where there is no pre-existing contract (* at the time of the convoys return - try it a few times and you'll understand what I mean by that!). The ship will also buy goods everywhere that he can, in order from the first stop

So if you send a ship to only one destination, they will sign a contract if that destination doesn't already have a contract. One simple tactic is to send convoys through two towns, eg Vigo and Cadiz, after signing a contract in one town.

Eg a contract is available in Vigo.

Convoy 1: Sail to Vigo then Cadiz with "contract" selected. The ship will fill the Vigo contract, probably fill any extra space with goods from Vigo, then sail to Cadiz and sign a contract in Cadiz, plus buy more goods if there is still empty space in the convoy.

Convoy 2: Sail to Cadiz then Vigo. The convoy will fill the contract in Cadiz and sign a new one in Vigo ...

Convoy 3: Sail to Vigo then Cadiz.

Convoy 4: Sail to Cadiz then Vigo

etc.

You DO NOT have to wait for Convoy 1 to return before sending Convoy 2; if they are both the same ship type & thus sail speed (eg both hulks or both crayers) then they'll take the same time for the trip, so you can send out all four convoys in order within one day, and about 12-15 days later all four will sail back with new contracts signed and filled in order. I don't know what the maximum number of convoys I've had out at once is; probably at least four between Vigo/Cadiz, plus at least four between Cagliari/Tunisia and Syrakus/the-one-just-north-of-Syrakus etc.

TRADE: Does not sign contracts. The only advantage of "trade" over "contracts" is that you get a slightly better price for the goods bought off-contract.

EXPLORE: I don't use in-contest. It takes longer for a ship on "explore" to return home than a ship on "trade", and a ship on trade will still discover new towns if sent to the right spot.

Oct 1 has arrived n my game and the learning continues. Some random thoughts:

What’s up with the AI and their HTH buildings. If I build a HTH, it seems to fill up rapidly. You have 80% or higher listed on the total occupancy, they have 5 houses built. I build a HTH and it gets loaded quickly with residents. I’ve not seen an HTH occupancy rate below 70% even after I’ve built 5 in a row. Just seems a little strange. I am interested to see where this goes because most of the veteran players are not building HTH’s but they are building the other 2. I’ll start building those this month, because the brick making machine is maturing nicely. That’s why I had to build all the HTH’s, I needed housing now for the workers I am bringing into town. I have a goal of 63 brickworks by end of 1300 and I have over 50 already with above 50% production capacity. I like getting 60 plus bricks a week from Bergen! London is the slowest to grow.

Population fluctuation is very interesting. This month I will start supplying the Hanse with my fleet and I think we will see the change beginning to increase satisfaction and population ratio’s. I had to laugh when I looked at one town and had only 8 total rich and wealthy in a town over 2000 population. It looks funny when you select the town home and see 0 and 2 % occupancy in merchant and gabled houses.

What’s up with loosing the points on your captain’s skills? I was surprised to see my only 5 pt trader go to a 3 when he was on arbitrage duty in Brugge. I’ve got to pay attention to them as the game goes along.

It took me 2 game days to get the fleet properly named and placed for the start of hub convoys. Matching captains to the right task and getting the ships in the right places.

I’ve got to figure out how to get some cash so I can move. The post on the hot keys has helped me a bunch in keeping track of ships and in manual arbitrage. Finding the time to accomplish manual arbitrage is a challenge. The set up of the auto arbitrage is next on my list. There appears to be a correlation of staggering the start times of the traders in the same city. I'll have at least 5 going in Gotenburg this month.

I had a suitor ask me for a marriage proposal, I gave him 3000 and it never showed up! He must have been a con man. So much for E Harmony in P3!

I also get messages that say I should consider impounding someone in the next 10 days but never get a chance to respond to that. Am I missing something? Most of the times I do get some impound notice of some goods but not always.

M ot C

Quoted

I had a suitor ask me for a marriage proposal, I gave him 3000 and it never showed up! He must have been a con man. So much for E Harmony in P3!

I've never had that happen with a suitor; however there is a few days delay I think between saying yes to the matchmaker and the picture of the wife arriving (but which wife you get is determined when you click yes, so you can save, accept, save, fast forward and reload to get a different one)

Quoted

I also get messages that say I should consider impounding someone in the next 10 days but never get a chance to respond to that. Am I missing something? Most of the times I do get some impound notice of some goods but not always.

With impounding, I have two option-buttons at the bottom of the message (saying impound and release or something like that). If you don't click on one within ten days (or have already clicked on one and reload the message) then the buttons are no longer available.

My english is very poor and so I must ask what HTH (mentioned by Man of the C) is. I am not sure if it is a fabric or a house. I assume that it is a house but I do not know which kind of house it is when it is a house.
May be it can be responsed under Chat and other lingo in off topic.

HTH is short for Half Timbered House
I am home today and getting a week or 2 into October. I had one town down to 1 rich and wealthy citizen. YIKES! Maybe the 2008 game can be one where we see who can build the most buildings with the least amount of population!

Starstruck "If you don't click on one within ten days (or have already clicked on one and reload the message) then the buttons are no longer available. "

I have a hunch that is what is happening to me. Thanks

I'd like to raise some more cash and I have a couple of towns that are neglected on purpose. I say that because I do not plan to devlelop it until 1301 All 3 classes of people are annoyed or dissastisfied. If I raid that town , will the resulting effect of dissatisfaction really be a bad thing on a town which is already low? How long does the effect last? What if it is a town that i have businesses in? The satisfaction is low because I am using the beer trick to populate the production businesses. The amount of wealthy and rich are low in those towns I'm thinking about as well. I tried searching the boards in english and translated the German side but couldn't find anything. Any thoughts?

I've never seen numbers on the effect of happiness of raiding towns. But my personal experiences were that it is small or negligible. I think the effect from destroying the port bombard may actually be bigger than the effect of multiple raids ... but again have no evidence of that.

So I would raid it by all means. But it will definitely negatively affect your 1300 rating if you are leaving a few towns dissatisfied with no rich ... all you really need to do is have the rich content for November, December and maybe a bit of October, and you'll get a noticeably better rating from filling up (240 ppl) the town-owned merchant houses.