Man of the C, you're being very pessimistic! You're at the same stage I was when I started playing this competition, except ... well, technically my submitted save was my third game on this map (I played out of Bremen early before I read we had to play from the starting save, then I got to October before restarting after I discovered the technique of manual arbitrage and decided cash was nice).
But you're doing better than I was in July ... and have the benefit of seeing everyone else's games
[edit: rechecked the stats - definitely ahead of me at July 1, but pretty similar at August 1. You're not picking up as many ships as me - I was taking every escort, patrol and pirate mission in sight! Still picking up more ships than most though, unless yours are whites rather than blacks?]
And I know that, if I had built merchant houses a month earlier instead of concentrating on production (rule misunderstanding) & mints (they don't do anywhere near as much as I thought - in fact when I look at my progress records for towns with/without I often wonder if they do anything at all
) then I would have had an extra couple of % rich & wealthy for 1300.
For London, if you want to attract beggars, make the poor unhappy or just barely satisfied (Just barely satisfied works best, but is very hard to achieve without making them too satisfied, so unhappy is usually a good choice). It sounds crazy, but it's waaay cheaper to grow an unhappy town than a happy one - 6 beer per day brings in lots of beggars (since you're cash rich - aka arbitrage - buy all the beer on the market, donate 6, then sell the rest again
). If the people are happy you can have to donate 30, 50, or more
. Which quickly becomes expensive! Maybe that should be in the tips & tricks actually, not sure if it's standard practise or just something I discovered.
BTW, if you get very happy people for the new year, it'll be 3-4 weeks before you can get them unhappy again in 1301
.
I wouldn't worry about walls till 1301 myself. Too many other uses for bricks, like merchant houses. The happiness penalty for having small walls seems, well, small. But if you're LM of a town, I would invest in two new port bombards if you're not fully using the build-queue with other things - 40 bricks, timber and IG gives a cheap and noticeable addition to happiness, that won't get destroyed when you do eventually expand the town walls.
Trade-routes: I never did set up any, only convoys. I traded everything manually, and still had lots of white ships that helped out until I got enough goods stockpiled to make the convoys run efficiently - late October or November. Then the whites just annoyed me, but I didn't wipe them out till 1301. Pick up enough ships from pirates, and your convoys will supply the Hanse without problems, with enough left over for meditteranean runs, outrigging and miscellaneous duties.
Baltic Trader's probably the one to talk to about arbitrage. He picked up the sort of cash in June 1300 that I didn't see till March 1301
. I have no idea how.
The only secret I can give to this contest is the obvious one - the only day that counts is December 31. Wasa topped the (current) table by building up a Hanse that was happy and rich for months on end and nice and stable. I narrowly got in behind him by building an unhappy poor Hanse that no-one in their right mind would want to live in, then cleaning it up at the last minute for the landlord to come and check over the new year ...
'course, that does have one big disadvantage. Under normal circumstances I would have asked for a full review of my submitted game for feedback. But my December 31 save looks absolutely nothing like my Hanse pre-mid-December or post-mid-January. So there wasn't much point