Hi

Hi!

For early/mid game concepts, please take a look at the steam guides (you don't need a steam account, just google).

For lategame concepts: A youtuber named DDRJake has a full playthrough of Patrician IV.

It features a full build up of the Hansa. Aka all towns built up to the max.

For a speedrun of the game, check out this video.

You can also find a lot of useful stuff on these forums (I think a year ago I was able to find savegames too).

Some infos:

- People need two types of foods, otherwise they starve

- The two most realiable food sources are grain and cheese (they don't need any resource to produce)

- You need massive amounts of bricks and wood for the buildup of your empire

- Different towns have different max size (aka town A if built up correctly can house 30k, while town B can easily house 60k)

- In Mid/Late game growing your population will become harder. The fast solution to this problem would be to hand out food to the poor (an action in the church building).
To do this, you'll need other things (beer, meat etc.) so in the mid/late game you'll need to put a bit of focus on those too

- Because you'll be building tons of ships, you have to make sure that your shipyards have enough materials needed for ships (hemp etc.).

- There's simply too much micro in this game without counting houses and convoys. Learn those (it can be a bit counter intuitive but this forum and the steam forum has a lot of guides explaining it).

- Land routes can act as an equalizer between nearby towns' stocks. But beware: this is a pretty lategame thing, and if you want to really use them, you'll have to mod the maps. (Pros in the past modded britain to have road connections between the towns. They shipped in goods into one harbor town, and distributed goods via carts.)

- The game is basically about stabilizing fluctuating demand and supply. Your two weapons are: transportation (ships, cart), buffers (warehouses). Use them wisely

- In the mid/late princes sieging down the towns becomes a problem. To overcome this you can get missions from them (if you are over 90-95% relations) where they ask you to pay up an insane amount of cash for 5-10% of their holdings. If you reach 100% they'll stop sieging your towns forever. BUT they'll still raid your carts. Due to this the lategame - at least for me - always turns into an endless joyless grind. So my advice would be to enjoy the early and midgame.

- If you're not yet ready for a playthrough where you max out all towns: try picking the minimal amount of towns with which you can produce the following goods:

two kinds of food, everything needed for ship and building construction (and the resources needed by those factories too, aka you need metal goods, but because of this, you need raw metal and wood too).

then try to max out these towns only. They'll be your core towns. If you later decide to branch out into wine or something, you'll have a neat little core town set that churns out essential materials for the buildup of the wine producing town.

- Remember: you DON'T have to sell materials to the market. For example: Producing raw metal only for your smithies, and not fulfilling the demand of the town itself is a viable strategy if you want to optimize. I think that you cannot produce enough of everything, so you'll need to decide which goods you won't provide for the towns.

Bye,

rkeeves