Posts by rkeeves

Hi,

No answers.

But lategame - at least for me - turned out to be REALLY boring. (the whole 'buy the prince's land' mission line is soul crashingly repetitive.)

The people usually did two hubs because of a technical reason: on professional difficulty the harbors can freeze in the winter.

To overcome this they used more than 1 hub (otherwise your whole system would get stuck if and when the central hub freezes).

Be aware though, that balancing stockpiles around 2, 3 and more hubs quickly becomes a nightmare.

First I'd build only 1. If you are really into two, then pick two towns based purely on sailing distances. Aka pick the first town which can cover the eastern part (baltics, and the denmark cross) then pirck the second which is central to the western part (lowlands, england, and the western part of norway, etc.).

You can also lurk around these forums and find savegames (I remember vividly that I was able to find a working save, although it modified the map files so I had to overwrite ssome game files for it to work though).

Sorry for the late and probably opaque answer!

Bye,

rkeeves

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

I attached the OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet(zipped) in case someone doesn't want to go to github.

The spreadsheet contains only regular formulas, no advanced things, so should work for everyone.

Hi all,

I tried to recreate the Bagaluth spreadsheet, but without relying on approximate numbers.

I studied the ini and tried to reproduce the demand calculations.

It's pretty much a work in progress but here's a link:

Open Office Calc spreadsheet

(the spreadsheet is in a github repo)

Green cells are intended as modifiable, everything else is calculated.

It has only two tabs(attached images):

'Input' - this is where you enter your expected consumer count etc and get the financial and other reports, the inputs on this page have nothing to do with ini files, like for example your expected consumer count, or how much you want to fulfill a given product's demand (say you want 100% fulfillment of everything, but 10% fulfillment of clothing)

'Basedata' - this where you can modify the parameters which are found in the ini files. You can also change which product consumes which(green triangle of a matrix on the pic). Aka every green cell in this page is corresponding to a value in the ini file(tradesystem.ini).

There are some tiny caveats.

For example:

In the ini file you can set the worker count per workshop on a per product basis.

In the spreadsheet all products use a global number(defaults to 25).

But if you have a problem with this you can easily modify it: it is a simple spreadsheet.

...

Except for one thing.

The only critical/not-so-easy-peasy thing is the computation of industry demand for a given market demand.

By industry demand I mean things which are not needed directly by your population, but indirectly by industries which need them as ingredients.

(Aka you need more wood overall than the people need because you need wood too for, say, pitch.)

Also, this calculation must be done in a way to ensure that you can set the dependencies DYNAMICALLY.

I mean if you want the production of pelts to consume raw iron too, you just overwrite one cell and it will recalculate everything.

This is not as straightforward as elementary calculations, but it can be done.

But the good news is that this computation is done in the spreadsheet in a matrix multiplicationy way, so there's no magic, macros or anything just simple math that you can see too.

This is the only "weird" calculation.

All the other things are just multiplications, additions etc. so they are pretty easy to understand.

Last caveat:

The ini file uses kilograms, the game uses barrels.

To make the spreadsheet as clear as possible I tried to always give the unit of a quantity next to its name.

Like for example:

Market Demand [kg/pop]

or

Sum Demand [barrel/day]

And the last thing:

All the green cell values on the Base Data page must be set according to YOUR ini file.

The current values in the cells are based on mine but the whole point of this spreadsheet is to be able to compute demands for different ini files.

Aka don't forget to set the green cells on the Base Data page to the values from your ini file.

Hope someone finds this useful, or maybe comes up with a better/friendlier spreadsheet!

(I'd like to know if there's a better solution for the handling of the dependency graph calculations - aka the matrix representation and the matrix vector product which results in the industry demand factor - than the one presented in this spreadsheet.)

Bye,

rkeeves

Dear all,

In case someone is interested Pat4-route (link goes to it's github page) contains, to my understanding and trial and error, the P4 route file format.

In the repo there's also a small Java program I wrote to test out my hypothesis about the format.

It reads a route file, then writes a new binary file based on the reconstructed Route, and also a text file too which contains the same data in human readable form for debug purposes.

The only tricky part is little-endiannes and char array max lengths.

Bye,

rkeeves

Dear Cete,

Really thanks for the answer!

It is an honor for me to "meet" a long time pro in this forum.

Yeah, embarassingly I misinterpreted the material needs in one of the spreadsheets (maybe Bagaluth's).

To my defense, I didn't want to edit the first post, so I corrected it in my second post in this thread via using kg/day data from the ini file. We came to the same conclusion.

.

Thank you also for clarifying where the tax goes.

This means, sadly, we cannot do standard modern day tax evasion schemes.

I'm simply trying to maximize profits with one goal:

Buy up all lands after 10 years from game start.

My main problem is revenue from trade+production in a 32x10k Hansa simply isn't pulling as much money in as needed to complete all land purchases.

I'll need a lot of years to simply accumulate the money and I'll be over 1380.

Also, I don't want to go above 10k/town, because after that the Lord's mood drops too quickly.

But maybe that's the trick, getting above the 10k mark?

But if others went over 32x10k how did they manage the mood drops?

Bye and thanks again for the answer,

rkeeves

As a side question:

Is the community dead? Or is the german sub active/people moved to another forum/P4 failed and people moved back to P2(P3), Rise Of Venice?

Bye,

rkeeves

P.S.: Off-topic but for me it was insane to learn that the englishmen IRL for a time relied upon hanseatic traders for stable currency. The mere fact of the Hansa's existence is fascinating. Such an interesting time period and place for a game.

Hi again,

I made a mistake and used the raw data from Bagaluth excel.

After adjustments the required shop count for 1 shop producing an end product is for me:

1.0833

1.3333

1.2500

1.2500

1.0417

1.3021

1.6250

1.0833

1.4167

1.4063

Aka the bagaluth excel's 1 demands 1 is actually in kilograms, so I way overshot the required shop count, and had to adjust for kg/day.

Attached an updated graph.

Now back to the original question:

Is the land tax simply voided? Or is it in the city treasury?

Also, for example land tax for your meat shops in Aalborg won't show up in their specific financial window if you click on them only in the counting house view's balance sheet.

Bye,

rkeeves

Dear all,

TLDR: Are land taxes really 280/week? Do they go to the treasury (so that we can siphon it back)?

Sorry for starting a new thread, but I wanted to keep this as a separate topic.

I might be misunderstanding the land tax system.

I want to show my problem on a simple example of a vertically integrated chain.

What's the full profits for a theoretical production chain which produces 1 ?

Profit pre taxes = Revenue - Expenses

Profit post taxes = Revenue - Expenses - Land Taxes

Revenue = 630

1 cloth shop produces 1 cloth which sells for 630 (1.8 multiplier to base price at X1 according to the ini file)

We have no other revenue, because the simply get used up in the vertical chain.

Expenses = 525

1 shop needs 1 shop which in turn needs 1 shop -> 3 shops

1 shop uses 25 workers, each gets 6 daily, plus 25 for running costs (base is 50 but we assume we researched the techs).

That's 3*(25*6+25)=525

Land Taxes = 120

land taxes cost 280/7 days.

We have three shops in the chain.

That's 3*280/7=120

Profit pre taxes = 630 - 525 = 105

Profit post taxes = 630 - 525 - 120 = -15

And that's a loss actually post taxes.

I attached a graph which contains all chains' respective profits before and after taxes.

(Yes, even before taxes are pretty bad for vertical integration targets according to this simple calculation.)

Aka, if land taxes work like 280 /week applied across all buildings and the tax does not go into treasury where we can siphon it out, then the cloth shop chain actually drains money.

I really fear that this is the case, because I just got my hands on a full hansa save.

It had 38047 shops, 38068 houses and 943 warehouses which should cost 30 823 200 .

The 10 day projection on the balance sheet said 28 790 800 and kept climbing.

I don't know why it is off by a little but it is in the ball park of the 280 / week tax which is troublesome.

A small note:

I only used the end product trade as revenue.

I could've added rent, head taxes etc...

Best regards,

rkeeves

Dear all,

TLDR: 3,8 mil hansa at 1378.07.28., but how? Herbert's Run

First of all, I just wanted to thank all forum members for the amazing tips in this forum.

I was reading the Herbert's thread, looking at his save files, and I kept wondering how he was able to do it?

I tried to replicate it, but I'm nowhere in 1378 compared to him.

In 1378 I am merely at 22x10k towns, which is a joke.

So I'm thinking about a new apporach.

Below is my new plan, and after that my questions about meta.

Please excuse me beforehand if I asked something which was already covered in the german subforum (there are simply so many threads, and the really juicy info is sometimes in threads whose title doesn't even have a connection to it.).

My meta plan was:

1. Initial Phase

1.1. Start with manual trade in the middle (LUB-AAL-OSL-MAL) (auto route wastes 1 day in each dock)

1.2. First build snaikkas (purely because this is the fastest way to reinvest the money, and also in this phase it is best to do small but very frequent trades)

1.3. Create small convoys to keep west and east alive. We need them for and because of ships.

1.4. Create offices only in the middle. We'll try to cover , , , (and some of ).

1.5. Try to rise through the ranks as fast as possible (you build snaikkas, so the ship count limit will be easy). Invest in guild privileges asap, because their cost scales according to rank, wealth etc. This is crucial. With higher rank comes higher rewards, better missions, etc.

1.6. Dont build houses yet, let the AI handle it.

1.7. This phase ends if you start getting "build two production sites" missions for 40k+ or you get overwhelmed by manual trading

2. Early Phase

2.1. Start setting up office trading.

2.2. The office must buy from the town market. This will help the AI, but at this stage our main objective is to make money, we'll later deal with them.

2.3. Each office town gets a dedicated convoy, LUB as central storage. The purpose of this is to distribute goods evenly in this early start-shaped network.

2.4. Each non-office town also gets a dedicated convoy. The purpose of this is to sell surpluses and also to bring in , etc, not produced in your "star".

2.5. Start ramming up production for , and . Also make sure you have surplus of and .

2.6. Become mayor, build university. Research first hulks, then production cost lowering techs, caravel, river cog.

2.7. Hunt for ships. (a simple crayer on manual combat)

2.8. Now you should start monitoring house occupancy. You must build houses if the initial spots in the core of the city are filled, because the AI builds horribly. So if you let it build freely it will waste significant space.

2.9. This phase ends if you reach the rank where you can get guild missions, and have surplus production of for town founding and at least a tiny fleet for sailor transfer.

3. Early-Mid Phase

3.1. Start making new cities (either by lord requests or by uni). You get 600k from a mission. If you make only 500 sized ones, and you supply and it will actually generate profit. Rinse and repeat so you can snowball.

3.2. Start doing mediterran trade runs. For this, you need LON or BRU to act as a dumping point for your expeditions, aka other ships must take the spice, wine etc from LON. The expeditions should only travel between med and LON.

3.3. Create 1-3 hunters. These consists of a 5 star combat captain, 3 cogs/hulks fully upgraded fully manned. If a pirate pops up, you can auto battle them and can even sometimes get a free ship from it.

3.4. In AI controlled towns, purge the competitors busnesses, by flooding their markets with goods. It will take around year, so be patient. Last time I made the mistake of simply purging these workers (didnt build workplaces for them) so this mass firing spree left a dent in the hansa's pop progress

3.5. Make sure you meet 100% demand for , , and also all the goods needed for a large "meal for the poor".

3.6. If you have covered all cities, start upping them to 3000+ inhabitants. This is just to generate "become hanseatic city" missions.

3.7. Start building up all cities to 10k, you will generate enough money from missions.

3.8. In this phase wood and brick is used for massive build up. If the pops dont get wood and bricks its fine. Their only "absolutely must" need is , and maybe (plagues etc).

3.9. In all cities, which you are not mayor of, send a patrol. Their main purpose is not to defend the city but to empty the city coffers, so AI cant build the cathedral.

3.10. Always keep at least 3 running orders in the shipyard. Build caravels and river cogs, maybe one shipyard can produce hulks. Cogs, snaikkas are essentially junk at this point so they must be used for manual goods moving or sailor transfer.

3.11. Put 3 fully upgraded non-manned hulks in each convoy, so they block (I've seen it last game with cogs, that pirates didnt attack a convoy if it had a lot of cannons, they didnt take into account sailor count. Am I imagining this?)

So, as you can see I never even made it past the all towns 10k point.

My questions are:

- The whole snaikka thing came from Roland. I did around 5 test runs, and for me at least early snaikkas are a clear win, but maybe after 5 or so, should I switch to crayers/cogs?

- Is the above game opening optimal?

- How do you break up your own game plan into sections? Do you switch later to a hub-based system and run for some time in a decentralized/haphazard way, or do you force yourself into a hub system even early on?

- I'm planning a hansa with 100% demand fulfillment except for (1%) and (60%) (60%) (these can be made with MM trade)

- I'm building ships. In the german threads I read that some people dont build, only capture from pirates. Is this a viable startegy?

- Are there any tricks to bookkeeping? I mean, I have a notebook with the full planned hansa, needs for different sizes of cities and I'm still overwhelmed by micro. Are there any "rule of thumbs" or you too have Excel/notebook open al the times?

- Are there any tricks? (I mean not like "you can use TAB in counting houses too to cycle through", but meta stuff like "during early build up you can leave out fish and mead, and concentrate on wood, bricks")

- I don't get this cash-crop thing. People keep mentioning that trading will bring in a lot of profits (sell at 1,75 of base price for one pip satisfaction). Well, according to my calculations, in a 32x10k hansa in 10 day you can have 520-550k profits from it. You can get this kind of money easily from a "become hanseatic city" mission. Is my plan of relying on missions bad? I think last time, when I focused on making money from trading I lagged behind, because it is simply not as good as doing missions. Trading for me simply isn't lucrative enough somehow, I only use it as a baseline, but I need something with some extra "ooomph" if I want a full hansa in 1378.

- I get that around 4 universities is enough. But why is NOT building chapels and infirmaries a good idea?

- How do you deal with AI in a full buildup game? (I know flooding of the market and worker shortage works. I'm more curious about when do you eliminate them and how do you contain them afterwards?)

- The land purchase from princes costs 30 mil a pop. With a 32 town 10k hansa you generate around 13 mil per month. According to this my plan of "build up to 32x10k then buy up lands and then continue expansion" will not work(In 1378 I wouldnt be near Herbert's score). What is your meta plan for buying land?

- Can I maybe learn P4 mid game tactics if I go over the P2/P3 tippsammlung? (Also, a lot of people say that P2/P3 is better than P4 but I only know P4.)

- I made some tests with lending money, but for me they generated so-so returns. Am I better off simply ignoring them?

- I never made tests about borrowing money, but the interest seems too high to be worth it. I am still thinking about a way to make it work. Do you use it during your games?

So basically, in this forum I was able to find a lot of tips regarding mechanics, early game, and extremely late game stuff (reducing cloth wine via MM trade, two HUB land road stock balancing) but I wasn't able to encounter so much threads about the build up phase's meta.

Please, don't be hesitant to correct me. Thank you kindly for your help in advance.

Best regards,

rkeeves