Trade routes "standard" setting

[Brufus]

Hi all, I'm brand new to the series, but not new to strategy games. I'm working on setting up trade routes and I'm wondering if anyone has an opinion on the "standard" setting for the trade routes which basically turns all goods on and buys/and sells based on the demand.

I'll be honest, I don't love the idea of micromanaging every single good for every single city on every single trade route, as they will be constantly changing, so I'm hoping that the standard setting (which seems like it should be called 'auto') is good enough.

Any thoughts are appreciated! Thanks!

[IroynArrow]

Originally posted by Brufus:

micromanaging every single good for every single city on every single trade route, as they will be constantly changing,

That is actually a good comment. Right now "standard" sets "buy" when a good is produced in a town. Will the trade route update when you add new goods to towns?

I do not understand why they only have to option to buy OR sell anyway. In previous games we could buy AND sell each good in each town along a trade route. We actually had 4 options per town. It went like 1) dump to warehouse, 2) sell to town, 3) take from warehouse, 4) buy from town.

If a town produces wood, but is out of stock, I want my convoy to sell wood to that town. Or when a product is in abundance in a town which does not produce it, I want my convoy to buy that good.

Design decisions like this are what keeping me from buying the game. The game has so much potential, but seems to mediocre......

[IroynArrow]

SkyeStorme says it here: https://youtu.be/bXw2GZgy80o?t=186

If towns get new production, you need to manually adjust the trade routes. Yikes!

No idea why the devs thought this was a good idea and why they did not just copy/paste the trade system from previous games.

[Dray Prescot]

Do some manual trading first before jumping into Auto Trade Routes, it helps you learn the area around your Home Town.

[Dedulka_DED]

also unable to press '0' (zero button) on trade rates))) lol

esp auto-trading isnt working as well

[dabba]

I am making a fortune off "standard" set trade routes. It works well and is super profitable for me as long as it is a good route, using wind efficiently, hitting the right towns, etc.

[Dray Prescot]

Trade routes should come after other things, early in the game they do not help in getting your tasks done. Manual control of your merchant convoys is a lot more useful early in a Campaign Game, particularly in delivering lot of colonial commodities to your Viceroy Capital every month to get Experience points towards Fame Points.

Most new players of PR4 do not realize how important it is to concentrate on getting Fame Points early in the game. If you wait, they get more and more expensive to get.

My advice to new players of PR4: FORGET about doing Auto Trade routes for at least several months, and use manual control of your merchant convoys until you learn the local towns around your Home Town and get a better feel for what they produce and what they need. If you really want to do them, buy a couple of small and fast cargo ships for a few trade routes. Save your starting ships for bigger cargoes that are manually controlled. Auto Trade Routes can not help you plan and do things to get your early missions taken care of quickly.

My MAIN priority in a new Campaign Game is producing and delivering (with manually controlled convoys) Colonial Commodities to the Viceroy Capital (Maracaibo) until your are selling the maximum amounts of them EVERY Month that your Viceroy wants. In the Spanish Campaign that is about 3500 total units of them PER MONTH, and it takes 6 to 8 months to build up to do that. That gets you off to your fastest start in the Spanish Campaign. You will have to build the businesses to produce that much of them, and you will make more money if you own the businesses, rather than buy from the AI owned businesses.

By doing this I finished the Spanish Campaign in the Beta, in a year and 10 months of game time.

[Oddible]

100% disagree with this last post. Manual trading is for chumps. Just set up trade routes to deliver the goods to the viceroy's town. Easy peasy.

[Dray Prescot]

Auto Trade routes do not work well getting the most colonial commodities delivered, you can see more things currently than you could when you set up the Routes. You can also do things for delivering other goods as needed. Later when things are more established you can switch over to Auto Trade Routes.

It may be easy, but it is the SLOW way to start the Game. You should concentrate on developing the colonial commodity market until you are producing enough to max out your Viseroy demand each month. This not gets you a lot of income but Experience Points as well.

At the start of the game almost all of the towns are too small to have much demand, which limits your sales. Meanwhile you can sell over 5800 units per MONTH of the colonial commodities to Maracaibo. The small towns do not buy anywhere near that amount of the non colonial commodities. Even for the goods that they are buying they only want 1 or 2 per day for 5 to 10 goods, i.e. at most 15 to 20 per day per town.

Getting Experience Points for Fame Points is very important early in the game, you need them for ship captains, commodity concessions and for taking control of towns from your Viceroy, and ordering large warships. The longer you wait to start getting them, the harder it will be.

In my new game, 1.0.2 of the Spanish Campaign, I got 2 Fame Points from Experience in the first 2 months of the game, from delivering colonial commodities and doing 3 random tasks. Plus 1 Fame for finishing the 1st set of Tasks.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2246665232

My deliveries of colonial commodities in the 1st 2 months of the Spanish Campaign, they were produced by towns near Seville and hauled by 2 of my starting convoys.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2247852338

After 2 months of play I have spent Fame Points on 1 Ship Captain's License and getting the Beer Concession. With 1 Fame Point still available, i.e. total of 3 Fame points in 2 months, 2 of them from Experience Points (this includes doing 3 random tasks for Experience Points using 2 small ships that I bought to do random tasks). I will have a 3rd Fame Point from Experience before 4 months game has passed.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2248001206

378 Experience points generated by the end of April 1572, i.e. 4 months of game time. I got my 4th Fame Point from Experience by April 13, 1572, i.e. only 3 1/2 months of game time. I generated 21, 17, 41, and 23 Experience Points for delivering colonial commodities, plus a number of random tasks.

The 50% off sales on buying ships at Maracaibo and Santo Domingo were a great bargain, not only did I buy a Fluyt and a Barque at half price, I also got 30 and 35 Experience Points as well !!

By the end of April 1572, I had bought 1 Corn In Campeche, 1 Brick in Havana, 4 Tobacco, 1 Cloth, and 1 Clothing Businesses in Seville, a Fluyt, and a Barque and 3 or 4 small ships, and have finished the deliver 1000 sailor/workers task, as well as the first set of tasks. Plus built a local Market and a Church in Seville. I also have a Ship Captain's license, and concessions for Beer, Cloth, and Clothing. With 1 Fame point not spent yet. I have also bought 6 production licenses (Havanna, Sisal, Campeche, Valladolid, Puerto Cabezas, and Maraciabo) at 25k each. I am playing the Lady Trader so Trading Licenses are all free for me.

This what you can do by ignoring Auto Trade Routes and putting the starting convoys to work on delivering colonial commodities, in just 4 months. Next I am going to be building the 4 Cotton businesses, and any Residences needed, and probably a 1 or 2 Hospitals.

[Still trying]

4 Oct @ 11:40am Dray's comment: Sounds good to me in my little world. I was coming to a similar conclusion about the early trading (I'm new to the game), having played an experimental 5 campaign games (none to conclusion however). I'd tried to set up a route that would gather colonial goods and deliver to the Viceroy but as I can't workout after numerous attempts, what the terms 'Automatic', '123', etc actually mean in practice I gave up and did things manually which seems time consuming but efficient and economical.
I also have a ship devoted to doing the quests which seems to work well in gathering the fame points.

[jonnin]

standard will earn steady profits, if not perfectly maximized. It is FINE if you want to set and forget it.
some things you may want to do on top of standard:
- you may want to set buy to a fixed number / any price to supply a business, eg say you make rum but need sugar, you may want to buy sugar at any price at a previous town and dump it all there even if its not profitable (try to avoid loss, but break even is OK since it feeds your rum factory).

- you may want to have special viceroy feeders early on that buy all they can and dump in the capital city for the 4 goods, to get fame, even if your profit is low or you may even take a small loss on it at times. The standard setting does not understand the fame game.

- you should be aware that adding a business requires you to reset the city. That is, say you had a hemp but no rope city, and months later you buy the right to make ropes. You build 5 rope factories and .... you trade route tries to SELL that town ropes from somewhere else. What went wrong?! The standard setting is not aware of updates; before this town needed rope and could not produce it, and it keeps that setting. You need to turn it all off and hit standard again on that town to make it start buying there and selling elsewhere.

- you may need a custom route to deal with game goal idiocy. Once in a while you get something like 'produce 500 units of X per day' as a game goal, and you need a dedicated large fleet to siphon it all off and sell it to anyone who will pay anything at all for the excess.

what I do for colonial goods is make a normal trade route on a HUGE capacity fleet (usually, at least 2 of the fluyt class ships) and tell it to trade normally (all standard). Then tweak it: set off on all the citys for colonial goods and sell 500 at whatever on the capital. Then find the towns that sell these goods and buy a large amount there (500 at whatever). This will work early game; later you may need to add ships and increase the values to 1000 per trip but until you start making plantations, its most likely to get like 100-200 of each or less per trip due to low production. Also this is a good convoy for a helmsman/navigator combo captain.