Advice/thoughts on efficient trade routes

[Yehoodi]

I have enjoyed these trading games and am playing Port Royal 3 again over the weekend after being away for a handful of years. Finished the trading scenario and did nearly all my trading by hand. Am now playing that game in free mode.

As with these trading games, I find it tough to get an efficient trading route going and end up just have a few small ones for resource moving. I end up making a huge transport fleet or two and trade by hand. It is fun and makes good money but gets long in the tooth to be honest. Be nice to sit back and let the AI do the heavy lifting.

I was wondering what other folks do to get an efficient trade route.

Any help advice/tips would be greatly appreciated.

Right now I am tooling with a manual route where i pick up a single item or two in one location and deliver it to a bunch of cities at like a 150% profit.

[redimap]

Assuming you are using the standard setup. i.e. Non-random production distribution, then there are a lot of trade routes to optimise profits. e.g.
Northern Route:
Port Royale ► Port-au-Prince ► Santiago ► Isabella ► Turk Islands ► Tortuga ► Gibara ► Charles Town ► Cat Island ► Andross ► Nassau ► Eleuthera ► Grand Bahamas ► Charleston ► St. Augstine ► Ft. Caroline

Western Route:
Port Royale ► Cayman ► Evangelista ► Nombre de Dios ► Havana ► Florida Keys ► Tampa ► Port St. Joe ► Biloxi ► Pensacola ► New Orleans ► Corpus Christi ► Tampico ► Vera Cruz ► Villa Hermosa ► Campeche ► Sisal ► Cancun

Eastern Route:
Port Royale ► Santo Domingo ► San Juan ► St. Thome ► St. Martin ► St. Kitts ► Antigua ► Guadeloupe ► Martinique ► Barbados ► St. Lucia ► Grenada ► Georgetown ► Port of Spain ► Puerto Santo ► Cartagena ► Margarita ► Puerto Cabello

Southern Route:
Port Royale ► Santiago ► Trinidad ► Evangelista ► Cayman ► Belize ► Roatan ► Providence ► Cartagena ► Santa Martha ► Maracaibo ► Gibraltar ► Coro ► Curaçao ► Puerto Cabello ► Caracas

Capital Route:
Your Home Town ► Port Royale ► Turk Islands ► Grand Bahama ► St. Augustine ► Havana ► New Orleans ► Vera Cruz ► Belize ► Caracas ► Margarita ► Guadeloupe ► San Juan

Middle Route:
Your Home Town ► Evangelista ► Cayman ► Trinidad ► Santiago ► Port Royale ► Port-au-Prince ► Tortuga ► Gibara ► Andross ► Nassau ► Florida Keys ► Havana ► Nombre de Dios ► Cancun

There are lots of other suggestions out there in the interwebs. I personally don't worry about trade routes too much. I tend to set up routes with small ships and oddly spaced ports. If you have too many trade routes running, then no port runs out of stuff, and therefore there are no shortages/tasks for you to make bigger money. Also, if you have two routes running across each other's ports, then both routes will suffer with less profit. Finally, assuming that you are pirating, freebooting and annexing yourself, it is better not to over-trade ports, as they provide places to dump your booty with a tidy profit. But, if you also have trade routes running through these ports, they buy your stuff back and trade it again for less profit.

[Yehoodi]

Great, thanks for the routes. I will give them a try.

I am pretty far into my game, and Holland has taken parts of northern Cuba.

Have a good infrastructure but do not as if yet do any battling. Got about 5 mil in the bank and can maintain this amount while still building. Would be nice to let the AI do the trading so i can do other stuff in the game.

I assume the non-random distribution you mean the AI buys and sells the goods?

Thanks again.

[Darinthal]

Non-Random Distribution refers to the default settings that set the manufacturing of the cities to the same in every game. My personal preference is to set the manufacturing in each city to random distribution. This changes the game every time you start a new game and means that trade routes need to be created new every game rather than saving the route for use in future games.

[Yehoodi]

okay thank you. So one can choose to have the same production in each city in each play through, or decide to have the production be changed for each play through.

My trouble is that i do not spend the time to micro manage across my cities to balance things out too much. I kind of build what i need at the time and try to keep things as balanced as possible, without going crazy. Just kind of wing it.

I did pick up Port Royale 4 Beta over the weekend, and it seems that the auto trader route work great early in the game and has calmed down some. But even now my auto routes in PR4 are making some decent money. Not sure if the devs have changes things or not.

As the same time though in PR4 i am only just following the campaign and have not built up may cities. Am enjoying PR4 though. Both are fun games.

[LeChevalier88]

I prefer to do trades manually myself. This is very time-consuming but it's simple and easy to adjust depending what's needed or what's in surplus. For me the main benefit of trading routes (Profit and Prosperity) is leveling up my captains' skills.
For money, it's mainly from pirating the treasure fleets.