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Discussions Rules and Guidelines
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You have to have an armed ship as the leader. Form/cancel convoy is a command tab on your menu. Have a reserve on cutlasses, because some break in battle. As counselor / mayor you can buy cutlasses at other ports at weapons shops, instead of risking a fine. Supplying your town with goods that the armorer uses: leather hemp iron goods.
Pirate(s)
Its not one pirate, it's just a random with the same name. you can turn down the pirate activity if you're getting swamped on main menu. Killing pirates is easier than trying to board, but no loot. Start building new ships at home so your yard starts producing better ships and new types.
Pirate skill ranks go higher than your captains can. So don't board unless you're sure you can win. The pirate ships you prize early are only good as warships. So fix /auction if you're not going to use them as warhips.
Get a crayer with a captain and let the battles run in automatic. This way like 90% of the times you'll escape, and worst case scenario you lose your goods. But you cannot lose your ship this way. If your captain has 4-5 navitgation skill then you'll escape 95+% of the times.
Only when you have an armed ship is when they can capture your ship, so bare that in mind.
You can get a armed-to-the-teeth convoy, with a 1:1 ratio of cutlasses:sailors minimum and full of the best cannons. But I don't think its worth it unless you're specifically hunting the pirates down.
If you're interest here is our patrician 3 discord: https://discord.gg/6BHaRZm
You can also make the Battle yourself and try to kill the Pirates, if you feel you have no chance to kill them and no chance to escape, you can surrender "white Flag under the map" and they will only loot you, even if they only have 20% left.
edit: They stay at 20% after the fight, so if they attack you next time they prolly still only have 20% left.
If you have a convoy and one ship is empty, you can surrender with that one ship and flee with the others. Like i said if you surrender you only get looted.
But tbh with good enough skill you can kill 3 ships with one. Just try to dodge, fiddle around, shoot every once in a while. Its basically you flee the whole fight and try to still shoot the enemy, if you reach the edge of the map turn around (while always keep the wind on your mind) and flee in the different direction. With a Crayer it is pretty easy, as long as your ship is over 70%.
I almost never battled the pirates - just a couple of times when they have only one ship - and all my strategy has been, for the initial and mid stages of the game:
a) trying to flee them (ignoring the "Steer Manually" option),
b) avoiding the long distances travels.
Until very recently, I didn't spend any money in weapons or even on hiring a Captain. The most unarmed the ship, the faster it sails.
When setting the routes for my ships, I didn't try to send them directly from Stettin to Oslo, nor to Cologne. Applied the "cabotage" model of transport: "shipping along coastal routes, port to port" (Wikipedia).
After a - big - while, when I reached a steady cash availability of 0.6 - 0.8 MM, and when I already had four/five ships, including a cog, then I decided to "promote" to convoy capable.
Picked my largest ship (a cog), checked for possible Improvement in my town Shipyard, bought enough weapons to fill fully its deck, including cutlasses for each crew member, hired 25-30 sailors and a captain. Then did the same, except the captain hiring, for 2-3 more of my ships, and formed my convoys, "Private" most of the times.
At first used the well armed convoy to deliver goods signed in the "Notices" section of my town "Guild": too bad for your reputation if you take a contract for delivering goods, and then can't comply because the pirates stole your cargo/ships.
After a while, took the time to set an automatic trading route, touching 20 towns (max # of stops).
Soon afterwards, my convoy had captured a couple of pirate ships, so I formed a second
convoy. And a remark about this: from all my 9 ships, I only have built 4-5 of them, all others are prizes captured to the pirates. Always avoiding the "Steer Manually" option, and letting the game to decide the outcome.
After a few rounds, this second convoy only had money loses, and my cash were free falling from 1 MM down to 0.8 MM, so I sent both convoys home, fired the second convoy captain and dissolved both of them. Formed one big 7 ships convoy (all cogs and crayers), and left out to snaikkas for ad-hoc sailing, such as fulfilling small contracts ("Notices") or exchanging goods between my four trading offices.
Soon afterwards, after a few rounds of my big new convoy, my cash availability jumped above 1 MM, to the level it is now.
Another nice thing about convoys is they send you a "Ship Trade" (profits/loses) notice every time they complete a journey, read them so you can keep track of how they are doing.
I haven't found yet the way of sending a convoy to the trade centers out of the map (the ones "discovered" and informed to you in your "Guild" options). Also, the couple of times I formed "public" convoys, no apparent benefit came from that.
Next, I'm planning to focus more in these two sides of using convoys.
To give a general hint of the basic economic underlying scenario of the game "world": Southern towns usually provide cheap Wine and Cloth, Central towns are good to buy cheap Beer/Grain, Northern towns are good to buy cheap Skins, Whale Oil and Fish.
Meat is a hot commodity, wherever/whenever you find it selling under 1,200 buy all you can, it is easy to find towns, including your own, where you frequently can sell it at 1,800/2,000.
Wine, Cloth, Leather and Iron Goods are hot as well. Fish is not as spectacular as Meat, but buying all you can under 550, will give you soon afterwards a nice benefit, by selling at 650-850.
My favorite trade is buying cheap Wine in Cologne, producing beer in my town, and buying cheap Skins up North. Then selling high the acquired goods in my home town, whereas selling my beer everywhere else.
Remove the catapults from your starting ship and sell them. If you lose your starting ship you are going to quit the game and start over anyway so there is no point wasting the cargo space while you only have your starter ship. Buy as many iron goods as you can get for cheap (~350 coins each) and set sail for Malmo. I start by running what I call the Luebeck Loop.
Now that your ship is on the way to Malmo hire an administrator in Luebeck. Set him to buy up to 100 iron goods at what ever your preferred price point is (remember your ship only has room for a maximum of 180 goods so there is no point buying a lot of goods that you don't have the room to transport). Then set your administrator to sell every thing that Luebeck doesn't produce itself (wine is an exception. Luebeck doesn't produce it but it never seems to want to pay what wine is worth either.) Except that you want to keep 10 cloth in stock (that's enough to build 2 cogs or 2 crayers).
All the towns start off with a glut of products. Luebeck might have as much as 50 hemp in town at rock bottom prices so buy 10 hemp for cheap. That is enough to build your 2nd and 3rd ship.
Set your administrator to buy a maximum of 40 pitch at the cheapest price he can and still actually buy some. That's enough pitch to make your first cog. Why a a cog? Because its cheaper to build than a crayer, it holds far more goods, and it has slots for 8 ship weapons without upgrading the ship. It only takes a crew of 10 rather than 8 so wages won't eat your lunch.
Next look at the armory. At the beginning of the game the armory can only hold a single one of each type ship weapon and a maximum of 10 cutlasses. That increases over time to a maximum of 20 of each type weapon and a max of 50 cutlasses but right now there will only be 1 of each type ship weapon available.
Catapults have longer range than ballistas but they do less damage. Range only makes a difference if you are fighting your ship battles manually but we will want to set up things so that you can do them automatically and still win.
A small ballista takes up one weapon slot and a larger one takes up 2. The large version of the weapon does about 25% more damage than 2 of the smaller ones of the same type. Your crayer can hold 5 weapons on each side of the ship so our goal is going to be 2 small balistas and 4 large ballistas. If we do it right we should have them accumulated by the time we get our first cog built.
For the armorer to produce ship (and later hand) weapons it takes, timber, hemp, leather, and iron goods. If the town runs out of any of those things weapon production stops. Luebeck produces timber, hemp, and iron goods so we need to make sure that we keep up a steady supply of leather to have weapons made.
This brings us back to making money. Because of the starting game glut you are only going to be able to profitably sell high demand goods. Click on the market hall and look at consumption. You'll find that what the town consumes the most of is beer, followed by iron goods, followed by wine. Next is cloth, leather, and whale oil. Then honey, pottery, and skins.
There are 2 different types of commodities large volume goods like hemp, bricks, timber, grain, fish, meat, and pig iron that take up 10 units of storage per good and small volume items, like beer, iron goods, leather, wine etc. that take up 1 unit of storage per good. We don't have much space so we want to avoid bulk goods like meat with the exception being pig iron. Luebeck requires pig iron to produce iron goods so we will want to bring that back with us to sell so that we have a steady supply of iron goods.
So lets look at prices compared to demand. Top demand goods are iron goods, beer, and wine. Beer can be bought for ~35 per unit and sells for as much as 75 so best case would be that we make 40 on each barrel of beer. Iron goods can be bought cheaply for 325 - 350 and sold at good prices for 400 - 525 per unit so we will make much more on iron goods than on beer. We can buy wine for 220 and sell it for 320+ but wine is too far away just now with our limited cargo space. We can buy leather for ~275 and sell it for 375 or more and we need it so the armorer can make weapons. skins have a low demand but they take 1 cargo space and we can buy them for as little as 700 and sell them for as much as 1500. We want to avoid meat at this point in the game. We can buy it for ~1000 and sell it for more than 1500 but one unit of it takes up 10 cargo spaces that means our profit is only ~50 per cargo unit space where as our profit on leather is ~100 per cargo space.
So to begin with we want to sell iron goods in Malmo, Aalborg, Oslo, Ripen, and maybe Hamburg and buy leather, a little honey (we don't want to over buy and not be able to sell at a profit quickly), a little pottery, cloth, skins, and pig iron in Malmo, buy leather, a little whale oil, and pig iron in Aalborg, pitch, skins, a little whale oil, and pig iron in Oslo, leather, a little whale oil, and pig iron in Ripen and beer in Hamburg if your goods to sell didn't run out by then.
While you are buying low and selling high look in each tavern for a captain and hire him. Having a captain gives you several special abilities. He can command a convoy, make automated trades, and he has bonuses to some of his abilities. From 0-5 coin bags, 0-5, swords, and 0-5 sails. When the captain is automated he gets a 2% reduction in the price of all goods he buys and an extra 2% profit for all goods he sells per coin bag he has and this applies to all the ships in the convoy. He gets an increase of 2% weapon strength and crew combat rating of his ship for each sword he has and he gets an increase of 2% sailing speed and 6% maneuverability for his ship for each sail he has.
Meanwhile back in Luebeck you want to keep buying cutlasses every time the armorer makes one (because he can only store a very limited quantity right now) and you want to accumulate 10 small ballistas to arm your crayer once you have a captain and have completed your first cog. When you tech up and begin producing large ballistas you will want to buy 4 and replace 8 of the small ballistas with the 4 large ballistas.
Once you are out of goods to sell on your first run, head back to Luebeck, and drop off the goods you picked up so your trade post manager can sell them while you continue. Repair your ship, pick up your iron goods, and if you didn't get a captain, head towards one of the river cities (Torun, Novgorod, and Cologne captains like to hang out in the river cities) selling and buying low space requirement goods in each city on the way, making sure that you don't overstock yourself on any particular good in Leubeck.
Once you have the money and materials start production of your first cog in Luebeck. If things work out the way you hope then you will have a captain, 10 small ballistas and maybe 20 cutlasses at the time your cog is complete. Fill the crayer with the maximum number of men that you can, put all the cutlasses you have available on board, put the weapons on your crayer, crew your cog and form a private convoy.
Armed this way you should be a match for any single ship pirate that you meet using automatic combat. Keep buying cutlasses as they are available and buy 8 large ballistas. Build a 2nd cog as soon as you can. Since you have more cargo space you can have your manager increase the amount of iron goods he purchases to 300 and you can make longer trade runs and start to buy some of the larger cargo space required items.
Continue this way until you can build your 2nd cog. The next time you are back in Luebeck put enough cutlasses on your crayer so that every sailor has one. When your 2nd cog is ready you are all set.
At this point, if Beneke has a 3 ship convoy, pull into Luebeck, put your 8 large ballistas on your 2 cogs, fill each cog with as many sailors as they can hold and distribute all the extra cutlasses you have evenly between the 2 cogs. Your 3 ships are now better armed than Beneke's 3 at this point and if he attacks you'll most likely sink one of his ships and capture at least 1 of the other 2 even using automatic combat (depending on your captian's stats.)
Afterwards when you tech up replace the large ballistas with bombards and the small ballistas with cannons. I like to have 2 armed crayers with captains in each of my fleets later on because I found to my horror a captain that has been sailing for a long time can retire which will disband your fleet causing you a huge nightmare unless you have another captain that you can immediately replace him with. You can also have a captain die in combat (its about a 1% chance each combat) causing the same problem much earlier in the game.
One other thing of note, as soon as you start construction of a trading post in another town you can immediately buy ship weapons in that town. That will solve your cutlass shortage.
However, given the length of the previous post, I'd say; be smart and just check the guide I wrote for this game.
Goods prices, the (dis)advantages of each ship type and weapons, as well how to deal with pirates are all mentioned in there.
Plus the tactics pirates use against you and which tactics you can use against pirates.
Only thing regarding that I'd like to say is this:
Upgrade a Crayer to level 3, give it a captain with a high sailing skill (4-5 preferred) and a high fighting skill (also 4-5 preferred) put 10 SMALL!!! catapults and 10 more cutlasses as you have crew on that ship and start looking for those black spots at the world map. Chances are you will find them in the Kattegat; the area between Malmö and Aalborg.
Save the game, select that Crayer, click at the pirate so your Crayer will sail to it and wait until it attacks.
When it does, select the manual fight option and start blasting at that pirate. Use your space bar to fire your weapons, as it'll save time compared to moving your mouse back and forth. Keep an eye at the clouds and use your higher speed as an advantage compared to the Cogs lower one.
You may loose the fight, so when that happens, load the safe, select your ship and try again. And again and again, up to the point you're able to capture one ship and sinking the other one(s).
Eventually you'll be able to capture a 55 crew Holk using a 28 crew Crayer.
And the reason why I mention SMALL!!! catapults over large ones:
Projectiles can and will destroy your ship weapons if they hit a slot. The moment a projectile hits a large catapult aboard your ship, you loose 40%!! of your attacking capabilty of that side.
However when using small catapults, you'll use only 1 out of 5 = 20% of that capability at that particular side.
And 4 small stones still hit a lot more as one large and one small stone; even if that large stone does more damage at a longer range.
But you can read all about that in my guide too.
Thorin :)
I specifically mentioned wanting to set the fleet up to use the auto battle button. With auto battle it all comes down to fire power. The main reason I do this is because in multiplayer games if you select manual combat the game crashes or locks up and I rarely play single player these days.
I also consider save scumming, the fleet river exploit, and the AI business destruction exploit to be cheating, especially in multiplayer. I prefer to play economically as going pirate and raiding towns is much too easy and I became bored with that years ago.
Some of the things I mentioned come right from the owners manual that came with the original disc. 2,300 hours on the Steam version and countless hours from the original disk before I repurchased it on Steam and the method I spoke of works on auto battle every time unless your captain has a 0 rating in everything (Yes, I've had a my first captain start with a zero rating in every thing on more than one occasion.)
Another thing to note, if you have even one weapon on a ship it WILL participate in the auto battle rather than flee. If the ship has no weapons it will flee so either load for bear or don't load any weapons at all.
Don't take my word for it though, try both methods and see which one you prefer.
That's my experience from both MP and SP of both Patrician II and Patrician III.
Using large weapons will severely reduce your damage output the moment only one of them is destroyed.
Again, experience from both Patrician II and III.
Buy iron goods up to 350 gold? A good way to destroy the economy of the town producing them, plus another good way to create a money sink for yourself.
Perhaps what you described works at Shopkeeper level, but it certainly won't work at any level above Travelling Merchant level.
And finally, the OP clearly states (s)he is playing from Stettin.
Your reply: "I am assuming you are starting in Lübeck....
Hence, you haven't even read the first post; making your previous reply even a less decent advise.
Yet, play this game the way you like and I play it my way. But accept critisism when it comes your way after someone else who usually plays at Patrician level disagrees with you.
Thorin :)
I'm fully aware that cogs and hulks will be captured more often but the OPs question was how to deal with Beneke Habbakuk having a 3 ship fleet. The only time this is a problem is in the very early game and my method works 100% of the time to eliminate that early issue. You may lose a ship but you will sink one and capture one or 2 as well replacing the ship you lost and eliminating Beneke or reducing him to a more manageable one ship fleet.
Anyone still having trouble with a 3 ship Beneke fleet in the early game is lacking in experience (especially not knowing how convoys work yet) and obviously still playing on shopkeeper difficulty. Something you may forgotten and hence my advice.
Perhaps the person who "writes guides" should accept criticism and move on as well.
I like how he turned your own post against you.
what I do is 2 or 3 ships
1 crayer fully extended and armed with 4 large cats, and 2 balls., with cutlasses for everyone This is the bait ship and convoy leader at least 0 2 0, 0 3 0 make sure he is carrying goods salt works as good as anything avoid beer and wine. This is so you can see the pirate ship on the game map if you have no goods you wont see the pirates.
2 a cog no armament w/ cutlasses for all. the fastest sailing fighting captain you have.
if you need a 3rd ship same set up if you put a couple guns on board this will split the pirate fleet. pirates will chase ships with guns. but you will have to control 3 ships at once
now Beneke Habbakuk may have 3 ships but he has 1 captain that's him. he's in 1 of the 3 ships. with any Luck Habbakuk is on the crayer and has 2 cogs w/ him.
when you go to the battle screen hit the flee button and maneuver your crayer to avoid your other ships. the pirates should all follow him. the other ship can get out of the way for now kill the sails when he's out of harms way don't let him leave the map. id. Habbakuk's ship damage it to around 65% more if you still have trouble out running him. but we don't want him in the rear of the pirate convoy.
if the pirates have a crayer or snaikka, damage it, "don't sink or capture Habbakuk" if you do he will appear on one of the other ships. now set your crayer to sail across the map intercept the rear ship with the cog (hulks work even better if you have access) hit the boarding button and chase the the ship with the least amount of sailors on it.or the guy in the rear. hit it to start the boarding. you should win easily. if you have enough crew take out the next ship. this is where the 3rd ship comes in handy as it has a full crew.
keeping everyone on the screen can be hard at first. However not arming your cogs means you just need to get them out of the way, and stop them til you need them. work 2 ships at a time and send the captured or low crew ships off the map.
Avoid getting your crayer to hit reefs or get caught going against the wind enough to get caught.
your high sailing captains should intercept the other pirate ship without having to damage them.
Lastly you can capture Habbakuk or damage him under 10 % and let him escape. He will be gone a long time if you do the later. otherwise he will be back in a day or so with a new ship.
once you have this down Pirates are easy ships to add to your fleet.
if your having trouble getting cutlasses take tavern missions the Pirate ship is usually in line with the reward. but even high dollar missions on the high seas can yield Crayers if you stop in the rivers and wait. Even early on a cascade attack with few or no cutlasses will net you a new ship.
The Cascade attack uses Several smaller ship board the pirate surrender at 1 sailor use the next ship until you can capture the pirate ship. if you want to go quicker use a snaikka w/ 1 small cat or ball for the first attack. and let it be captured they have to transfer 5 crew to the ship.
and don't sell your weapons better to take out a loan early game for money.
capturing Pirates will net a fleet of ships in the time it takes to build one. and a note on that building a crayer or snaikka will upgrade your shipyard faster as it upgrades with each ship finished. "a cog first" is 154 days that's 5 months just in build time.
a snaikka is done in 70 and gives you the possibility of a cascade attack for a pirate ship. a crayer is huge if you play on Patrician level. i'll have captured hulks before that cog is built. granted this is for single player.
find a captain before you hire an administrator. as you can use him in every town. and he's hopefully already a 3+ trader.
quick start guide: Patrician level: Luebeck:
when you start the game save as start then sail around till you find a captain restart and get him asap. odds are hes in a river town so grab some iron goods and head to Torun.
when you get there hire the captain take out a long term loan as much as you can get then click auto trade button select Torun. buy wool at 1200 sell iron goods at 400 click active button. it will automaticly stop. wool is pretty much in demand in stettin rostock andl luebeck.
Change city in auto trade and head to Gdansk click active and wait for it you can click the button then speed up the game one click to activate immediately. then slow down the game again. work your back to Luebeck picking up needed supplies and selling what you can. rostock probably needs fish which you can grab with some beer in stettin. save your game.
always check for any tavern missions . and use the auto trade button in each town.
you want escort missions you can out run everyone at this point but save just in case. make sure you have leather sell to 300 in luebeck. there are buy and sell guides out there but to figure out how that is calculated go to the market hall and check the consumption double that. then go to the buy and sell by clicking the cranes around the docks sell 1 less then double and write that number down you need to buy for less than that and sell for that price in your home town.
when you have the supplies and money start a crayer in your home town. you can build ships in other towns as long as you bring a ship there and have the supplies and money. so build a cog in Stettin or Rostock when you can. when you get your first Crayer upgrade it and arm it start taking on any missions that may yield a crayer or Snaikka. reward is a good indicator find another captain. two crayers and you can take on pretty much any one thing.
try to join the guild in your home town early it's expensive later and you cant progress beyond merchant without membership. there are it takes a minimum of 7 months to become a patrician and be mayor . totally possible in Luebeck the first year.