Newbie, can't break a profit

[jeroenla]

Hi all,
I've been losing a lot of nights sleep this week, because I discovered this game. But no matter what I try, I fail to make a profit.

As long as I am buying and selling, it goes well, but the buildings I make are bleeding money like crazy.

The sawmill produces timber, which is great, but it's 25g more expensive than the market. The fish my fisherman produces is 100g more expensive than the market. That goes for all.

How do I get my production to be efficient enough to actually be able to sell it through my trading house?

(And why does the average cost keep rising?)

[knighttemplar1960]

Some starting tips:

1) Keep buying and selling. Don't build buildings until you aren't getting enough supplies to make money AND keep your home city supplied.

2) Concentrate on goods that take up small amounts of cargo space. 10 Iron goods take up the same amount of space as 1 load of fish. The profit on the 10 iron goods will be somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500. The profit on the 1 load of fish will be $100. You will make more money buying 10 barrels of beer for 35 and selling it for 50 than you will on 1 load of fish. In the early game I usually make most of my money on Iron goods. I add skins, wine, and leather as I can and spices when I find some. (Occasionally you will find a large amount of spice in Bruges, Cologne, London, or Scarborough. If there is more than 10 in the town you can purchase the amount over 10 and resell it for more than you paid for it or you can take it back to your home town and let your trading post manager sell it for you.)

3) Automate some trade routes. Each captain has a rating in coin bags, sails, and swords. The higher the number the captain has for his coin bags the less it costs him for goods he buys and the more he makes for goods he sells.

4) When you have regular trade routes established and can afford to set up buildings try to put your industries in cities where the production is effective rather than low. Every 3 industries of the same type that you own in a city (whether it is effective or low) gives a production bonus to that type of building for you with a maximum bonus when you have 9 of the same industries in that town.

5) Make sure you have enough warehouse space in each town to hold every thing that will be produced and stored between the times that your ships make calls. Renting warehouse space eats up profits FAST.

6) You are better off having more ships than having more warehouses. You can store goods that you are moving in your ships if you don't have the warehouse space to drop goods off. (Your ships make good mobile warehouses.)

For more tips look through the guides on this forum or you can friend me and message me if you have more questions.

[Oakshield]

First of all:

welcome to this game.

Yes, it's a one which can be a bit complicated to master, however, once you do, you'll be able at some point to get to the highest position within a year while playing at the highest difficulty and still not being satisfied about what happened.

From what you wrote, I can only asume you've started in Lübeck (or Luebeck as it is in some translations); which in itself is nice city, but not the best starting point.
I'm also afraid you have begun setting up the wrong kinds of industries; which is causing your problem.

So my first piece of advice is:

Save your current game and start over.
Or - if you don't want to do that - load a saved game from where you didn't have any industries left.

The problem you - and many before you - ran into is that you've begun producing goods that are needed, but don't generate a high profit.
The high profit goods in this game are Cloth, Iron Goods (or IG), Skins, Wine and Spices.

Anything else is either a low profit good, used to keep population happy; as resource for the production of the high profit goods or both.
And unfortunately, Fish and Timber are the latter.

The second "mistake" you - and many before you - made is that you have begun producing some of the items in a city that doesn't do them in an effective way.

If you click at the city at the world-map, it'll show you a list of goods it produces; with the effective ones on the left and the in-effective ones on the right.
You can get the same information when clicking at the statue at the town's square.
In general it means that an ineffective production facility has a lower output at a higher cost as an effective facility.
If you for some reason loose workers or have industries shutting down because they're outside the townwalls and the town is besieged, you'll even have more problems when those industries are starting up again.
And thus your costs are increasing; while the costprice isn't dropping at all.

If you check Lübeck, you'll notice that Fish is produced effectively, but timber isn't. So right now producing it is a "mistake"; although later in the game you actually may do that.

The reason you got problems with fish is that you need to import salt and hemp - as Lübeck produces the latter ineffective as well - meaning your base costs are getting up. And with Oslo, Aalborg and Stetting producing Fish in that region as well, there's plenty of it to be sold by the AI.


Since you got the trading aspect under control, I'll keep short about that;

Your first priority is to expand your fleet so you're able to visit each and every nearby city (Aalborg, Oslo, Rostock, Stettin, Malmö) with a single ship. Make sure you sell everything you don't produce in those cities and buy ONLY what those cities produce.

Lübeck is producing iron goods, while Malmö produces cloth; which are two of the items making money in this game.

So here's a basic approach you can use:

1) Start trading from Lübeck to Rostock, Stettin, (Gdansk), Malmö, Oslo, Aalborg and back to Lübeck selling all goods a city doesn't have and buy only what they produce.

2) If you think you can do some piracy, make sure you got a captain, buy cutlasses at the weaponsmith, load those aboard your ship and sail to the rivers leading to Novgorod, Torun (or Thorn) and Cologne. Turn into a pirate, attack and capture ships with less as 75% health points and at least 100 cargo aboard, sell the cargo, use the ships for trading.
Do this a few times and you got enough steps for stage 3.

3) If not going a pirate way, buy ships instead until you got enough to supply each city by a single ship. Make sure you got a captain aboard so you can use trade routes to make your life a lot easier.
Eventually you'll end up with 5-6 convoys doing the trading for you.
Consider adding a 7th convoy visiting Groningen, Bruges, Cologne and London to pick up wine and spices while you sell IG and Cloth there.
And consider adding an 8th convoy visiting Torun, Riga, Reval, Novgorod and Ladoga to sell IG and Cloth (Plus when you got them, wine and spices) and buy up the skins.

4) Now you got your distribution under controll, build houses - most likely a Half-timbered house first - and join the city's guild. You will need the latter to progress anyway and the sooner you join them, the cheaper it is. You can check the housing by clicking at them.

5) With everything under control, it's time to focus at production.
As mentioned earlier, Iron goods, Skins, Cloth, Wine and Spices are where the money is, so start producing those first.
Hire an administrator in Lübeck, set him up to sell everything you DO NOT produce there, however, also make sure you start stockpiling hemp (21), salt (50), Pig Iron (10) timber (50), Pitch (50) and Cloth (50) there. Those number apply to your minimum stock needed to either build a house, industry or ship, or to supply your industries.

6) Now when that's done, order the construction of a Workshop.
It'll take some time before it's build, so have some patience.
Expect your first IG produced in it being more expensive as what you pay for buying them form the town, however the price will drop over time. And by mixing them up with what is bought, you'll be able to get a nice price out of it anyway.
If it's running, order a 2nd and a 3rd, but DO NOT expand into timber, bricks, pitch or whatever. No matter what the prices look like.

7) Now your main concern is to make sure you got a steady flow of resources to feed your iron goods production. Meaning you need pig iron and timber.
Both are produced effective at Aalborg and Oslo, so you may consider to expand to either one of those cities and to Malmö later. Note, build only one sawmill to start with, as building too many too soon will drive you into bankrupty
Or instead aim at the cloth production and expand to Malmö first and those two cities later.
When that's done expand to Stettin to start producing Salt, Beer and Grain; it'll be a nice spot where you can sell your IG and Cloth.

Eventually you may consider to expand to one of the western cities - Bremen has IG, Cloth and Beer prodution - and eastern cities (Visby got Cloth, Stockholm got IG and Reval got IG and Skins) to set up a base of operation there.

When you notice you're running out of certain products, check if you can pick them elsewhere or if you need to produce them. When it's the latter, set up a route that supplies the town with all it doesn't produce, bring a covoy with enough timber, IG and bricks to build an office and "start over" there.

The easiest way to control the entire map is by setting up 3 major cities for the 3 regions, from which you supply all the cities of that region and transport the goods not produced in that region to the other two.
The key to that, focus at the high profit goods first: IG, Cloth, Skin, Wine, Spices and the "Big Four" (Grain, Beer, Fish, Timber - and wool according to some -) after that. Anything else is just needed to keep (a part of) your population happy.

Good luck!


Thorin :)

[TheMaster1]

Drop by our discord to get more tips :)

https://discord.gg/6BHaRZm

[jeroenla]

Thank you for your elaborate reply. I was kinda surprised to see you tell me not to produce wood, as it's an input for the iron goods, but I get the point about efficiency :)

#3 Now, when you say "Supply each city by a single ship", does that mean doing only one-stop trade routes? I was thinking of using a ship to sail Luebeck, Malmo, Aalborg, Oslo, Aalborg, Luebeck...picking up Iron Goods, and a few beer, from Luebeck to sell in the other cities and picking up pig iron there. Are you suggesting I should, instead, use 3 different trade routes? Why is that better?

I notice when I regularly make a stop at town, there aren't that many resources available. What, then, is the advantage of a convoy?

#5 (and earlier), how can I sell what I don't produce? How do I get it in my posession? Also, those numbers are pretty high...50 cloth? I don't think I've ever owned more than 3 so far :D :D

[Oakshield]

Sorry for the long reply. I'll try to keep it shorter this time. :D

#3: What I meant is to set up a convoy from Lübeck, sailng to Malmö and back to Lübeck again.
In Lübeck you can pick up everything BUT wool, cloth, timber and Pig Iron from your warehouse.
Your next stop is Malmö, where you (attempt to) sell everything, and buy Wool, Cloth, Timber and Pig Iron.
3rd stop is Lübeck again, where you try to sell everything you have in stock.
4th stop is Lübeck once more, where you move everything you haven't sold back to your warehouse.
While you can do this manually, it's far better to set up this route using a captain; as you can automate it and only adjust it when you notice you are selling all goods over there.

Do the same thing for:
- Oslo (buying Pig Iron, Pitch, Whale Oil, Skins and Timber),
- Aalborg (buying Meat, Leather, Whale Oil, Pig Iron, Timber, Pottery),
- Rostock (buying Salt, Honey, Pottery, Hemp, Grain),
- Stettin: (buying Beer, Fish, Salt, Hemp)

As you can see, by buying the items produced at efficient production, you're able to get them at hte right price; thus making your profit highest.
But more important, you will most likely buy more as you use in Lübeck. Because of that, your surplus will be picked up by a convoy and used to be sold in one of the other cities.

What I just described is called Hub-system, whereas Lübeck is the center of the Hub and the other cities are the spokes. It's basically the most effective way to trade in this game, as you collect all goods at a central place, before they're picked up again.

Only problem you may run into, is that you will run out of warehouse space pretty soon. You can solve that by building more warehouses - and thus pay more taxes too - as they offer 2.000 extra barrels of storage.

OR:

You set up one convoy in Lübeck that has the following trade route (and thus a captain)

Lübeck: Pick up all from warehouse (since you locked some goods, that won't hurt you much)
Lübeck: Sell all to city
Lübeck: Drop everything in the warehouse

With that route you'll cut the extra storage costs, may make a little profit and still can run things using your office only. However, disadvantage of it, is that you may have problems to supply your trade routes.

As for captains (as you *will* need them; there are always two around in the game. However, the AI does pick them up too, so it may take some time to find them.
Good thing is, the AI doesn't pick up captains in a river town, meaning you got some better chances to find one over there.
Until you do, run circular routes as you mentioned before 'til you got enough captains to switch to a hub-system.


Thorin :)

[jeroenla]

Why are you saying sorry for something I thanked you for? LOL.

Anyway, I've actually managed to get the production to be somewhat economically sound...but...

As soon as I get an automated traderoute and an office elsewhere... the pirates come. They hit me each time I leave harbor (in harbor too), causing me to go bankrupt.

I've been googling on how to deal with them, but they all assume that you already have a nice fleet of warships. Which I don't....

How am I supposed to survive those bastards?

[Draconyx]

For the pirates load up the most powerful ship (crayers, cogs or hulks) with cannons or the furthest down the list of options you have access to and cutlass's to the number of max crew plus 10 so say its 31 crew you have 40 cutlass on the ship. also fill the crew up totally.

If you save frequently enough when the pirates attack you should have a recent save. Use that to practice controlling ships in combat. I've gotten to the point that I can usually beat ahulk with a snaikka. If the situation is right its even possible to capture the hulk using a snaikka.

[Oakshield]

Pirates are there from the start, they will just attack your ships from a certain reputation / rank ( I think it was travelling merchant rank) or when you got a very juicy cargo aboard. Something you can use to your advantage later.

As long as your ships aren't armed, let the AI handle the fight. Even with fully loades ships they're often able to flee from attacking pirates.
If the ship is armed, however, the captains will fight the pirates; and often loose. So it's better o fight those battles yourself.

Depending at when you started, you need to expand the ship with a captain to level 3, outfit it with weapons - catapults first, bombards and eventually cannons later - arm your crew with cutlasses.
I wouldn't use Cogs as was mentioned in the above post though.

Yes, they can turn at a dime, however they're slower as the other ships ingame and thus have a hard time to capture opponents; unless those are stupid enough to sail a few times into your broadsides.

For river convoys or convoys using Snaikka's only, a lvl 3 Crayer with maximum crew, surplus cutlasses and full (small) weapons would be the best ship to deal with pirates.
More important, as the crew, weapons and upgrade use cargo space, you need to add a 2nd ship to the convoy to carry what you want to trade.

For larger convoys heading to sea towns only, or having Cogs in them, a Holk would be better.

There are several tactics you can use to deal with pirates, however, I won't write them all down here.
Instead, I'll do a bit of self promotion, as lots of your questions will be answered here:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1956335034

The other option instead of fighting the convoys is having the captains deal with it.
You'd be surprised how well the AI captains are able to flee from pirates if their ships aren't armed.
And how terrible they behave when their ships are armed. :(

So for now, I think your best option is to make sure the ship isn't armed until you're able to build yourself one or more Crayers, upgrade them to level 3, find a captain with at least 4 points in sailing and fighting skill and start hunting the buggers.

The moment you find one, set the game speed to slowest, save the game using something like "naval battle training" and attack the convoy.
After that, try to defeat it; capturing is something you can try later, first lesson is to sink the bugger(s).
When you managed that, try to capture a ship, after you sank or forced the other ones to flee.
After you trained a battle a few times, you'll notice the AI pirates will use some patterns over and over again. You will also learn to recognize the patterns and anticipate to them. At that point you're able to defeat them every time and end up with an extra ship after each battle.

Last piece of advice, when doing a naval battle; keep an eye at the shoals and the clouds.
Shoals can be used to force a pirate to take a longer route towards you if you keep them between the pirates and yourself. Plus if a ship runs into it, they slow down a lot and are an easy target.
Clouds show the wind direction, while the windspeed reduces the more you get to the outer of the map.
Something you can use to your advance, as a snaikka runs faster against the wind, as a Cog does. Even if the Snaikka is (almost) fully loaded.


Thorin :)

[jeroenla]

Oh glorious day, I followed Draconyx suggestion and managed to kill Benake. It only took me about 10 tries or so. But my theory that the sea would now be safe was an illusion. Because a new guy popped up in seconds.

Do I at least earn anything (reputation?) by killing them?

Furthermore, good advice on the AI, Oakshield...turns out the AI is pretty good at fleeing. Sure, it costs some in repairs, but I get to keep my cargo.

I've just started collecting materials for my first hulk (it got unlocked), to turn it into a floating fortress, see where that goes.

How do I see the "captains points"?

But now that I have -more or less- a grasp of pirates.... how do I deal with the prince. He just destroyed my entire savings (2 breweries and a grain farm) in Stettin and is laying siege on three or four cities at the same time. This is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥! And all I can think of doing is... pray...

[Oakshield]

Destroying pirates give you an increased reputation all over the Hanse. And it´s something you need if you want to build in or get access to other cities.

Captain´s skill can be seen when opening the ship panel, selecting crew and when a captain is there it´ll show you three numbers like 0/5/4.
First number is trading, second is sailing and third is fighting.
Same numbers also show up when you check on them when they´re still in a tavern.

As for the prince - or better said, princes and marauders - the only thing you can do about it is to pay them off when you're a councillor or above.
The only way to deal with them is to have strong defences - like cannon towers, pitch shoot (and enough pitch in town) and a good militairy (10 swordsmen, 4 archers, 3 x-bowmen and 3 musketeers) when you're a Lord Mayor (LM).
If you aren't LM, but are councillor, ask to expand the military the moment a siege hits your town. It won't save you at the current siege, but may help with the next.

As for sieges in other cities, check which gate got both towers build and build your industries there.
All besieging armies attack the gates with the worst defences; so it wouldn't be smart to build your industries there.
Also, if you got councillor rank in another town, you can request an expansion of the town walls to make sure your industries will be protected over time.
Disadvantage: it also means the moment the industries are inside the wall, you need to pay taxes for them and even if they're inside the new wall, but aren't finished, the new wall acts as if it isn't there.
Advantage, you may be the one selling the required goods to town and make a small profit out of it.

As for what to do when you are LM and building a new wall or want to upgrade the existing one, make sure you got enough resources available and also make sure you increase defences at the gate next to your industries.

And finally, make sure there's enough beer in town, although I think that isn't much of a problem with Stettin. :)

Thorin :)

[jeroenla]

But what can I do when I am just a lowly merchant...?

[AlP]

Originally posted by jeroenla:

But what can I do when I am just a lowly merchant...?

Generally, you don't start building industries until a bit later, because they take some time to give you a return on your investment and become profitable. Trading is more profitable early on.

When you are just starting out, build or capture a few snaikkas. Having more ships will give you a massibe boost to your income.

If you really want to start building, start with low cost industries, like pitch. They are cheap and fast to make, and pitch is always in demand (you also need it to build ships, and there won't be enough pitch produced by towns).

There is a production bonus for 3, 6 and 9 industries of the same type in the same town. So if you build 3 Pitchmakers, they will produce more pitch than three individual Pitchmakers, for the same cost. This is how you get goods that cost lower than the market price.

[jeroenla]

Ah, right...
I figured I'd make a good move in monopolizing the iron goods (workshops, then only supplying myself with pig iron)...and then get beer for happy workers....

Managing more than 2 ships is a pain, and I only discovered autotrading LOL

[Nikiforos V Fokas]

Work towards the immediate start of wood and brick businesses in cities that can support easy quick transportation of wood or bricks (cough Stockholm/Visby cough.)

If you want to see the Hanse grow quickly, start those businesses and their supporting 'half-timbered houses'. You need 1 sawmill per 4 brickmakers. Then always recall the needs of the poor are -essential- to any Hanse growth at all. Supply beer grain fish wool and wood to them in preference in your home town initially. Without the poor happy, your hometown will stagnate. The middle classes and rich can wait their turn until your hometown reaches 3000 or so, then have a go at their needs, e.g. ironware cloth and furs (skins).

Have fun; this is arguably still the best trader ever made.

[noch_dm]

Wait do you not get taxed on industries outside the walls? I always* build inside the walls when I can, am LM and got there in Stettin by arming a Crayer, setting it just outside of Stettin and using it to pirate only* incoming ships to sell the goods directly to Stettin, eventually the NPCs stopped trading with Stetting (Mostly) so I just built production facilities that made what Stettin was lacking and expanded from there... well thats how I learned to play the game properly anyway.

But are you serious that the Buisnesses outside the wall aren't taxed? If so I never noticed the difference.