Port Royale 3: Trading Strategies

Port Royale 3 Trade Strategies, this guide attempts to further explain what trading strategies there is, what each one does and where it can be useful.

Introduction to Strategies

Trading Strategies are options that can be used to preset how your ships trade with both towns and your warehouses in Port Royale 3. The strategies mentioned here are available in the full game with expansions, so if you don't see a strategy listed here in game then it's likely your missing an expansion.

Some strategies are for allowing your captain to automatically buy and sell commodities between ports, other strategies are for more logistic purposes like stockpiling all warehouse goods on the route at one warehouse or distributing goods evenly throughout your warehouses.

This guide will attempt to explain what each strategy does and where it's best used.

Prosperity

When "Prosperity" is used as a strategy, your Captains will concentrate on buying/selling goods that are in demand on that route. This strategy emphasises increasing reputation with the cities on the route. This means your Captains will not over-purchase goods. (Lowering market stock through over-purchasing reduces town reputation.)

"Prosperity" only uses town markets for buying and selling, so the only way any goods will enter your warehouse is if you have a warehouse Steward buying goods from the market.

Having a large combined cargohold within the captains fleet will increase the number of different goods bought and sold.

Suggested use

Autonomous trade routes that don't require stocking player warehouses (since the captain only uses the Market)

If you have some industry in the port, you can set your warehouse stewards to sell produce to the market at 115% to flood it with "cheap" merchandise which your captains will then buy cheaply and sell to other ports on the route for a profit.

Profit

Where "Prosperity" concetrates on Reputation, "Profit" concentrates on Money. Your Reputation will not climb as quickly, but your profits will.

When "Profit" is used as a strategy, your ships Captains will concentrate on buying/selling goods that are the most profitable.

"Profit" again only uses town markets for buying and selling, so the only way any goods will enter your warehouse is if you have a warehouse Steward buying goods from the market. If you want to make a fleet profitable and you have towns that are producing goods, then make sure you get your warehouse steward to flood the market with cheap produce. Your captain will then buy it from the market and attempt to distribute (for Profit) along the route.

Having a large combined cargohold within the captains fleet will increase the number of different goods bought and sold.

Suggested use

Autonomous trade routes that don't require stocking player warehouses (since the captain only uses the Market)

If you have some industry in the port, you can set your warehouse stewards to sell produce to the market at 115% to flood it with "cheap" merchandise which your captains will then buy cheaply and sell to other ports on the route for a profit.

Obtain Building Materials

"Obtain Building Materials" is a strategy used to buy and supply the first warehouse on route with building materials (Wood and Bricks).

If the warehouse becomes filled with 500 wood and 1000 bricks, the trade route will be inactivated.

Since this strategy only effects wood and bricks there is no point sending a fleet to cities that doesn't have those goods available.

Suggested use

Short haul trade routes where Bricks/Wood is sold by the towns market or your stewards to the market, just remember that the captain will be delivering those goods to the first warehouse on the route.

It might even be a good idea to have a fleet specifically for this task which you can reroute when necessary.

Empty Warehouse

"Empty Warehouse" is a strategy that can be used to sell overstocked goods throughout a trade route to market. The warehouse that is emptied is the first warehouse that is on the route.

The warehouse will be emptied until there is supplies left for 20 days, at which time the captain will cease trading that good until a greater volume.

If the convoy empties before completing the route, it will return to the warehouse to reload and start the route again.

Suggested use

Best used to stop a warehouse getting overstocked. (Since having more goods than space costs penalty fees)

Sell and Supply

The "Sell and Supply" strategy can help keep multiple warehouses from overfilling as well as making sure that your production lines have the required materials to produce their end product (as long as the good is available from your warehouses on the route).

"Sell and Supply" will load goods from your warehouse to be both distributed where they are needed and/or sold to the towns markets that are on route.

Suggested use

Keep multiple businesses supplied in different towns. (Logistics).

Procure Raw Materials

"Procure Raw Materials" is a strategy where the captain attempts to load Raw materials that exist in your warehouses and distribute them amongst all the warehouses where goods are required for production.

The captains will only load stock where there is a high demand, so if your route has a lot of businesses that need wood and you have one warehouse stockpiling it, your captain will distribute the wood.

Centralize

"Centralize" is a strategy to use if you want one city to be where everything is pooled. It's best used with a town where you've built and Embassy, so the treasure fleet visits (Expansion required)

Your captains will unload everything at the first warehouse on the route and load everything from all other warehouses on route.

Since the Markets aren't used, it serves no purpose to have any other towns on the route other than the ones where you own warehouses.

Ignores Warehouse Steward Limits.

Distribute

"Distribute" is a strategy where your captains will attempt to evenly distribute resource goods throughout all your warehouses on route.

Since the Markets aren't used, it serves no purpose to have any other towns on the route other than the ones where you own warehouses.

Ignores Warehouse Steward Limits.

Suggested use

If you are stockpiling a raw resource like Lumber and it's required in multiple other towns with warehouses, you can use this method to share the goods amongst all of them. The ship will skip all remaining stops on route if it has emptied it's hold.

My Strategy

"My Strategy" is where you can create your own custom strategy.


It can be extremely powerful if used correctly for managing a route as you can buy/sell to the market as well as move goods too and from your convoy to your warehouse (if you have one in that port)


The custom rules step logically through available orders that you have set, your captain will do the following at each city (unless told to skip a city or due to an event):


Unload Goods to Warehouse (If you have a warehouse available there)


Sell Goods to the Market


Load Goods from the Warehouse (If you have goods at a warehouse there)


Buy Goods from the Market

Warehouse Steward "limits" are ignored since it's up to you to work out what goods are needed or should be picked up.

You should take caution when using "Maximum" for loading/purchasing, as your captain could potentially load your entire fleet with just one cargotype therefore blocking other types from being loaded.
So you might consider setting limits on how much cargo should be loaded (and/or unloaded)

Warehouse Stewards

When you have warehouse in a city, you have the option of "Hiring a Steward". Stewards are the warehouse managers, they follow what settings you give them but they can buy stock from the local market, sell produce to the local market, they can reserve a number of days supply of raw stock and they can also be used to "block" what minimum number of goods are stored before being sold to market or moved to a convoy.

Default pricing

The pricing structure in Port Royale 3 uses percentages where 100% is the production cost (The base cost to produce) and 120% is usually the price you'll see goods sold for in ports. (Might change based upon difficulty settings)

While it is possible to keep the default values, it can be best to buy goods up to 115% and sell at over 130% to maximize profit. To begin with your produce might be slow to sell, at least until any already existant stock depletes enough to raise the price. (Depending on which game/difficulty settings you've chosen will alter how effective these values are and how long prices take to change when a stock depletes)

When you edit the "Block" setting, you'll find there are changable values per good, one is for how many goods to keep from market and the other is how many goods to release to convoy.

If you want to get your warehouse steward buying raw materials from the market, you'll have to set your buying price for 120%, This basically means that the steward will buy all excess market stock until either it levels at two green pips or fills your warehouse (whichever is sooner)

The "release to convoy" value is so you can arrange for a stock to be kept at the warehouse, where any overstock is sold to the market and the convoy is loaded from warehouse stock.

Exotic Exports

While there is a whole bunch of resources and commodities that your ships trade between the colonies, there are exotics that are pooled at Governor and Viceroy ports for the treasure fleets to Export back to Europe. (They will bring immigrants to those ports that can either be hired in your workshops or hired onto your ships as crew.)

There is four Exotics in total:
Coffee and Cacao (Cocoa) both require 0.5 Tools to grow.
Tobacco and Dyes grow as a raw resource.

Each are produced within certain area's of the Caribbean:

Convoy Tips

On large convoys

The larger a convoy is the more money it will cost to maintain it (both paying wages and repairs), large convoys (more than 3-4 large ships) are really best for either attacking pirate hideouts or in longhaul trade runs that have a large number of "ports of call" (up to the maximum of 18 ports on a route).

limiting crew and munitions based upon Escort vessels

If you have more than 3 ships to a convoy, don't maximise your crew or munitions. The maximum value is based upon the total ships in the convoy. You can only enter combat with three ships so it makes sense to limit crew and muniitons to what you need for battle.

While in port:

• Pick the three ships from you convoy that you want as escort vessels and move the other ships out of the convoy to the harbor.
  
• Maximise all the crew/munitions you need for those escort ships in the convoy.
  
• Finally move all the ships from the harbor back into the convoy.

How many men do you actually need for a crew?

It's mentioned many times that the ships cannons fire faster if there are four sailor's per cannon.

What this means is you can get away with counting how many cannons are on the escort ships and loading only four times that number in sailors, rather than filling the ships with the maximum number of sailors.

It should be noted that extra sailors do have their uses as replacements between battles or as melee units during boardings. (If you don't have enough defenders during a boarding you could lose control of your ship)

[Towers]

This is amazing

[mstrdeckard]

FWIW... i began playing this game years ago... but not regularly enough to get any good at it. So now that i have the time, i'm finally attempting to get beyond 1561-December and see how well i can play this. So i am still reading all of these articles/guides... and i have half a mind to try to collate them all into a personal guide at least for myself. i love this game - the simplicity (in some sense) combined with the complexity (in other senses). So, yes, to those who wonder if anyone is still playing this game in 2023-November.... the answer is YES!

[xoverth]

Thanks for this guide

[Stryderunknown]

@Deus in Regnum
I've reviewed what I originally wrote and realise that my writeup on the subject might have been a little off. So with that I'm rewriting the Distribute entry to explain it's function, sorry if this originally caused a misinterpretation as to how it can be used.

[0x3334]

nice guide, but i am having huge problems with the distribute trade route option. I select only the towns with my warehouses and activate it. Upon reaching a town it deactivates itself. I had 2 warehouses. in warehouse A i had 1000 corn and in warehouse B i had 0. The convoy reached warehouse A, but instead of loading up on corn it shut itself down. What am i missing here?

[Kedsa]

Thank you!

[Stryderunknown]

If you've reached the maximum number of ports for your route, then you can try adding more convoys.

I wouldn't put convoys following the same route, as each port needs enough time to recover the market price after a bulk amount of goods has been sold. (You'll notice if your convoys running on a short route that your ships hold might be constantly filled as it's not selling enough)

You can speed the market recovery up in the ports that you help build, as increasing their size increases the number of products consumed by the population.

You can also use the tavern to your advantage through finding a Merchant that might want to buy all of your supply of a particular product (which can generate a large profit) or a pirate that will make stock disappear from the market (allowing you to sell your produce to fill the void).

I hope that's some help to you.

[Stryderunknown]

Updated: Added a simple Exotics map to help work out which part of the world they are in.

[Stryderunknown]

Updated: I-candy(images), Fixed some grammatic errors (not all of them of course, just some)