Patrician IV advanced guide

This guide for the Patrician IV game is intended for use and recreation of advanced control schemes when it comes to the games' systems, mainly trade and manufacture. The guide aims for optimal Hansa growth and optimal income by using properly set auto-trading convoys and counting houses.

Cities and their produced goods at 26 towns setting

The goods highlighted in yellow are believed to be the "big four" of Patrician IV - basically, wares that are required for the town in order for it not to starve to death, or suffer a famine.

The towns highlighted in gray are added at the 26 towns starter setting, as opposed to 20 towns starter setting.

Trading convoys

For the purposes of this guide, it is assumed you have a single distribution center preferably somewhere in the center of the map to minimise travel times. While I do understand how that affects efficiency negatively, it is one of the easiest setups to do properly and requires the least amount of micro-management.

Time managed well is time not wasted, so it is beneficial if you set up your convoys correctly the first time, so that you don't have to spend time revisiting your mistakes.

It is highly recommended to send out convoys in the following convention:

• each convoy handles a single good type
  
• each town (excluding the distribution town) should have 19 convoys assigned in a specific manner described below

Let's assume Lübeck is the distribution center for your playthrough. Lübeck produces grain, hemp, salt, metal goods and beer on standard settings. All the other goods that are not produced locally in Lübeck have to be imported in order to keep the citizens happy.

All other towns are defined as exporters for the purpose of this guide.

There are four types of cases you will have to handle in the above described scenario.

Case 1

The goods produced in exporters are not produced in your distribution center.

Auto-trade setup is fairly simple here.
Lübeck does not produce wood, but Malmö does.

Set the convoy so that it unloads MAX and loads 0 at Lübeck, and unloads 0 and loads MAX at Malmö.

Case 2

The goods produced in exporters are produced in your distribution center.

Lübeck produces Metal goods, so does Bremen.

Set the convoy so that it unloads MAX and loads 0 at Lübeck, and unloads 0 and loads MAX at Bremen.

This prevents overflowing of consumed, unproduced good in the exporter city. In other words, less goods are wasted waiting out to be consumed elsewhere.

Case 3

The goods NOT produced in exporters are produced in your distribution center.

Lübeck produces Grain, but Malmö does not.

Set the convoy so that it unloads 0 and loads MAX at Lübeck, and unloads MAX and loads MAX at Malmo. Repeat the above, so that you have 4 stops total: 2 in your distribution center and 2 in an exporter city.

Case 4

The goods produced in exporters are produced neither there, nor in your distribution center.

Neither Lübeck nor Malmö produce wine.

Set the convoy so that it unloads MAX and loads MAX at Lübeck, and unloads MAX and loads MAX at Malmö.

This guarantees that if there is a shortage of Wine in Lübeck, not all of the Wine will be taken back to Malmö to unload.

Summary

The above settings guarantee that you will have total control of goods flow with a single glance on the state of your warehouses in your distribution center. Is there an awful lot of grain in your warehouse? Reduce production of grain overall or greatly increase the production of other goods.

Counting houses

Counting houses are very important for this type of goods flow control.

Counting houses have two settings - Sale of goods and Purchase of goods.

For Sale of goods I recommend using the "SELL CONSUMER" price. Amount set to 0, no lock.
HOWEVER - if your businesses require the presence of an intermediate good, such as wood for pitch, honey for mead, salt for meat et cetera, I recommend setting an amount that works best for you - I would suggest experimenting. At the start I found that amount 500 works out decently.

Sell consumer - it's simply 90% of the sale value described to the left of each Sell consumer column. 90% is an arbitrary value, choose what you will, but I found that 90% works out decently in stopping the odd famine here and there.

For Purchase of goods, I recommend setting all buy prices to minimum. To achieve this, simply input "0" into the purchasing price field. Do it for all of the goods in the Purchase of goods tab. Amount set to 1000, and then

LOCK

Locking is absolutely crucial in the overall method I am describing in this guide.

About this guide

This guide was created to assist myself with schemes that work out and also to present the schemes I designed to others.

This guide is always a work-in-progress. If you have any suggestions on what to add, please post your suggestions below.

[Heraclitus]

My cities don't get sieged, thanks to a few choice extra zeros in my townbattles.ini file!

[Andromalis]

Since purchasing goods will take the items off of the local market which will also be immediately replenished by your counting house it's the only fool-proof way of ensuring you actually stock your inland cities. Locking goods ensures ships work properly - and if you bypass the central hub, your only option is to purchase goods off the local market. This method backfires when your shoreside cities get sieged, since then the stocks will quickly run out.

[Heraclitus]

That's an interesting idea; set the wagons up to buy from market at the coastal city (i.e. a micro-distribution city) at a set price, then unload at the inland cities. I would need to make sure there is adequate gap in the trade lock and the minimum qty to keep in stock at the counting house in order to ensure the market gets regular-interval supplies.

I am in the middle of resetting all of the trade routes, but once I get that done, I think I'll give this a shot.

[Andromalis]

@Heraclitus - I think the only solution to this problem is to buy the goods from the city with gold. The stocks will get replenished very fast from your counting house, but this very small window of opportunity allows your AI competitors to gain a slight edge over you - it shouldn't be too bad, though.

[Heraclitus]

I've always struggled with keeping landlocked cities adequately supplied without relying on macro. Do you have an suggestions that works with the above distribution method? Best I can think of is to make Lubeck the central hub so the wagons to Berlin/Erfurt/etc work the same as a coastal town, but that doesn't help other towns like Kaunas.

[Andromalis]

@Heraclitus this setup is a fire and forget, that's what makes it so effective. If you need to send more wares somewhere, you just add extra ships to a convoy. On top of that you sometimes get attacked by pirates, but these pirates may choose to attack your "cheap" convoys instead of your wine/spice convoys. Of course piracy is something this game does very terribly because you can never truly get rid of it in any way, as youi'd have to manually play each battle to do it "efficiently".

[Heraclitus]

Excellent! I've always done massive round-trips for distribution--10+ stops for every convoy. I've never considered doing 1-ship/1-stop distribution. That'ld be a lot of convoys, but it will solve so many headaches!

[Oakshield]

(part 2)

Assuming a city needs 100 wood and produces 25 by itself,and is 1.5 day sailing away from the hub, the equation would be:

((100 - 25) / 10) x ((2 x 1.5) +2) =
{ (( 75) / 10) x (( 3) + 2) =}
{ (7.5) x (5)} = 37.5


{The last two lines show the exact amounts from the various calculations} and the final outcome.

Since you can't transport half filled barrels in this game, the amount transported is rounded up to 38 barrels of wood for each trip.

Advantage of this method: Smaller convoys are needed, over time the city gets overstocked, but since it's growing, you will sell the surplus anyway. Simply keeping an eye at the city and changing the demanded value once in a while makes life for auto trading convoys a lot easier.

[Oakshield]

The solution I use is a simply formula calculating the exact amount needed in a city.
I have set that formula in an Excell file, simply copying it 20x for all goods and up to 26 times for each city. After that the only thing needed to be done is to change the 10 day demand and 10 day production values of each city to calculate how much of a certain good is needed.
The complete formula looks like this:

((10 day demand - 10 day production)/ 10) x ((2x traveltime) + 2)

To add, since a convoy travels back and forth, traveltime is taken twice. Assuming (un)loading takes a full day in both cities, two days are added to the equation.
For the travel time, the slowest ship - usually a Cog (Sea) or a Snaikka (River) - with a captain with no navigation skill is used to get the closest travel times.
It would be a good idea to write those times down somewhere, so you won't have to recalculate them over and over again. :)

[super_falco]

LOL I forgot everything about production, I was thinking only of trading goods. Thanks, now I understand.