Guess there's different approaches to this game. When I played this regularly I started to optimize heavily which eventually killed the fun and became much more of a chore. If I will remember I will try to post some info about game mechanic (depending on how deep you dived into it you may already know this), later I will maybe go on a rant and tell you what the only correct way to play the game is and why all the people posting online is approaching it wrong. Just kidding (except I'm not, just wanted to know that I'm not actually seething at those alleged Patrician "pros", however I stopped enjoying that playstyle a long time ago because everything became extremely repetitive).

>>2409959
Since meds aren't helping you go with the 1300s theme and try applying tallow and leeches.

Does anyone here apply turkish building?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsNJ4ibrGNg

I was wondering if a pirate pays for himself. So I started a new game, set home town to Luebeck and build ships and handed them to pirates. Then I calculated the total loot of each individual pirate and one of the upper average ones yielded roghly 120K. Usually the number was around 100K with individual pirate yields being usually somewhere between 80K and 120K. There were few pirates with even higher numbers. One in particular returned over 50K in less than a week (highest isolated look roughly 28K followed by 23K a few days later. And I think that yields of 200K are in reach.

Regarding the pirate to hire, I cannot tell I observed a distinct difference. At least when it comes to the look. Some forum posts suggested that a pirate who demands a higher share does a better job and with that I agree. Although I can say that this is marginal at best. Way more depends on the pirate's location and you cannot control which pirate spawns in which tavern. Best towns to loot are Aalborg, Malmo, Visby, Bremen (in that order). When hiring a pirate don't pick the option to sailing the entire Hanse. It has no benefits and the pirate is harder to find later.

Best ship to pass to the pirate is actually a Level 2 Snaikka. And it's not even a matter of cost income ration. Actually Snaikkas and Crayers are the only ships that work at all. Cogs and Hulks are too slow to intercept the AI trader ships and often don't generate any loot at all. Crayers should be in theory better but that somehow doesn't reflect on the result. Level 3 Snaikkas generate less loot, probably due to lower cargo capacity. If you have a spare Level 3 though, I recommend not arming it to the max. Cutlesses don't matter, apparently the pirates bring their own. Contrary to some post in forums, Level 1 (unarmed) Snaikkas and Crayers do generate loot. In fact, if you pass a level 1 ship to the pirates it ends up armed (seen by the icon but also they fire if you attack them). In theory pirates could be abused to do a free ship upgrade by passing a level 1 and immediately recapture it. However, there's a strange interaction - or maybe it was just coincidence - but those pirates who started with a level 1 didn't bring any loot for a very long time in the beginning (up to 3 months whereas regular pirates around Aalborg and Malmo plundered in the first 2 days, sometimes even twice in the first week). If I were paranoid, I'd say they keep your share during the time because they had to do the upgrade at their own expense.

Anyways, there's up to 5 active pirates at a time. Means you can hire them on your own so you won't be bothered by those sent by your rivals. Plus, it's a good thing to have some around known location if you want to cheese your way to Alderman.
I'd say pirates can make you easily 1,000,000 over five years, without grinding. So you can either pass them ships you wouldn't use otherwise or constantly build snaikkas to upgrade your shipyards.

Do you still only find the first captain in Novgorod or Cologne?

>>2410799
you play with low pirate activity?

>>2410799
meme answer: yes

real answer: if you play on harder difficulty they're all over the place

>>2409931
Home town power ranking:

Elite:
Reval, Luebeck
Excellent:
Visby, Bremen, Rostock(, Novgorod)
Pretty good:
Stettin, Riga, Hamburg(, Brugge)
Good:
Danzig, Thorn, Stockholm
Garbage:
Cologne(, London)

>be me
>doing an escort
>2 ship convoy of the Hulk and a crayon
>suddenly attacked by a pirate convo of 3 coggae
>seize them all
>literally two seconds later attacked by hulk of the rogue pirate
>reach Riga with 6 ships
>get paid 4600G
>refuse to elaborate
>leave

>>2410770
If you need to do piracy, do it properly, during the first few months of the game (also known as the brutal start):
1. Save the game (A)
2. Sail your convoy to a point in the map where it has no visual contact with other ships, and raise the black flag
2. Attack a harbor. eg Hamburg or Bremen. At this point in the game, there should only be one (or even no) tower guarding the port. Relatively easy to pull off with an armed crayer with 4 heavy catapults. You'll get lots of cash (~100k) from plundering the city hall coffers, and from stolen goods.
3. Save the game (B)
4. Fast-forward 6 months. Or 8? Can't remember, too lazy to look up the guide. 12 months should be definitely enough though.
5. If you don't get a letter with an indictment for piracy(*), congratulations. Load save (B) and continue, with lots of cash to invest into your starting businesses.
If you get indicted, load save (A) and repeat until success.

(*) This can also happen when other ships see you changing flags, or by giving your ships to a tavern pirate. Or even just by talking to a pirate. Or by not taking a bath often enough.

Giving ships to a pirate, or even attacking convoys manually, isn't very cost-effective. Apart from the risk of getting an indictment for piracy and having to pay a lot, the pirate will eventually fuck off and abandon you, or get defeated. The money you get is a fraction of what you would have made from auto trading, or using that ship to fulfill trade missions. Doing it to damage your competition isn't a good reason either, the trade volume of AI traders basically becomes negligible once you seriously start building your own production and distribution network. Central storage system is best, but a pain to set up and maintain, but it's basically a free cash machine.

Unofficial Patrician III bible:
http://www.patrizierforum.net/woltlabcore/index.php?attachment/2992-tippsammlung-2010-en-translation-by-roflman-pdf/

I love the game but it did not work the last time I installed it. I had to run it on a virtual machine, which came back to bite me in the ass during covid because those malware-adjacent proctoring tools refused to let me take a test on my PC until I removed it
Which games can scratch that trading itch? Sailing Era was a lot of fun, Caravaneer slightly less so (mid- and end-game combat was pure CBT)

>>2413248
Some praise High Seas, High Profits. It's heavily inspired by Patrician 3. Although I personally don't really like the style. I'm not someone who insists on highly realistic graphics but this plastic toy optics almost entirely kills it for me. But the kiss of death is the fact that the setting is an Anno style entirely made up auto generated map of fictional towns and islands. You should still check it out of you haven't already, maybe it's just up your alles.

>>2413156
little correction/addendum:

First, I know that this is essentially the meta:
>go get captain
>turn pirate, seize at least two civil ships
>save/reload so you don't get charged
>form convoy, arm your flag ship and raid town
>save/reload so you don't get charged

This among other little meta quirks makes the starting game so tedious in my opinion.

Now for some correction:
>charges only come in days after the crime not months. Waiting 3 week on FF is more than enough to determine whether or not you're gonna have to expect a trial

>Raising the pirate flag does absolutely nothing. You can sail for years all over the Hanse switching flags forth and back and you never get indicted. It's only attack (even a short misclick with immediately letting the poor soul go) that lead to trials. The "switching flags in plain sight of other ships" is a myth. It literally does nothing. In fact, you can't even swap flags when in sight of another ship since the button will be grayed out. The myth only comes from the letter text when you actually get indicted.

And yes, it is obvious that one ship can generate more than those approximately 12K-16K within a year. But considering that people do crazy things like driving giant convoys deliberately through storms to give the shipyards something to do to not lose their efficiency due to lack of work building useless snaikkas isn't the dumbest thing to do. Plus, handing ships over to pirates mainly serves two purposes: 1) to not get bothered by AI hired pirates since theres a Hanse wide limit of 5 active freelance pirates and 2) to harvest easy Alderman missions (since the "Stopping a notorious pirate" mission will firstly address those freelance pirates over the auto generated ones)

>>2410262
Turkish building is a meme.
There is literally never a moment when you actually need it, unless your goal is breaking the game (and not in the fun, borderline cheating way, just breaking how things work)
You can build normally and still get shit done to towns having on regular basis 20k people in them.
The actual trick is handling all the fucking logistics of it, not building up

>>2411540
I wish you could start in Oslo. One of the best resources and an excellent position, too

>>2413248
Port Royale is an obvious one
Sailwind maybe, if you want to handle a boat yourself

>>2413248
Trade Empires - it's deceivingly simple, but good luck with good scores in moderate and tough scenarios, as expected from Frog City's game
1869 - old, but gold, basically contemporary of original Patrician, and you are handling a large shipping company
High Seas Trader is a single-ship version of Patrician, but has surprisingly good sailing mechanics for game this old; long distance hauls feel underwhelming, thou

And there is also Sagres, which is its own beast entirely, but trade, especially in exotics, is vital

>>2413673
you can easily change that in the editor setting the status of Oslo from Trading Station to Hanseatic Town. Maybe you will need to degrade another Hanseatic Town instead if you're using the official editor that comes with the game.

>>2413709
I actually tried that few times (degrading either Reval or Riga due to their placement), but the game gets very unstable, very quickly, especially if you start trading in the degraded place

>>2413670
Turkish building is a meme for production facitlites. When building houses it's incredibly useful to know how the game places roads because otherwise it often leads to stupid output. Still kinda funny that they thought of a mechanism that prevents ugly and generic town layouts. Imagine if you could simply place all houses side by side in a single row so it would resemble one big ugly barracks.

>>2413711
Really? you sure this is a problem with the general procedure and not something that popped up with using operating systems 20 years ahead of those which the game was initially designed for?
I remember starting in Malmo, London, Bergen or Novgorod and I never got any problems with the game. Although this is years ago.

>>2413715
I kept getting crashes, so eventually i stopped trying

>>2413399
>High Seas, High Profits
I played only the demo of it but I was annoyed that "real time" was just not pausing every turn and the simulation was very "croase". Like I know there's some simulation tick in the end but the ships jumping forward annoyed me more than it should.

Anyone knows if it's been figured out how to manipulate the odds where a new settlement spawns?

speaking of settlements, does this happen to anyone else that some ai merchant founds a new settlement and that one is essentially out for the rest of the game? how to prevent this to happen?