Patrician 2

[Probbka]

I recently bought this game, and it's quite frankly pissing me off. Has anyone bought this game? I can't move anything from my ship to my trade office in Gdansk. Anyone had this problem?

Probbka

[Rex Little]

I've never heard of this game. Who makes it? What's it like? I gather it's about trade; what time period? Is there combat as well? Real-time or turn-based? Anything unique?

[Kautilya]

Here is a very thorough review, as usual , from wargamer.com which should answer most of your questions.

http://wargamer.com/reviews/patrician_ii_main.asp

[Grumbold]

In the hope that this might be everything that Merchant Prince II failed to be and on the strength of some moderately positive reviews I bought Patrician II.

Probbka you've probably discovered it by now but if you select the ship and click on the dock crane then the panel on the right will give you all the options of ship-town, ship-office, office-town trading.

Initially its fascinating but after a while it gets infuriating. My problems start the minute I want to automate a route. The automation options are woefully inadequate. I can set a price to buy or sell at but not how much of the hold to devote to this good in total if I've already got a load that failed to sell last time round. The cargo that doesn't sell out completely slowly grows to take over all the space.

I can tell my town warehouse supervisors to keep a certain number of items in stock at all times but never tell them a maximum price to buy at or any circumstance to sell to the town. The town can be starving to death and it won't sell a sack of grain from my bulging warehouses unless I do it manually myself. Pure hassle when ten towns can be starving at once and the daft town mayors will only buy a week's supply of grain at a time before the price they will pay drops to unprofitably low amounts.

If a ship shows up in November with a cargo of food to see you through the winter, do you buy the lot at a fair price and thank the gods or ask for a few morsels and send it on its way?? Bah. This game could have been so good but the need to micromanage every ship route and every trade is too much. Back to the shop it goes.

[Probbka]

Congrats, Grumbold! You found my post after 3 months. That's some fine searchin'.

I indeed did find out, just after this post, how to do what I had asked. Haven't played the game much since, though, because as you said the automation is frustrating. Small-time operations are fun, but once you expand beyond say 10 ships, it's just too hard. And I never bothered with grain... it so rarely turned a profit. Just kept it around to make booze and so forth.

Probbka

[Grumbold]

Did a search on Patrician and your thread was the most relevant of the three posts on the entirety of Apolyton dedicated to this fine game

I wasn't looking in january because as usual the UK version was lagging far behind the US one, despite there being no localisation done whatsoever. Now I've vented my frustration I'll hit uninstall, take it back and try to forget the wasted hours

[Harovan]

Originally posted by Grumbold
My problems start the minute I want to automate a route. The automation options are woefully inadequate. I can set a price to buy or sell at but not how much of the hold to devote to this good in total if I've already got a load that failed to sell last time round. The cargo that doesn't sell out completely slowly grows to take over all the space.

Despite the fact, that you probably already returned the game: In autoroutes it's good to have a city, where you maintain an office. Let the ship in this city sell nothing, but move all it's load to your office. This frees all space at the ship, and your office manager can sell it later. Or, now and then you could check it yourself and raise or lower prices, to reduce overtrade.

[Grumbold]

The problem is that a warehouse office can hold only 200 crates when max extended. A ship dealing in crated cargoes can fill this in a single load if it is full. With barrel cargoes (1/10 of a crate) it certainly takes longer but you're supposedly moving toward a game situation where your ships travel in huge convoys. The office managers cannot sell goods automatically. Unless I missed something they can only buy a fixed amount and don't care what the price is. Its precisely this lack of useful automation that I dislike.

[Harovan]

Hmmm, I'm playing with the extension pack. Recently bought both the game and the ex pack bundled and cheap in ebay. There the office manager automatically rents space in concurrent's warehouses, costs 1 gold per crate and day, but this way your office always remains operational. You can build unlimited own warehouses in each city you have an office in. The office managers can both buy and sell automatically (which they could, AFAIK, without the extension pack too), and you can set a maximum price (when buying), a minimum (when selling), an amount of goods to hold in the store (either delivered by ship or to be bought by the manager) to secure your production, and an amount which is not loaded on ships while exporting goods. That's pretty cool, and once you have a few traderoutes worked out and saved to the disk, The first 1-2 years go pretty quick and there's not much to manage.

[Grumbold]

That is WAY better and under those conditions I'd be enjoying the game! Are you playing the German version or has an X-pack been released for the US?

[Harovan]

I play the German version. Since Ascaron is a German company, this time the anglophones have to wait for a localization . I don't know if a UK/US version of the Xpack is released yet, look out for it, the name must be Patrician II Add-On "Upswing of the Hanse" or alike. As far as I could see, Ascaron was in financial trouble recently, but it seems to be over.

[Harovan]

Look at this one, it's from a German fan forum:

http://derholzwurm9.bei.t-online.de/...sliste1303.jpg

Nice ship list, no? This is after 3 years. No... it's not me. I'm not yet so good.

[Grumbold]

Yum! I think I only had about five ships after three years, but then I had got a fair bit of property in my home town.

The only website I found with any mention of the x-pack seemed to imply it was waiting to see if the sales figures justified releasing the English language expansion.

[Zkribbler]

I'm thinkin' about buyin' this game in the future and, 'cause this thread is about ready to slip off the first page, I'm bumping it up to the top.