Patrician 2: What am I doing wrong?

[Zkribbler]

I seem to be missing a central principal of this game.

I have no trouble sailing around the Baltic making money trading.

However, as soon as I build any business, my finances head south. Between the initial building price, wages, taxes and the costs of resources, all of my businesses lose huge amounts of money. I know I must be missing something, but what??

[Grumbold]

There are some pretty good sites for Patrician II but what I gleaned was -

Businesses will tend to lose money unless you have built them where the production is efficient (double symbol.) Their profitability comes partly from the town growth they will generate, so build housing to accomodate your new merchants and rich folk (cheap housing is also needed but harder to profit from, let the AI build them unless you desperately need more houses for new workers.) Make sure the town is comfortably supplied with its other needs too. A big business in a failing town will fail. Remember to set up your warehouse to buy in raw materials to keep the industry supplied or set up ship routes to bring in cheaper resources (your raw material cost can heavily influence the finished cost, and if you run out completely your factories hemorrhage money.) Lastly, when you actually have enough demand for your product, building multiple industries of the same type will give a bonus (at 3, 6 and 9 I believe.)

I've had no problems getting Iron Goods foundries up and running in the northern town where both the ore and iron goods are double symbol since supplying the raw material needs no effort. Iron goods are very high in demand at the early stages so it is easy to get one or two factories running at profit almost from the start. Its possible to make this your home town but its harder to grow than one of the southern towns who produce their own grain, meat and beer.

[Grumbold]

Another tip: If you find the warehouse AI too limiting because it won't compare prices before buying or selling, consider stationing fleets in harbours as floating warehouses. The instructions you can give them about when to buy, sell or offload to the real warehouse are much better. They still c an't make decisions based on how much stock they already have, unfortunately, but its a step in the right direction.

[Zkribbler]

Thanks Grumbold