Contest 2007 Smalltalk

  • I never paid too much attention to loans until this contest. The lack of cloth, hemp, and pitch forced me to go another route. There is some sytem behind my "insanity" :D It's called around 600 ships by the end of 1301 :170:


    London, Bremen and Hamburg have completed construction of their walls and are working on other fortifications. Ladoga and Stettin are completely placed while Oslo and Bruegge are about 50% placed and Bergen lacks behind at about 25% placed and constructed.
    In Ladoga the inventory of building materials is slowly growing in anticipation of Novgorod as next NPT. Until I have enough apiaries it does not matter where I go since I will not be able to generate the goods I want. By the time the 3rd NPT becomes available I should have enough IG and honey to be able to become selective.
    What I can't understand is that I keep on getting timber; I have enough leather (not lacking anywhere) and huge stocks of meat. I would like wool plus I will try to tamper with hemp stocks; we do need more whalers; just two ports is not enough. Due to exclusive use of the hemp trick I only have enough hemp farms to cover the need of the fisher and hunting lodges.

    Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new
    Wer niemals einen Fehler gemacht hat, hat noch nie etwas neues probiert Albert Einstein

  • Zitat

    Originally posted by Hopsing
    Look here please:Wertung und Kommentare 1300


    Or go to the page with all rankings in place. :D
    Please check links

    Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new
    Wer niemals einen Fehler gemacht hat, hat noch nie etwas neues probiert Albert Einstein

  • I managed to get the Hanse to agree to give me another NPT. I got Helsinki with fish, honey (both unavoidable) and wool :D
    The next NPT will have to be with whale oil. Until then all new businesses in Bergen and Oslo will have to be whalers only until the 3rd walls have been placed.
    I have lost some satisfaction amongst the rich - go figure why - but wool was high on my list. It did take 4 game days to get the offer changed.

    Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new
    Wer niemals einen Fehler gemacht hat, hat noch nie etwas neues probiert Albert Einstein

  • How do NPTs work with generating whale oil? Normally whale oil always has fish as an inefficient product in the same town, but NPTs don't seem to have inefficient products. With oil, do you generate a town with three efficient goods and also an inefficient one, or does it not show up but the whalers still make fish ... ?

  • Zitat

    Originally posted by Starstruck
    How do NPTs work with generating whale oil? Normally whale oil always has fish as an inefficient product in the same town, but NPTs don't seem to have inefficient products. With oil, do you generate a town with three efficient goods and also an inefficient one, or does it not show up but the whalers still make fish ... ?


    Whale oil/fish is the exception to the rule. You can sometimes generate 4 goods in the NPT, with fish being the "normal", 4th good. Just generate a lack of hemp by buying all up and loading it on convoys. Also, any convoy that ships hemp must be interrupted; just let it stop short of the destination and click the route on again once you have your required NPT goods. Make sure you make saves enroute so, in the event that everything gets botched, you can start over again. When generating wool I needed 4 saves.

    Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new
    Wer niemals einen Fehler gemacht hat, hat noch nie etwas neues probiert Albert Einstein

  • When producing a lack of grain, hemp and a third good of your choice, you can even create a production town with five productions: meat and leather, whale oil and fisch and a fifth one.


    Zitat

    Is there a way to get the forum to host pictures or must they be put on external sites?


    This forum has no feature to host your own images activated, so they must be linked to from an external server.

  • To download the spreadsheet to calculate overall satisfaction and social structure, please go to "contestlinks"

    Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new
    Wer niemals einen Fehler gemacht hat, hat noch nie etwas neues probiert Albert Einstein

  • A link to the teamstandings and saved games has been added to the "2007contest links" thread

    Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new
    Wer niemals einen Fehler gemacht hat, hat noch nie etwas neues probiert Albert Einstein

  • Starstruck:
    Last year Team NewWorld did not just beat every other team, we gave them a thorough pounding :D
    The year has just begun and to date Hessen ist just a one-man show comprising the perfectionist Ugh!. My initial showing may have been poor, especially compared to yours, but the year is not over and, like BT, I am known to replay a wee bit ;)


    Man of the C:
    May I suggest to build walls instead of a school in London. You can attract enough beggars by feeding the poor.

    Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new
    Wer niemals einen Fehler gemacht hat, hat noch nie etwas neues probiert Albert Einstein

    Dieser Beitrag wurde bereits 1 Mal editiert, zuletzt von bizpro ()

  • Yep, walls are on the menu :]with approval in Gotenburg already. In London, I've been dumping a load of BFG in there, expanded the church, built the wells and roads, but not much movement on the beggars towards the businesses yet. (9 brick,2wood,1 smelter) Pop 1700's. Sept. will bring the vote for the wall expansion.


    "Well, with a strong showing in 1300, I'm going to back Man of the C to lead New World to victory" :eek2:
    Thanks for the props. I read the threads to day and I felt like I would probably pull you guys down in the standings! I will be nowhere near your values in 1300. I think :200: BT is way out in front of me.


    Starstruck, I will gladly take any :help:I can get. I do feel like I'm behind the learning curve in 3 areas: arbitration set-up, convoy management, and trade route set-up's. It seems to take me a long time to set up one simple trade route. I know I have good data from this site and the excel sheets, and the submitted entries, but I am very slow in analysis and applying it to the game. Once I know what I'm supposed to do, I enjoy it alot but the planning does get to be a challenge. I find myself micro-managing a bit to much because the flow of the game is so new to me. :feather:That's how I felt in the July month. I concentrated on some things and others slipped right by. Aug is going better but I really do not have a grasp on the "suppling the towns so they grow properly and with satisfaction" component. I'm trying to keep it simple, but that is a challenge.


    It's funny, I've ignored developing anything in Stettin and everyone is satisfied or above! :crazy:

  • Man of the C, you're being very pessimistic! You're at the same stage I was when I started playing this competition, except ... well, technically my submitted save was my third game on this map (I played out of Bremen early before I read we had to play from the starting save, then I got to October before restarting after I discovered the technique of manual arbitrage and decided cash was nice).


    But you're doing better than I was in July ... and have the benefit of seeing everyone else's games ;)


    [edit: rechecked the stats - definitely ahead of me at July 1, but pretty similar at August 1. You're not picking up as many ships as me - I was taking every escort, patrol and pirate mission in sight! Still picking up more ships than most though, unless yours are whites rather than blacks?]


    And I know that, if I had built merchant houses a month earlier instead of concentrating on production (rule misunderstanding) & mints (they don't do anywhere near as much as I thought - in fact when I look at my progress records for towns with/without I often wonder if they do anything at all ?() then I would have had an extra couple of % rich & wealthy for 1300.


    For London, if you want to attract beggars, make the poor unhappy or just barely satisfied (Just barely satisfied works best, but is very hard to achieve without making them too satisfied, so unhappy is usually a good choice). It sounds crazy, but it's waaay cheaper to grow an unhappy town than a happy one - 6 beer per day brings in lots of beggars (since you're cash rich - aka arbitrage - buy all the beer on the market, donate 6, then sell the rest again :D). If the people are happy you can have to donate 30, 50, or more :eek2:. Which quickly becomes expensive! Maybe that should be in the tips & tricks actually, not sure if it's standard practise or just something I discovered.


    BTW, if you get very happy people for the new year, it'll be 3-4 weeks before you can get them unhappy again in 1301 :D.


    I wouldn't worry about walls till 1301 myself. Too many other uses for bricks, like merchant houses. The happiness penalty for having small walls seems, well, small. But if you're LM of a town, I would invest in two new port bombards if you're not fully using the build-queue with other things - 40 bricks, timber and IG gives a cheap and noticeable addition to happiness, that won't get destroyed when you do eventually expand the town walls.


    Trade-routes: I never did set up any, only convoys. I traded everything manually, and still had lots of white ships that helped out until I got enough goods stockpiled to make the convoys run efficiently - late October or November. Then the whites just annoyed me, but I didn't wipe them out till 1301. Pick up enough ships from pirates, and your convoys will supply the Hanse without problems, with enough left over for meditteranean runs, outrigging and miscellaneous duties.


    Baltic Trader's probably the one to talk to about arbitrage. He picked up the sort of cash in June 1300 that I didn't see till March 1301 :crazy:. I have no idea how.


    The only secret I can give to this contest is the obvious one - the only day that counts is December 31. Wasa topped the (current) table by building up a Hanse that was happy and rich for months on end and nice and stable. I narrowly got in behind him by building an unhappy poor Hanse that no-one in their right mind would want to live in, then cleaning it up at the last minute for the landlord to come and check over the new year ... :giggle:


    'course, that does have one big disadvantage. Under normal circumstances I would have asked for a full review of my submitted game for feedback. But my December 31 save looks absolutely nothing like my Hanse pre-mid-December or post-mid-January. So there wasn't much point ;(

  • BTW, I don't have the German to join in the discussion over there, but I have the same "can't auction someone else's property in XXX" problem that x9jaan has reported in the German thread equivalent to this one.


    In my case, I can auction most properties, but a sheep farm in Danzig and a house in Bergen are refusing to go under the hammer (I get the message "do you want to auction this for ..." but then it doesn't appear in the guild list of auctions.


    I know the Danzig property got put on auction by me a few times, and I kept on missing the date and so someone else bought it. Not sure if I ever put the Bergen house on auction before, but that may be somehow related to the problem.

  • Man of the C:
    try this:

    • make a save
    • check the weekly consumption in town A, for example Hamburg
    • the time needed to make the round trip is just over a week. Add in the time for periodic repairs and you have a 2-week supply that should be left at Hamburg.
    • load 80% of the needed goods into your convoy and, upom arrival in Hamburg load all consumables from the trade office.
    • make another stop in Hamburg and unload the 2-week supply and then load all produced goods, i.e. fish, IG etc.
    • return to your hub and offload all goods into the trade office prior to loading again.
    • It does not matter where you repair your convoy, but in either town repairs should be done during one of the two stops.


    Rearding your standing: I believe my current standing is well bellow yours but, Else has not entered the stage yet ;)


    The reason why the people of Stettin are happy is because they are supplied and no construction is going on to sour their mood. Somehow people get cranky as soon as a business has been completed and it is not fully staffed. Schools, mints etc do not improve their mood at that point; they are long-term solutions. However, IMHO, a school is not really necessary in tyhis contest. As soon as the town's businesses are fully staffed, the workers will flock into your own, as long as you have living space available.
    Each business, i.e. sawmill, brickworks etc. will take up to 12 new workers per day. If you have 4 different businesses, like fisher, sawmill, brickworks and workshops in London, the maximum new workers are 12 each for a total of 48/day. Since each comes with his/her family the total changeover from beggars to citizens would be 192/day. An empty half-timber house would fill in less than 1 day. This means you have to pre-plan and not attract too many beggars for the available living space - they will leave if they find no accomodation and the overall mood will decrease.


    @ Starstruck:
    x9jaan has a problem forcing the auctioning off of a business in Bruegge. That has happened to me too but just with one particular vinyard; I had to destroy the business and had no problem forcing the acutioning of its replacement.
    Whoever doesn't know how to, click on one of your businesses/houses and then doubble click on the competitor's building. You can either destroy or force an auction and take it off his hands. In a game where building materials are scarce, I like buying since money is not an issue :D
    I believe it could be triggered by an auction overflow. I try not to have more than 3 auctions staged at any time.
    Regarding arbitrage: the cash-cow is called: manual arbitrage, quick fire, click orgy, etc. It all comes down how fast you can move your pointer and, with a trackball and w/o trade office, it goes up to 94 cycles a day. After the trade office is built you can still do around 80 cycles/day. Now, imagine you yield 6,000/cycle that's 480,000/day. And there are instances where I achieved >10,000/cycle. Now, that's making hay. Of course, once you have a fleet of arbitrage ships in a port and plenty of skins it gets into even more astronomic spheres.
    BTW, the beer trick etc are in the collection of tips and tricks, currently under review. And yes, there will be a translation, chapter by chapter, on this forum section. Bablefish makes such a mess out of long translations X(

    Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new
    Wer niemals einen Fehler gemacht hat, hat noch nie etwas neues probiert Albert Einstein

    Dieser Beitrag wurde bereits 2 Mal editiert, zuletzt von bizpro ()

  • Zitat

    I believe it could be triggered by an auction overflow. I try not to have more than 3 auctions staged at any time.


    That's the same problem I refer to; I have used the auctioning trick to pick up buildings from London, Brugge, etc.


    I don't think it's an auction overflow, unless there's some wierd delayed effect from previously overfull queues. The first time that I noticed the sheep farm in Danzig failed to join the auction queue, the auction queue was empty. I tried again after putting a competitor's merchant house in London up for auction. I tried later with three buildings in the queue. In all cases the Danzig sheep farm wouldn't go into the auction queue.


    I haven't tried switching computers yet, but presumably it's somehow a property of the savegame since I regularly restart Patrician and/or save/load games. As such if you want a savegame with the problem, I can send you one.


    Zitat

    After the trade office is built you can still do around 80 cycles/day.


    Mmm ... why does a trade office change things? Isn't it still once cycle (buy/sell) every two ticks?

  • The TO difference: With the trade office active, the window changes to ship-town, ship office (etc) view when you select the market to sell the purchased goods. When you go back to the auto trade activation step to move the sequence up to the buy cycle, you have to re-open the window now, because it closed in the previous step. This adds additional clicks to your manual trade and hence slows you down on the toal amount of trade you can do in a day. BT either has a callouse on this palm, one on his thumb or on the tip of his fingers depending upon the way he moves the mouse. I have the first, but I see a trackball coming with my next computer purchase.! :190:

  • You sell manually through the market?


    Ah, I guess I wasn't doing a traditional click-frenzy after all. I was just setting stage 1 of an autoroute to buy (up to X) then stage 2 to sell (down to Y, and buy other goods so the ship stays occupied).


    Then I just double clicked on the autoroute tickmark to cycle the ship between the stages every tick.


    I tried selling manually, but my fingers got way too tired. Even with a double-click per tick, it's rather a lot of clicking.


    I'm still missing something though. I never tried counting ticks per day myself, but I thought the autoroutes all clicked over at a set tick-mark in the game's time (and presumably you need to autoroute the buy phase to make money). Which, assuming it always took the same time for you to sell goods on the market, would again mean that you'd either do a complete cycle per tick (N per day), or one cycle per two ticks like me (ie N/2 per day), etc. A decrease from 94 to 80 isn't N to N/2 ...


    Maybe my understanding of time ticks is screwed up.

  • Yep. Manually thru the market. Click on your ship, open the autoroute window and click the check on get the captain to buy the goods, then back to the market, open the market, click max(which will let you see the ratio of the buy and the sell, then manually sell it right then and back to the autoroute window to get them captain to buy it again. I tried it with one of yourships in your 1300 game, A33 Monstrocity in Reval(great name) :giggle: and it was impressive. You also had a 5 pointer in Bruges which was doing over 2k a trade (skins). Just think if A33 was a convoy of 10 of those bad boys and sold 4500 goods a whack. Serious capitol. In the beginning, I helped me tremendously in Edinburg and Danzig with the first captains to get me going. I didn't manage it well, maybe 20 - 30 transactions a day when others are getting in 60-80, but it was a lot faster than other methods of cash production. Bizpro helped me understand the fineries of it. one of the big keys was to do it and know when you needed to quit to go do something else. Switching the top screen to ocean view from the town view helps a bunch. I was tempted in July to go back and restart the game with what I have learned so far but I'm going to just keep on. Recognizing you may not have used this in your game makes me even more impressed with your start! :170:
    That's why my right palm has a callouse on it now! :giggle: