port royale 3 trading strategy

This tutorial will help you set up an automated trade convoy in Port Royale 3.

The strategy we will be using is basically to send the ship in a circle, spending as little time at sea as possible. If your convoy goes through an area that has a certain resource at every port, like cacao or dye, then the convoy will "build up" a stock of those goods (because no one is buying them on the route). You might consider adding a "home port" to your route so that the ship can unload the excess goods, to be picked up by a convoy trading on a different route in a different region.

I have seen the best success with about ten to 13 cities on a trade route.

Okay, first, get some ships together. If you can get at least three war ships (galleons, war galleons, liners, etc) then you will be able top prevent most pirate attacks. I always use war ships because they don't lose all of their cargo once every ten minutes (which gets expensive fast). Name your convoy something that has to do with the route you have it on. I'm naming mine "Yucatan Trader"

Once you have your fleet put together, then we are going to set up the trade route. First, select the convoy, click on the "bag" icon in the convoy panel, and then click on "New Trade Route".

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Then, click on all of your cities in the order that you want the convoy to visit them. Again, I usually use big circles, like the one around the Gulf of Mexico shown here. Don't forget that you can zoom by using the mouse wheel, if you want to make the route planning a bit easier.

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When we are happy with our route, click on "Settings" in the upper Right hand corner.

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Change the route to "My strategy", and then click on "Edit my strategy."

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Now, look at the labeled screenshot I've made for you. First, you will make sure the first town is selected. Then, make sure that you have "Selling" selected. Click on the "max" on the left side, and then click on "120%". Then click on the "+" button to the right of the "120%" until the value of wood is about 50-ish. All values should adjust together. When that is done, change the bar at the top to "Buying". Then repeat the above, except adjust until the value of wood is 40. When you are done with that, tell all of the other towns to copy the instructions from previous town.

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If you set the buy price so that wood was 40 or less, then you should only gain reputation in all of the towns along your route.

Note that it is VERY important that you select "max" for all goods for both buying and selling, unless you specifically want to disable them for some reason. If you forget to set at least one good value to something other than "-", your traders will not move. They will just stay in place and you will get a notification of "Route Deactivated." It's obnoxious that Port Royale 3 only tells you "Route Disabled" without telling you WHY. Well, the reason is because your trader isn't set to buy anything, and they don't have anything to sell, so they just give up.

Now, if you have any warehouses along the route, you can set up warehouse interactions, like dropping off excess goods, or picking up goods from other trade routes.

When you are done here, click the "x" in the upper corner, and then click on "activate route." Now you can go off and do something else while your traders do all the work for you!

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Good work!

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