First let me share a number of useful things others have shared with me. Here's a link to the Patrician IV folder on my google drive. You shouldn't be able to modify the files, (If you can, please don't.) but you should be able to view them and copy them if you'd like.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1D0fYUhxBH_m9Lw6IpBOH2uPQAC5klkqO?usp=sharing

The file marked "download.ods" is an Open Office Sheets file of a spreadsheet I downloaded ten or more years ago containing the knowledge an expert player named Hein Bagaluth aka Ralf Tielmann. It's got all kinds of useful information about the game. You don't have to memorize it. The sheet is there for reference.

"Download 2.ods" is that same sheet after being downloaded and modified by another expert player I cannot name who added onto the original work including a lot of material about "The Rise of a Dynasty" expansion.

Both of these people have my hearty thanks.

The "info.gsheet" is parts of the above spreadsheets I've clipped and crammed together for quick reference. I added a few notes of my own.

The "start.gsheet" shows the list of demands, productions, and the net productions you'll find in the Hanse at the start of the game. There is some variation from game start to game start which I assume is random. If you update the values for demand and production, the formula will calculate the net effect on the 3rd sheet.

The "observed.gsheet" is the start sheet updated to the current state of my current game, so I don't think it will interest you.

The "p4addon_modding.zip" is the essential tool for modding the game. There are a number of game files in there. You change any of the values in any of the sheets, put them in a folder called "ini" and drop that in the Patrician IV folder. When you reload the game, it will have new behaviors based on your modifications. The "ini" folder I have has the only mod to the game I made which is about sea battles, so I'll discuss that in that section.

If you've never played the game before, you probably want to play the campaign on easy. It isn't really a campaign. It's more of an extended tutorial.

Once you've got the basics, start a game on professional with high pirate activity. Every fight with a pirate gives you a cheap ship. I think it's also a nice break from empire building. See the Sea Battles section below.

Leave the rest of the settings in their default state except Starting City. By default you'll start in Lubeck which isn't a bad place, but the only thing that really recommends it is its central location. The campaign suggests you build your second counting house in Aalborg. I'm not even sure how that would work, and that brings me to the main point of this guide-

Industries only produce if you keep them supplied.

At the start of the game you can't possibly get enough wood for Lubeck to produce salt in all the salters it has before you even come onto the scene. If you can't produce salt in Lubeck, you can't produce meat in Aalborg. What you need is a supply of wood to fuel that whole chain, and you can't get it in Lubeck.

Start the game in Danzig. Reval would be a good choice too. Build counting houses in all the cities that can produce wood and brick before any other cities. Make your first industries wood and brick. You can't build anything else without those, so get them first.

Danzig, Reval, Malmo, Novgorod, Oslo, Bergen (not necessarily in that order). Build industries to build other industries (and keep them supplied). I'll continue this discussion in the next section.

What always capped my development in older games was that there was nothing to trade. Cities never produced anything. I thought it was because AI merchants were buying all the goods first, but no matter how frequently I visited them they never had anything for sale.

I knew that production had requirements, but I assumed the AI merchants would consider supplying their own production to be their first priority. Their ships are always crawling all over the North Sea like ants. What are they doing?

Well, I don't know what they're doing, but what they're not doing is supplying their own production facilities. You can't produce all the goods you want by yourself, so supply their production, buy the goods, and sell them at a profit.

The 10-day demand list you see on the middle tab at the wharf includes the supply for all the businesses in town that aren't yours. Get the supplies needed to produce high-value goods, sell those supplies to the cities that will produce those high-value goods, buy the products, sell them, profit.

The "start" spreadsheet I have on my drive will give you a pretty good idea which cities are producing (and demanding) what goods.

If you buy at "buy" price and sell at the "sell" price listed on the Download spreadsheet, the highest value goods are spices, wine, and clothing in that order. Next is pelts followed closely by meat. You can't produce spices. Wine doesn't need any supplies. But those are problematic trade goods to base a business on anyway because, while they are high-value, they aren't in high demand.

If you look at my "info" spreadsheet, you'll see I have multiplied the profit per unit good sold by the demand per 1,000 citizens. Stockfish is the absolute winner, but clothing comes next and it's more convenient because it's higher profit per unit and has a simpler supply chain.

You need wood to produce salt, pitch, and metal goods. You need salt to produce meat and stockfish. You need metal goods to produce pelts. So wood is at the base of the production chain for 3 highly valuable trade goods, and it is the thing Hanseatic cities are most often undersupplied in.

Raw metal is the other piece of metal goods. You need wool to produce cloth, and cloth to produce clothing. Honey to produce mead. Grain to produce beer. Hemp to produce pelts and stockfish, two other high value goods.

You also need wood and bricks to build any kind of building. Some buildings also need metal goods.

You need wood, hemp, metal goods, cloth, and pitch to build ships.

So don't just sell to make money. Sell to produce things that will make you more money.

I know, people hate sea battles. They're long. What bugs me most about them is that the starting positions are random. Very often you'll start a battle in a pinch you can't get out of without getting shot. If they wound you enough right off the bat, it will lead to you getting shot again and your inevitable defeat.

If you drop the "ini" folder in my google drive into your Patrician IV folder (if you've downloaded it from Steam, that's C:/Program Files(x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/Patrician IV). It will increase all types of damage from all weapons by a factor of 5. This was just done with the intention of making ship battles go faster, and it does. Unfortunately, it also makes it easier to lose because that cheap shot the AI sometimes gets at the start of a fight does more damage.

Still I rarely lose a fight, and there's no ironman mode in this game. You can just reload it. Some people rig it so the AI can't do significant damage, but I think that's cheating so you won't hear how to do it from me.

I'll put actual combat tactics in its own section.

It's generally agreed that crayers are the best combat ships. When you get hulks you probably want to go with those because the enemy will have hulks too, and it takes forever to destroy a hulk with anything but another hulk.

In any case, you have two options: 1) Have one fighting ship for each convoy. Whenever it gets close to an enemy, they'll attack thinking its an easy target and you hit Manual fight and remind them who is The Master of Orion (oh, sorry, different game). 2) Set up three big, fully armed fighting ships. Pirates won't attack figuring the fight won't be worth it for them. (I think the princes' war fleets and the Pirates from [x city] will attack, so you're not totally off the hook.)

The nice thing about option 2 is all you need is a lot of guns. You won't need crew. The AI just sees the guns and backs off, so that option is cheaper.

A problem with option 1 is that your ship might be damaged in the battle. What do you do then? Put the whole fleet out of commission while it repairs? That sucks. Might rather keep two, and only have one activated at any one time. That way you can just kick the ship out of the group while it repairs, assign the spare to combat readiness, and pick up the other one once it's done repairing.

I've heard that if you have a captain with a 5 Combat skill, you can auto battle and they'll capture one of the enemies. But I haven't played with that too much.

As a general matter, you want to destroy pirates as soon as they appear wherever they are. As long as they're in the water, they'll be making Hanseatic League poorer and the pirate richer.

Apparently the typical player never realizes the wind is important in sea battles. Well, it is. When you turn into the wind, you turn slower and move faster. When you turn against the wind, you turn faster and move slower. I'm not sure if it effects bigger ships more than it does smaller ships. I think it does, but it may just be that I'm expecting that because that's the way things were in Sid Meier's Pirates!

When a fight starts, the AI will drop you at a random distance and bearing from your targets. If you're too close (especially if they're coming right at you), get the hell out of there (turn into the wind).

Once you get to a comfortable distance and they're following, pick one ship you like. Destroy the other two. With the last one, blast it a couple of times to slow it down, then switch to grape shot (F3), keep hitting it until the crew is gone, then switch back to solid shot (F1), and keep blasting it until you get the fight over/ship captured message. (For that last bit of blasting go back to grape shot, so you don't damage your new ship any more than you have to.)

Take your new ship to the nearest port and repair it. Damaged ships will slow you down.

But how do I attack? You ask. It works like this. First off don't get too close. Sail away from them, and they'll follow. Once you've got a comfortable distance, turn and blast them. Then turn back and repeat. If you're feeling confident, you can try using both broadsides. Turn and blast them. Then turn the other way until you can blast them again. Then turn back.

But it's safer to just use one side. Turn just enough to fire. Turn back till you're running straight away from the enemy. Wait until you've got a good distance and your cannons are reloaded. Turn and fire again with the same broadside.

The tricky part is turning faster than they do. That's especially hard when they're in smaller ships. There are two things you can do: 1) Turn against the wind. That will make you turn fast. 2) Lower your sails. That will also reduce your speed and increase your rotation rate. Hit the 'Q' key 4 times. Turn. Fire. Start turning back the other way. Hit the 'E' key 4 times.

Which way to turn? How far away to get? This you will learn with practice. Happy hunting.

When you first get build privileges in a city, fill it with small wells. Put them in nooks and corners. Try not to fill a space that could hold another building. You can see if you've built enough by clicking one. It will tell you the percent coverage.

Don't build too much in any one city. You never know when there might be a fire (even if you've properly built wells) or plaque. In professional games fires happen a lot. In winter harbors freeze over too. So you don't want too much of your production to be in one city.

There's another reason too. If you keep building industries, people will keep coming looking for jobs. And if you let a city grow too big, it will absorb the resources of the whole Hanse and you won't be able to do anything but supply it.

Which brings me to another point. As soon as you become mayor of your first city, you'll want to build all the special mayor buildings as soon as you can, but don't build a cathedral. Leave that for the next mayor. If the city doesn't have a cathedral, it can't grow over 10,000 population and as I just said you don't want any one city to grow too big too quickly. Ideally you'd want to start cathedrals in every city at the same time.

Each city has three gates, and there are roads leading up to each of those gates. When you build your first industries, build them out as far as you can along the road. (When you go to place the building, move it out along the road. It will go- green, green, green, and then turn red. Build as far out as you can.) If the city decides to build a new wall, it will build it big enough to put all the businesses inside. If you build out there, the new wall will be as big as it can be at least at those three points. If you don't, the city will build a smaller wall and it will just be a waste of resources because you'll want to build a bigger wall later.

Once you've built the biggest wall you can, build four cannon towers at each gate. That might be overkill, but as far as I've seen it's enough.

I think most missions are a bad idea or a waste of time and resources. The treasure map sounds like fun, but I found the treasure a few times and I wasn't at all sure the goods I got were worth more than I spent on the pieces of the map. Same goes for the "cheap goods" you can buy in the tavern sometimes. Doing piracy missions sounds like a good way to get your reputation reduced. Offering your ships as a city patrol barely pays for the upkeep of those ships. Money you lend very often becomes money you lost.

Borrowing money may be a good idea so you can make a push that will make more in the long run.

Of course you get married- to a woman with a large dowry, in ships, nevermind the goods.

Take the Increase Production missions if you want to build those industries and you have the money and the wood and brick so you can build them quick.

Don't waste your time looking for pirate hideouts. I always think I know where they are because the pirate always puts his ships in the same place, but I have never found a hideout. When the AI finds hideouts, take the Hanse mission to destroy it.

Take the Hanse Recognition as a Hanseatic City missions if you're in a position to fulfill them. Usually the trading post only needs a minster. So you have to dump a hundred thousand or so to convince the council to build the minster; dump something like 1000 wood, 2000 brick, and 250 metal goods on the city to get the thing built, and then check back a month or so later when they reconvene to dump another hundred or two thousand on them to convince them to apply for entry into the League. All this has to be done quickly. Missions in this game never leave you a lot of time to get it done.

Similarly, don't take the Founding a City missions until you're in a good place. You have to dump thousands and thousands of wood, brick, metal goods, and money on them to get them up and running. And you have to do it quickly.

Another problem I was having last time I played is that I was doing way too many prince tribute missions- like one a month in each region. It's not worth it. Do them every once in a while when they're really angry, or don't and let them loot your cities, get some more cheap heavily armed ships.

I'll probably come back to this guide and make a new section about land routes when I figure out more about them. I've been told the way to handle them is not to make big wagon trains. Just send out individual wagons with no soldiers. If you arm them, you'll end up paying more to the soldiers than you'll lose from them getting raided periodically. I imagine that will change once the land cities start getting big and well developed.

One thing I can tell you from hard experience is don't take the prince mission to open land routes until you're ready to start feeding the cities. If you don't send them food, they'll go into famine right away and be useless. From their productions, it looks like they could be really valuable cities too.

Don't bother looking for Mediterranean ports. The AI will find them for you.

Eventually you'll want to send regular expeditions to all five ports, but it seems best to start with the ones that take pitch and metal goods and give spices and wine. It's easier to produce metal goods than pelts, and the wine is more valuable than the cloth as a reward.

Start with about 100 metal goods and 100 pitch. Scale that up as the other port develops.

Don't give in to the temptation to make trade routes too early. You can do it better if you do it by hand.

Instead of automating it, group your ships into big convoys that you can control by hand.

Other than that, all I can say is good luck.