Patrician IV

Played Patrician IV.

The world map is horrible. In comparison to ANNO 1404, town graphics is worse and slightly slower.
User interface is less descriptive, and lack names of goods. In addition transactions are done by dragging. It become lame after a few hours of playing.
Iron goods are not that crazy important.
City popularity basically require a large transactions, as popularity decrease is linear and it's unlikely to be able to send enough ships regularly.
Ship construction, and construction of buildings, require materials on city market. You can't use materials from your warehouse to construct your own ships or buildings. Considering wood is somehow rare at the beginning...

Difficulty is: Normal, Advanced, Professional. Freezing doesn't occur at normal difficulty. (BTW freezing behaves somewhat crazy.)

Piracy rate is significantly lower than in Patrician III, I didn't see any in first year, and starting money are much larger.

The two types of cargo sizes were merged into one.

Cities behave somewhat more sane, and there is better construction space. However there is only one type of housing.

Goods are categorized into regional, and normal goods. Each type require different guild permit.

You need to buy guild permits, trader rank, and also some popularity before they would allow you to make your own production houses.

Fleet captains are much smaller problem than they were.

So basically they dumbed it down a bit.

thanks, I downloaded the demo and couldn't get myself to playing it.

Thanks for the review. I will let it simmer for a few more patches and addons before trying.

Ship construction, and construction of buildings, require materials on city market. You can't use materials from your warehouse to construct your own ships or buildings. Considering wood is somehow rare at the beginning...

Click to expand...

What the fuck is this shit?

It means that we buy woods from other markets, sell it here, then the god forsaken shipwright buy woods and start making your contracted ships.

I just shaking my head at the idiocy.

Anymore reviews? I like Patrician "3" a lot.

Benelux Gameplay magazine called it the king of its genre. With the addition that this was only because there was nothing noteworthy in the genre atm and that thus one eye ruled the blind. They weren't exactly clear on wether it was better than Patrician III or not. Meh, I'll 'demo' it once I find the time.

When you Untermenchen say P3, you actually mean the data disc to what's known as P2 in Germany? In which case I'll have to grab both. Looks sweet on screenshots.