While trade may be the key to success, without a well thought out supply chain you’ll be struggling to acquire the goods to turn a real profit. In this Port Royale 4 guide we will look into how to build your towns and businesses into production powerhouses.
Port Royale 4 Production
At any zoom level you can click on the colony’s flag or info box to bring up its Town Tab. From here you can see which commodities are cultivated or extracted, along with the efficiency of each. These are the only raw materials that can be created by your town and these cannot be changed.
Going over to the Production tab at the top of the window you see what resources and commodities are actually produced and in what quantities. Early game, most towns start with only a few but these can be expanded up to a total of seven.
Clicking on one of the commodities will show you the number of businesses and how many workers are employed in the industry. These businesses will produce goods daily and sell them on the local market for the current price.
It’s not just your businesses that operate in the colonies and you will be competing with AI industries to turn a profit. These AI businesses will disable themselves if they can’t turn a profit but if they do so, it’s likely you are losing money as well.
The important thing to remember here is that production is expensive and over-saturating the market with goods will considerably impact your payday. Take this example of Cotton, you can see that it costs 2,880 a day to run the business. If we were to look at the sale price in the Market tab we would see it has fallen to 64 per unit because of saturation. This means that the 52.8 we produce per day is worth 3,379, making us only 500 gold per day.
While profit is still profit, that’s barely enough to finance a handful of ships. Still, the purpose of production is not to turn massive profits itself, but rather to produce large amounts of now low value goods for you to trade to colonies that don’t have such a surplus.
Port Royale 4 Building
In the top right of the screen you can click on the little house to bring up the Construction window. This displays the town buildings and businesses you can build in two different tabs.
To get the basics out of the way, only the town administrator can build town buildings, and the player needs a building permit to construct businesses. At the start of the game you will have both of these for your home colony, but will need to buy a building permit to run businesses in other towns. Once you have enough employees in another colony, you can apply with your Viceroy to take over the administration and gain access to the town buildings.
Even with the required permissions you will notice that some buildings remain greyed out. This could be due to several possible causes such as not being a colony resource, not having enough people, or not having the right Concession. These Concessions are available from the regional Viceroy at a cost of 1 Fame Point and will allow you to build a new type of handicraft business.
Hint: You don’t need to unlock all of these quickly so to start choose a handicraft business that matches up with what raw materials you produce. For example, if you grow grain, build a brewery as this keeps costs down and automation up.
When placing buildings you need to zoom in and will see the effects of the selected building on happiness when you however over an empty hex. You will want to try and build on highlighted green hexes if you can as these have the most positive bonuses. Be sure to keep an eye on layout as you build up your towns and keep production away from residences and handicraft businesses near to both.
Hint: If you combine 4 same resource businesses by placing them next to each other they create a large business which grants a 10% bonus. This isn’t a critical boon but can be worth doing if you have the space.
In the building panel you will see the construction commodities required for the building and how much this will cost in gold. Once placed you will see the impact of all building projects in the top left. Construction will only begin once all the materials are available. You can either sell these to the town yourself or wait for other merchants to bring the goods.
Port Royale 4 Workers
All businesses need workers and the town tab shows you how many unemployed job seekers you have available. These workers come from the Viceroy’s town and are distributed automatically, as long as your Satisfaction is over 40%. Satisfaction can be raised through having chapels, taverns, and gardens near your residences along with ensuring that the demand for commodities is met.
You can see what is demanded by the inhabitants of a particular town in the Market tab, with the most important demands at the top. It’s not crucial these are all met, but the more people living in the town, the more important a good supply becomes.
While building new businesses, be careful not to overlook living space as more workers need more housing, and missing workers will reduce the output of your businesses. If you are the town administrator, this is entirely up to you, but if you are merely building businesses in other colonies you will have to wait for the town to do it, although it doesn’t usually take them that long.
Hint: If you have free space available, you don’t have to just wait for people to arrive. If you hire Sailors for your fleet from other colonies and dismiss them in your own, they will then join the job seekers pool and can be put to work.
Perhaps more importantly, ensure you have the required resources for handicraft production as if they cannot get hold of the raw materials, you will be paying your workers to sit around and do nothing all day, causing you to run at a loss. If you run into troubles here, you can disable production of a commodity in the production tab to prevent oversupply.
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