Review by: Rob Zacny

Increasingly, I spend as much time thinking about Patrician IV as playing it. Before I even got out of bed this morning, I was making plans for my new counting house in Danzig and the eastern Baltic markets to which it had access. I had a rough plan in mind: I would use Danzig as a transfer station for goods heading west to Denmark and Sweden, and those heading east to the other Baltic ports. The profits would be tremendous!

Before I could sit down and start playing, however, I took a moment to think about all the work I would have to do. The new goods coming to the west would require finding new price points. I would have to revise cargo lists for the convoys making stops at Danzig. That spelled about 20 or 30 minutes of fiddling with cargo manifests and stock levels at my warehouses. That would follow another 20 minutes of watching and tweaking the revised convoys to quash any inefficiency.

This is the good and bad of Patrician IV. It is an infectious game with long chains of cause and effect. There are always interesting problems to work on, and they lurk in the back of your mind even after you exit the game. On the other hand, playing Patrician IV is as painstaking as constructing a house of cards, and just as easy to knock over. The more intricate and ambitious the construct, the harder it is to refine, repair, or expand. This game should have shipped with a personal assistant included.

The foundation of Patrician IV is trade between cities. Each city requires a wide variety of goods, but can only produce five. The rest have to come from other cities. At first, it's very easy to exploit this market. A single ship with limited cargo space has no trouble turning a handsome profit. However, traders can make far more money by increasing their hauling capacity and doing business in greater volume. That's also harder, because doing business in large volume changes the prices of goods at each port. Filling those hulls with cargo gets prohibitively expensive as you consume a city's stock of a good, and selling lots of one good lowers the sales price. So the next step is diversification and production.

Production involves the earliest stages of politics as well. You earn a reputation in each city you visit, and this reputation opinion is improved by doing good works or good business in the city. Bring beer to Oslo, where it is scarce and everyone is sick to death of mead, and you will win a lot of fans. Once the local merchant guild has a high enough opinion of you, you can open a counting house there. If their opinion continues to improve, they will let you open production facilities, and perhaps one day even let you get in on the most lucrative regional items.

However, other traders have positions in these cities, and expanding onto their turf makes enemies. The objective for all traders is to rise in primacy within the Hanseatic League, the trade federation that serves as the backdrop for this game. What begins as a simple microeconomics exercise in marginal costs and marginal profits gets more complicated and competitive as you begin reshaping Patrician's economy. One way you do this is to drive competitors out of business, which can involve piracy, price wars, and monopolization (such as making sure the AI can't get critical resources for production businesses).