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Game Information
- Platform: Windows 7
- PEGI Rating: Ages 18 and Over
- Media: DVD-ROM
- Item Quantity: 1
Frequently Bought Together
Product Features
- Become a powerful merchant and rise through the ranks using your increasing fame and wealth to shape towns from small villages to glorious capitals
- Balance competing interests, trade routes, political turmoil, disease, weather, piracy and greedy royalty
- Construct buildings and hire workers, stimulating demand for common and exotic goods
- Battle the high seas and protect your ship from pirate raiders in realistic and exciting sea battles
- A visually stunning and powerful new graphics engine lets you visit bustling and realistically recreated medieval cities such as London, Novgorod, Cologne and Bergen
- Brand new user friendly interface that makes Patrician IV easy to play but challenging to master
Product details
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Product Description
Manufacturer's Description
Based on the franchise that has sold more than two million copies and won the hearts of gamers worldwide, Patrician IV challenges players to rise up the merchant ranks to become the leader of burgeoning shipping empire during the late middle ages in Northern Europe – a time where success in trade could be as rewarding and influential as the power bestowed by noble birth, religious position or political clout.
Patrician IV’s authentic supply and demand based trading system allows players to grow their business and head out to the high seas to form trading routes with other Hanseatic cities negotiating better prices for the buying and selling of goods. Sea battles keep the pace
Product Description
In Patrician IV the player takes on the role of a young merchant in the area of the Baltic and North Sea during the late Middle Age, the zenith of the Hanseatic League and its naval trading empire.
Starting from meagre beginnings as a small stall trader, players must use every skill at their disposal to rise through the merchant ranks and become the most powerful merchant in Europe. The authentic supply and demand-based trading system allows players to grow their business and head out to the high seas to form trading routes with other Hanseatic cities negotiating better prices for the buying and selling of goods.
- Rise through the merchant ranks using your increasing fame and wealth to shape towns from small villages to glorious capitals during the middle ages
- Thrive based on your ability to prosper in a realistic supply and demand driven economy
- Balance competing interests, trade routes, political turmoil, disease, weather, piracy and greedy royalty to maximise your wealth reputation
- Construct buildings and hire workers, stimulating demand for common and more exotic goods
- Fortify your convoys to hold off pirate attacks or hunt them down in realistic sea battles
- Set up your trading routes along the Baltic and North Sea and visit bustling medieval cities such as London, Novgorod, Cologne and Bergen
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
22 of 25 people found the following review helpful
Fun:
If you are new to the Patrician series then you may think this is a good game. If you do take a look at Patrician III. If you have played and mastered Patrician III then in almost all aspects Patrician IV is worse. The UI is painfully slow even on my 3Ghz quad core with 8GB RAM, DX 10 compatible GPU with 512 RAM, Hardware RAID card with 2TBs of free space (this is really fast disk) running 64 bit Vista which according to the box this game is "enhanced for". I would hate to play it a slow machine!
The programming effort clearly has been put into making the game very pretty and it is in places but this is always at the expense of usability.
Take the trading interface, there is a button to increase or decrease the quantity of goods after clicking on the up or down button you have to keep the mouse cursor still for around a second or it will not register. Clicking on the numbers themselves sometimes highlights them so you can type in the required value. mostly it flashes the selection highlight over the existing value and then blinks off again. This makes setting up auto trade route, which are a major part of the game, really tedious. Double clicking on one of the product icons should move that product up or down in the three boxes, most of the time it simply flashes and stays put. Drag and drop is well drag and random drop you are never really sure where it will end up. Most of the time it pops right back from where it started from. You can and very often do need to trade in the same city 2-3 times in a row the interface does not allow you to do this. So you have to resort to adding your cities in a random order and fight the drag and drop interface on the next tab. Once in the mid game you will be trading all different types of goods to many cites this means with the new interface you have to scroll lists and change tabs to see what you have set up. In P III this was all on one screen, albeit not very pretty, but no scrolling up and down to see your orders to the captain.
The main game map has changed from good graphics in Patrician III with easily identifiable ship types to what looks like 2 triangles stuck together and a rectangle stuck on top giving the overall impression of a cheap, childish cartoon.
The Combat engine is defiantly on the side of the pirates. You tell a ship to sail west and attack a specific pirate. You move on to look at the next ship in your attack fleet only to find the initial ship has turned around and now locked into attacking an entirely different pirate ship. Getting you own ship to fire is also hard the AI steers them such that they never quite get into firing position before swerving off in the wrong direction. According to the manual you left click that sometimes opens up an icon showing the reload times. Attacking pirates is frustrating at best.
Staying with pirates even on the lowest level it is not possible to keep up with the pirate expansion. For every ship you build they build 3-4. I even tried only fighting pirates and nothing else for 6 months of game time and still found they were gaining at 2-3 to my one. I did end up with a lot of captured pirate ships though!
The interface to move ships from one of your convoys to another also suffers from the same drag drop problems the icon does not stay with the mouse cursor and drifts off on its own. Making it very difficult to tell where you are dropping the ship. So it usually pop back from where it came from. I did not find a way to move captains from one convoy to another when they gain experience better suited to another route.
In the campaign series if you do not wait for the guy on the top left to finish his speech before clicking on say the tavern or Guild then he will repeat the same thing 4-5 times.
Using the mini map to jump from town to town gives you a light blue screen with some grey blobs on it, then 2-3 seconds later the town redraws. Going from the game map to a town takes an age as it is reloaded each time.
When a city is under siege I never did get to seethe besieging army like in P III. Not sure if the are invisible or not.
I have tried turning down all the graphics but this only removes the pretty stuff not the annoying delays and usability issues.
Right after the install there are difficulties, you must have an internet connection or you cannot get past the registration screen and then each time you load the game this is checked again very slowly!
My recommendation would be to buy Patrician III instead, it's a far better game.
It would seem that Kalypso have tick box managers if something almost works tick the box and move on. There are also still bugs in the software the longer you play the slower it all runs. Quite often clicking on a city from the game map causes the whole game to lock up. Nothing works and you cannot get back to Windows to kill it off you have to reboot causing Windows to whine and moan that you did not shut down correctly.
The programming effort clearly has been put into making the game very pretty and it is in places but this is always at the expense of usability.
Take the trading interface, there is a button to increase or decrease the quantity of goods after clicking on the up or down button you have to keep the mouse cursor still for around a second or it will not register. Clicking on the numbers themselves sometimes highlights them so you can type in the required value. mostly it flashes the selection highlight over the existing value and then blinks off again. This makes setting up auto trade route, which are a major part of the game, really tedious. Double clicking on one of the product icons should move that product up or down in the three boxes, most of the time it simply flashes and stays put. Drag and drop is well drag and random drop you are never really sure where it will end up. Most of the time it pops right back from where it started from. You can and very often do need to trade in the same city 2-3 times in a row the interface does not allow you to do this. So you have to resort to adding your cities in a random order and fight the drag and drop interface on the next tab. Once in the mid game you will be trading all different types of goods to many cites this means with the new interface you have to scroll lists and change tabs to see what you have set up. In P III this was all on one screen, albeit not very pretty, but no scrolling up and down to see your orders to the captain.
The main game map has changed from good graphics in Patrician III with easily identifiable ship types to what looks like 2 triangles stuck together and a rectangle stuck on top giving the overall impression of a cheap, childish cartoon.
The Combat engine is defiantly on the side of the pirates. You tell a ship to sail west and attack a specific pirate. You move on to look at the next ship in your attack fleet only to find the initial ship has turned around and now locked into attacking an entirely different pirate ship. Getting you own ship to fire is also hard the AI steers them such that they never quite get into firing position before swerving off in the wrong direction. According to the manual you left click that sometimes opens up an icon showing the reload times. Attacking pirates is frustrating at best.
Staying with pirates even on the lowest level it is not possible to keep up with the pirate expansion. For every ship you build they build 3-4. I even tried only fighting pirates and nothing else for 6 months of game time and still found they were gaining at 2-3 to my one. I did end up with a lot of captured pirate ships though!
The interface to move ships from one of your convoys to another also suffers from the same drag drop problems the icon does not stay with the mouse cursor and drifts off on its own. Making it very difficult to tell where you are dropping the ship. So it usually pop back from where it came from. I did not find a way to move captains from one convoy to another when they gain experience better suited to another route.
In the campaign series if you do not wait for the guy on the top left to finish his speech before clicking on say the tavern or Guild then he will repeat the same thing 4-5 times.
Using the mini map to jump from town to town gives you a light blue screen with some grey blobs on it, then 2-3 seconds later the town redraws. Going from the game map to a town takes an age as it is reloaded each time.
When a city is under siege I never did get to seethe besieging army like in P III. Not sure if the are invisible or not.
I have tried turning down all the graphics but this only removes the pretty stuff not the annoying delays and usability issues.
Right after the install there are difficulties, you must have an internet connection or you cannot get past the registration screen and then each time you load the game this is checked again very slowly!
My recommendation would be to buy Patrician III instead, it's a far better game.
It would seem that Kalypso have tick box managers if something almost works tick the box and move on. There are also still bugs in the software the longer you play the slower it all runs. Quite often clicking on a city from the game map causes the whole game to lock up. Nothing works and you cannot get back to Windows to kill it off you have to reboot causing Windows to whine and moan that you did not shut down correctly.
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Fun:
In itself Patrician IV is quite a good game but it is not as good as Patrician III unless your priority is pretty graphics.
I would rate Patrician III and Patrician IV as 4 overall but whereas Patrician III was 5 for gameplay and 3 for graphics, Patrician IV is the other way around.
Personally I prefer the user interface to Patrician III but I think the Patrician IV user interface will be easier for the average game player to learn.
In summary I would say that the Patrician series has gone the same way as the Caesar series: version 4 is dumber and prettier in order to appeal to a younger consumer profile.
I would rate Patrician III and Patrician IV as 4 overall but whereas Patrician III was 5 for gameplay and 3 for graphics, Patrician IV is the other way around.
Personally I prefer the user interface to Patrician III but I think the Patrician IV user interface will be easier for the average game player to learn.
In summary I would say that the Patrician series has gone the same way as the Caesar series: version 4 is dumber and prettier in order to appeal to a younger consumer profile.
16 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Fun:
Having never played any of the Patrician series I had very few preconceptions regarding this game. I am however a fan of strategy games such as Anno. This game failed to meet even my fairly low expectations. The graphics are average at best while the gameplay is dull, fiddly and unrewarding.
Navigation around a crude nautical map unloading and loading a selection of uninteresting goods was not what i was hoping. Game play beyond this is practically non-existent. The only good point of this game is that it is so mind numbingly boring I soon found even the most tedious chores offering more fulfilment than Patrician IV.
Seriously, if you want to play a real strategic trading game buy Anno 1404.
Navigation around a crude nautical map unloading and loading a selection of uninteresting goods was not what i was hoping. Game play beyond this is practically non-existent. The only good point of this game is that it is so mind numbingly boring I soon found even the most tedious chores offering more fulfilment than Patrician IV.
Seriously, if you want to play a real strategic trading game buy Anno 1404.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Good game, some grafic misunderstanding
Bought this game few weeks ago I found it good even I was scared as I read some rewievs. I agree there is a bad main map if you played Patrician III, ships showing is awful for... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Dimitrij
Boring
I've enjoyed Patricial games before but this is very slow, not intuitive, poor guide, poor graphics. I wish I hadn't bought it.
Published 15 months ago by RoseJane
New nice features
I am a fan of Patrician series and there are several good differences between Patrician III and Patrician IV. Read more
Published 18 months ago by Armando Leonel Santos
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