Port Royale 4: Anon 1602 Scenario/Mod

I have always loved the PR series (also the other trading sim titles like Patrician, Rise of Venice, etc…), and the absolute train wreck that Gaming Minds did with PR4 saddens me greatly, cause the game looks awesome and had great potential.

So I set out to alter the game (which has no modding support) with trainers, to turn it into a playable state for long time fans of the series. The end result looks like this:

I have played for 10 in game year now and they have not respawned, so pretty sure they won’t ever respawn. My guess is the treasure fleet mechanic actually contribute to a hidden in-game counter that tracks money for all 4 nations, by wiping them out they don’t receive shipments hence no money to rebuilt for reinforcements. Cause I also tried wiping the map on a normal game, with 10 years of in-game play time and the AI just kept on respawning with reinforcements, ultra annoying.

But wiping them created a new challenge, it also wiped all neutral merchant convoys! As I circled above, the # of merchant convoys was tied to the # of towns each nation had. So with no convoys moving goods around, the entire Caribbeans descended into a supply chaos, and famine/depopulation ensued:

So I thought at this point, I’ll either have to create big fleet to replace the neutral fleets, or just wipe the slate clean by going around and buying all remaining supplies from the towns, centralizing it in Port Royale. Then destroying neutral businesses in all the towns. I chose the latter, because I also loved the Anon series in which there are no business on the map, and you had to build from the ground up. so now every town looks like this:

But then I have OCD and hate how the goods I bought up from all the towns is just random and will exhaust at different rates, I then went on to give myself a full year of supplies ( that support approximately 12k people) of every good that according their consumption ratios, so they would essentially all reduce to 0 at approximately same time, with extra Wood/Bricks/Metalware because you need it to build businesses:

Next is to leave myself with 1.3Mil, one capital ship and two merchant ships:

And there you have it, you can play the game normally from here. With no annoyances from the European powers, no retarded AI building industry where you don’t want it, and no combat except pirates, which is why I left that one Carrack to deal with them. (I absolutely hate combat, so I play with god mod on to auto every fight, so one is enough to kill the entire fleet, if you don’t wanna mess with trainers you can buy back some more ships from the shipyard in Port Royale).

https://drive.google.com/file/d/19KU_h4w9WZABmugHk457yJuv_1MBB2m8/view?usp=sharing

Put it here:
\Steam\userdata\137785595\1024650\remote\savegames

Or goto ingame and press “Report Issue”, and press save, it will pop up the savegame folder.

I tested this on my other computer with a fresh install of PR so it should work. if it doesn’t I guess you’re stuck with having to read the below sections how to achieve this yourself. (It’s a pretty tedious process)

This is my take on how I enjoy the game, some of you might think it’s cheating, but give it a shot, it’s harder than it looks. Because there are no industries on the map, if you don’t build the necessary industries before your supplies run out, your town’s satisfaction will eventually dip below 60%, then workers gradually gets laid off, and since there are no AI industries to to buy goods from, if you run out of something and you didn’t build any businesses, there are no other ways of getting it.

I actually tried giving myself only 3 month of supplies at first, but failed miserably, because I ran out of supplies. Now I’m almost 10 years into my game, with the eventual goal of maxing every town and reach supply/demand equilibrium in the Caribbeans, here’s how’s going so far:

Having so much more fun than vanilla! Actually more fun than PR3 cause you couldn’t take the last viceroy towns even in 3.

Download cheatengine:
https://www.cheatengine.org/

Get the cheat table for PR4
https://fearlessrevolution.com/viewtopic.php?t=14043

I’m not gonna cover how to use this software, google it or ask in comments.

Start a free game with Bucaneer Mode On, others settings such as nation/characters/difficulty options don’t matter. Try to go for a map distribution (I think #2 is most balanced) which all the nations have equal amount of towns, so you won’t have a hard time with one of them dominating.

Fire up cheat engine and turn on the below options:

Under player info set fame points to 50, and progress to 1000, this way you can unlock all concessions immediately. Also select the initial captain that came with Bucanner Mode on, and set his level to 10. Now you have infinite money, ultra fast ships, ships won’t die, and all concessions unlocked.

Next is to build up a fleet of 40 capital ships, 4 each convoy, 10 captains total. So you can siege 10 towns at once, and absolute steamroll the AI as fast as possible.

Now go in each viceroy town and try to look for a capital ship tier ship for sell, War Galleon/Ship of the Line/Caravel/Carack

If none are available, Galleon will also do cause it has the highest crew number, because the trainer does not protect you against boarding so if you run with no crews, AI will just capture your ship. If no Galleon is available, a Military Frigate/Corvette will also do, but kind of risky. Another route is to build a capital ship from your shipyard, but that requires waiting.

Once you got your one ship fleet, go to the below position circled red on the mini-map, where the blue dot is, not the screen I’m on, I know… a bad screenshot on my part, but that’s the only one I kept during the process:

This is where the treasure fleets from Europe will leave after picking up colonial goods, which is consisted of 4 capital ships of their respective country. So intercept a fleet, chain shot and capture every single one, they won’t be able to hurt you cause god mod is on. Rinse and repeat 10 times, and you got 40 ships. Don’t forget to hire every single captain that comes along as you do this, you need 10 to be able to declare independence.

This position may be different in your game depending on the distributions picked and where the viceroy town is. So if the treasure fleet doesn’t spawn there, go park your convoy near the viceroy town then follow them to the edge of the map to see where they will go.

Once you got 10 convoys/captains, declare independence from concessions. and just start conquering towns 10 at a time. You can almost auto every single battle because 4 capital ships in a convoy is favored in the auto calc, if you’re forced to fight manual, just enter combat, then press Automatic button. You will take no losses cause god mod is on. At this point, we don’t care about capturing any ships, just sieging towns and wiping AI fleets off the map. I was able to do this within one in-game year, the game started at 1/1/1604, I wiped the map on 12/20/1604:

Now you’re done with the conquering part, time for the more tedious task of destroying every single business in 60 towns. Zoom into town, buy up every business, and demolish them, repeat 60 times. Leave the housing! No easy way around it.

Now to the even more tedious part. With your 10 convoys, go around 60 towns and buy up all remaining goods, if there are too may to fit on a convoy, use cheat engine to edit the number of goods to 0, essentially destroying the goods. (Don’t worry, we can recreate them later with the trainer) The trainer can only edit 4 goods at a time, so don’t load more than 4 different goods on your ship at a time. Once you set the goods amount to 0, you have to disband and reform the convoy because the total capacity is not reset until you do this. (I said it was tedious…)

Now take your remaining goods and dump them all in Port Royale, now for the most tedious part. Like I mentioned before when you consolidated all goods, the amount will vary greatly and will most definitely be different than the standard consumption ratios. So one good will run out before another, causing satisfaction drop and lay offs.

With no businesses in the Caribbeans at all, towns hover around 200 population, with 60 towns, that’s around 12k population total. I like to give myself X month of supplies but based on consumption ratios, I’m sure veterans of the series all play this game with a spreadsheet open, so I won’t cover the actual ratios here.

To actually set the amount of goods in Port Royale, basically load 4 goods at a time onto your ship, set the # of goods under “Item Amount”, then sell them back to Port Royale. Repeat 15 times for all 60 goods. Below are the numbers for a full year supply to support 12k people, with extra wood/bricks/metalware for construction:

Sell all your ships, except with the number of ships you want to start with. I usually leave one combat capital ship, and two merchant ships. Fire all your captains except 1. And use cheat engine one last time to set your starting funds under “Player Info”. I started with 1.3Mil, seems alot but really not giving you have to singlehandedly build every single trade good industry from the ground up. Save your game, close cheatengine and reload your game. Done!

Note if you start with too many ships, and not enough money you will run into debt because under very hard economy, even if your ships are not in a convoy they will still cost upkeep.