We sat with Daniel Dumont at E3 2010 for an interesting demo of Patrician IV, where we learned a lot about world economy, supply and demand.
Patrician IV is not a game about violence or construction. You don’t mobilize armies or populate continents, but instead focus on production and consumption of goods. This strategy-specific title represents the historical situation based on real facts from Northern Europe during the late Middle Ages, in the region comprised between England and Russia. This was the first example of global trade: produce goods (raw or manufactured), export them to other cities, bring back other goods.
To simply describe it, Patrician IV is a consumption and production simulation. Your city produces goods, which you then sell and observe to see how much it’s being consumed in the cities you sold it to. The only way to make money in the game is to buy things cheap and sell them at a higher price somewhere else. Certain events (such as a town siege, strong weather, a fire, pirates) will affect production, which will directly affect the price and demand, having an impact in the world.
You would expect such a complex game to have a steep learning curve, but this isn’t the case. The game starts simple, with a flat learning curve, slowly showing you the steps to take. You can click in your town to talk to your advisors and get some hints. Click a convoy, click a market, you get shown a list of goods with supply indicators and their respective prices. You can buy stock from the list of goods and then transport it to sell somewhere else for a profit.
Trading will slowly increase your reputation, which is the key to becoming a member of the different tribes. You will slowly notice goals you must reach to advance, for example becoming more popular or reaching a certain trade level, in order to unlock other features (for example, joining the guild so that you can produce your own manufactured goods).
You can also establish and optimize trade routes. You will pick the cities for the route, pick the goods to trade, and activate the route according to specific variants such as price or amount of product.
Eventually you will need more reputation, more production sites, more buildings, so it’s not all just about the money. The complexity starts to rise slowly with the inclusion of politics and pirates; as your reputation rises, you can become a councillor or try to become mayor, which will then let you access new buildings for your town, as well as the ability to fortify it so that the town can defend itself from pirate attacks.
We could have gone on and on checking out little details, exploring menus and trade possibilities, but our time came to an end. Hopefully, we will see more of Patrician IV when it’s released this Fall, and you just know it’s going to be a time consumer.