I've just purchased Patrician I & II here at GOG. Patrician I seems to play fine so far on my Windows 8.1 laptop ... but there is no documentation, no manual ... so how the heck does one figure out how to play it?

Maybe the manual that comes with Patrician II will suffice? Any help appreciated. I googled the problem, and it seems that there isn't a manual available for the game. Interesting one this ... why would a game company publish a game without any documentation on how to play it?

I would suggest - start playing Patrician 2, then it will be easier for you to play the 1st one. ;)

I guess that is what I will do, though my bafflement at the absence of documentation remains.

Hmm, not sure, but maybe there never was any manual at all. :D

And therein is the source of my bafflement :)

I just found a german manual. In case its useful for someone, click on Handbuch.

And an english site mentioned how poor the manual was, mobygames tells us who was responsible for it, so we can be reasonably sure there was at least something at some point. Sorry can't find it either.

It drove me absolutely crazy too that there was no manual or map for The Patrician when I bought it. I scoured the internet looking for anything that could help me. Eventually, I found a complete pdf of the French manual. Also, somewhere (but I can't remember where), I found a faq that gave most instructions. I formatted the faq as best as I could and whatever gaps I found I used the French manual with an online translation site to give me a rough translation of the instructions and then reworked the English to sound more natural. I put all of this together, copied some of the images from the French manual, then reformatted it all to look like a proper manual, and finally made a pdf file.

I'm going to post it here, but I really can't guarantee the quality or accuracy of this manual. I did this all a long time ago, and I just can't find the sources of all these files I used. I'm a little reticent about posting it here because I don't want to step on any copyright toes. But I do think a lot of people might benefit from this, so I'll take a chance and post it.

I'm not entirely sure how to post this file, so I put it on this upload site. (I also included the Patrician map, just in case.) You can get it here:

http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=56311677352206263774

Please enjoy!

(I just realized that the English manual I reformatted was from the Lemon Amiga site: http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/docs.php?id=1197) So most credit goes to whoever uploaded that.)

manual at lemonamiga