Thorfinn: I've just started this game. Interesting, but unless I'm misunderstanding something, the warehouse manager you hire is a total moron. Is it really the case that all he can do is keep a minimum stock of specified goods and get those to your businesses? He can't buy low or sell high, like in Port Royale?
The only clunky workaround I've found to this is to hire a captain, then have that city twice in the roster, another city interleaved which he skips. This captain can buy low/sell high, as well as transfer to and from the warehouse. Is there a better way?
The warehouse manager and the captain are mostly the same when it comes to trade. Perhaps the only difference is that the captain has a 'trading' skill that can vary between 0 and 5. So, for both of them, select a product, specify the amount, and the price at which the product should be bought or sold.
For example, it is useful to instruct the warehouse manager to buy products that are available cheaply in your home town. Let's say, there is a lot of beer produced in the town, and when the amount offered is large, the price can go at times as low as 31 gold for 1 beer. Now, set the manager to buy beer at 35 gold, and set the maximum amount of beer that he should buy, to 40. This way, you know he would spend no more than 1400 gold until he obtains 40 beers. While he is doing this, you can travel and trade with your ship. Once you are back in town, you can simply transfer the beer to the ship and go to a town, where there is almost no beer. If they offer you to pay you 55 gold per beer, your profit would be 20 gold per beer, or 800 totally for this batch.
Later, when you build offices in more towns and hire warehouse managers in all of them, you can simply set a group of ships that automatically travels between the towns and only takes/puts products in the warehouse. Set the warehouse managers to sell and buy and good prices, set the ships to transfer the right amounts of products, and you would get rich - and the sweet thing is that you wouldn't need to work much :) Of course, this requires planning and fine tuning, and once you do it, you could stop dealing personally with trade and use your time for funnier things, for example, chasing pirates.
Also, what's a "reasonable" rate of progression? How many ships do you usually have at around, say, 6 months? A year? When do you generally start warehouses in other cities? Any rules of thumb you use?
It depends - on your trading (and other) skills, on your knowledge in the mechanics of the game, on the difficulty level at which you play, and so on. For example, recently I started playing at 'normal' difficulty, and had 2 ships at 6 months, and 1 or 2 more at 1 year from the start. Started warehouses in other cities when I could afford it - that is, bring enough resources to the town (or buy them locally), spend money for building, and after that I still have, let's say, 20000 gold remaining so I can continue trading as usual. While it is expensive to build a warehouse in another town, if you use managers as in the example above it pays well in the long run.
Last but not least - read the fine manual, it is available as download in GOG, and it is really fine.
