I have some knowing of Port Royale games content, so is Patrician 3 similar to them? From these games what one is the best introduction into Ascaron strategy games' world? What one of them is most beginner-friendly? I'm not a big lover of RTS games, more preferring turn-based ones. And what are the prominent traits, differing one game from other?

Thanks in advance.

Its a bit late, but if you still care...

Patrician 3 is hard, especially early on. So much to do and you have no clue what of that you should be doing. Profit margins are narrower than usual in such "produce and trade" games. Some fighting is necessary, but the focus is definitely on trading. Once you know your way around however, the freedom to play any way you choose is the major point that keeps me coming back to this game for a decade and counting. But that doesn't help a beginner. P3 has a hotseat mode that you can play even alone, it makes the game turn based for all practical purposes (no time passes until you press "end turn", next turn starts when a ship arrives somewhere)

Port Royale (all versions, don't know the differences between them well enough) puts more emphasis on battles, trading is somewhat easier. There is a political aspect too that is absent from P3, each port has a colonial power that owns it and these nations have their own wars and alliances . There are some artificial fleet size restrictions, ruling the whole map is a lot harder if that's your goal. No idea if it has hotseat mode.

I reluctantly recommend the game I don't even like much, Port Royale, for beginners. If you like the way trade works with the constantly changing demands and prices, come back for the real thing ;-) Or get Patrician 4 elsewhere, it keeps most of the good things, while not throwing its whole complexity at you in the first minute like P3 does.

Whichever you choose, knowing one will give you a headstart for the other. I also wouln't call either of them RTS, they are much less stressful.

Thanks a lot for your reply. Your advice on hot-seat mode is priceless really, 'cause I'm more a turn-based player.

If you already started a singleplayer game that you'd like to continue, go into your P3/save folder, it should have a subfolder called "Ein", maybe Kam too if you play a campaign. Make another folder there named "Mehr" if it doesn't exist yet; they should be next to each other, not nested. Copy both the .pat and .pst of your save from Ein to Mehr and you can load it in "multi"player.

Now it occurs to me that I have no clue how that interacts with campaign/scenario play, might behave oddly later but initially even these seem to work, I only really used it with open ended games. Otherwise there is always the misnamed Pause, might be good enough if you don't plan to walk away for a while.

(If your folders have english names instead you have to do some guessing, I don't have the international version to check if they changed that.)