any tips for running a business? All I do is lose money. I'll build a farm/factory/ etc and the goods get moved to the storage unit but they never sell. I set the prices low, still no sales. Any ideas?
Edit: This is for Port Royale 1

From the fact you're saying you've set the prices low, I guess you already have a manager to sell your things.
Anyway, you really shouldn't try selling the goods you produce in the same town. The very fact you can produce them there (generally) means they have a surplus of it (remember, the town produces it, too), so you'll have to set the price EXTREMELY low to sell your product, going even lower than the production cost of the product.
Instead, load them on a ship and deliver them to towns in need of that product. Voilá! Instant profit :-).

thanks, I'm starting to get the hang of it

This thread has some good info: http://www.gog.com/en/forum/port_royale_series/any_tips_on_setting_up_trade_routes

This never happened to me. Usually, you can get away with setting your selling price a bit higher than the production price, even if you sell to the very town your business is in - especially if the town produces the respective good *efficiently*. If your town grows large enough, you'll even be forced to sell to that very town, to avoid happiness issues.

Example: Charlestowne produces Grain, Fish and Potatoes, as well as Salt and Rum efficiently. If you build a bunch of Saltworks and Distilleries, the population will grow and locally produced food won't suffice any more, so your grainfarms, potatofarms and fisher's huts will have to sell a portion of their produce to Charlestown itself, to keep it well supplied. Otherwise, you risk a chain reaction of low happiness => recession => lack of workers for your businesses. The spiral of death. :) Of course, you could wait for the AI traders to build businesses in Charlestown or supply it with convoys, but the AI can be somewhat slow (sometimes *too* slow) to respond. And why let them have your profits? With efficiently produced goods, you'll be able to sell at lower prices than anyone else, which discourages the pesky competition from selling the respective goods on your turf. The richer and bigger the town, the cheaper your production. In one game I was producing grain in Charlestown for 65 gold a barrel, if I remember correctly. This allows you to sell your grain in Charlestown at... hmmm... 75? Maybe 80 if you're greedy. Sure, in terms of profit per barrel sold, it may *seem* a bad deal, when you're used to selling grain at 100 gold/barrel (or more). But selling at minimal prices allows you to outsell the competition, ergo, ALL your produced goods will sell, while theirs will not. This in term means that you'll be able to build as many businesses are necessary to match the consumption of chosen towns - so ALL the goods consumed in those towns will be produced by you. If you build a grain farm and sell grain a 120 gold per barrel, your profit per barrel is very high. But if you sell at 75-80 gold per barrel, you'll have more total profit, even if you sell to the producing town itself - because you'll be able to build *as many* grainfarms as necessary to fill the entire demand of the towns in the area.

The only thing that REALLY bugs one if applying this strategy, is the ridiculous 10-captains limit. The 10-ships per convoy limit is also pretty absurd. I mean, if you come from a game like Patrician III, in which you could stack some 200 ships in a convoy (don't remember how many exactly, maybe it's 256 or something like that) and in which you could look forward to a fleet with hundreds of convoys, this gets very annoying, very fast.

That being said, you are of course right to: You can rake in more profit per barrel if selling to towns that don't produce the given goods. BUT, selling to the very town you produce in is also possible in the above circumstances. Hope that was not to incoherent. :)

Heh, tell me about it. In my latest game, Isabella has a bad habit of consuming ALL of their fish, meaning I can sell the very fish I produce there for 300+/barrel.
BTW, nice treatise, not incoherent at all.
Also, welcome to GOG!

Thank you. I'm glad you liked it. :)
The whole thing would be even easier to set up and maintain, if *somebody* on the design team would have thought it a good idea to make the town-data screen also show the goddamn numbers for local production, as opposed to just consumption. It's a shame, really. This game could have been as good as Patrician, if not for stupid stuff like the convoy limit, or this omission of production data - and other stuff like it.

What is the optimum proportion of the various businesses to keep everyone happy in the whole region? (Port Royale 2)

Awhile ago, I did some calculations and concluded that the number of businesses for each commodity should be about equal. In the case of wood and tile, this would leave a surplus which you need for new buildings. But now I wonder whether this is correct. With approx. 50 business for each, I seem to have chronic shortages especially for luxury products, Of course, staffing businesses with workers increases the population that must be supplied with everything, so if you haven't chosen the right kind of business to build, the situation only gets worse.

Maintaining the right proportion should enable enough of everything to be produced, and any shortages would be a matter of distribution through one's network of convoys. This is a challenge in itself, so that it is not easy to be certain that the wrong mix of businesses is the real problem, rather than failure to transport goods across the map to where they are needed. It's not good having towns, especially towns where you maintain warehouses and businesses, fall into stagnation because of lack of supplies.

Correction: the number of Coffeee, Cocoa, Dye, and Tobacco plantations should be half the number of all the others. Lumber mills and brickmakers could be a little less, too, at least later in the game.

If you check the population of a town against the demand for products, and the production of products, I think you will find that each lumber mill or brickmaker serves about 2909 people, each grain or fruit farm feeds 2180, and each finished-goods plant also supllies 2180. Each raw materials and colonial-goods plantation supplies 4360. However, half the output of a raw-materials plantation is used by a finished-goods plant (assuming equal
numbers of these two types), cutting in half the number of people whose direct needs
it can meet: so we're back to net 2180.

The figure of 30 workers per business is a little deceptive, because of their wives and children. For these purposes, It is simpler to think of a business requiring 120 citizens in all. So, with one plantation for each colonial good and two businesses of every other type, 4360 people can be provided for, with some lumber and bricks left over for further construction . The total population required by these twenty-eight businesses is 3360. The surplus production of every other product should be 29%.

With approximately these ratios of various businesses on the map, not too many soldiers in the towns, and efficient distribution by fleets, shortages should eventually disappear. But it's not working out that way yet for me.

Is my reasoning correct?