I've just started playing the Port Royale tutorial. I have a question which must be stupid, and after that, there'll be more.

I've been given a map with a Secret Location. Alas, looking at the Sea Chart, this location isn't marked and there's nowhere it might be. Supposedly, this place is between Cartagena and Providence, but these towns aren't shown. Help.

Look at this map - http://tyrenzin.deviantart.com/art/quot-Port-Royale-quot-map-57254446

Thanks for that. It wasn't possible to zoom in on the image in Firefox but it was in Internet Explorer. The instructions say to search the coast between Cartagena and Providence, but doing that, I find nothing. Any suggestions?

Try to send your ship as exactly to the marked location as you can manage, then crisscross around this spot until something happens. You're basically trying to hit the one correct pixel that hides what you're looking for. Sailing along the coast doesn't help, hit the red marker.

If you hold down ctrl while rightclicking to set your target, you can assing more than one waypoint on the route, making some little star pattern there helps to hit the sweet spot eventually.

I don't get it. I worked out exactly what place the map was supposed to show, but when I hang around there, nothing happens. I'm also wondering if anything can be done with the ship wreckage and people you sometimes see floating.

Thanks for the tip about setting waypoints.

Waiting doesn't help, you need to be in the right spot. If you don't mind spoilers now, you should see an english convoi in that place. Your training targets for combat tutorial.

You can pick up floatsam and drowning people in some of ascaron's sailing games, but I really can't remember if its this one - click on them, sail there to find out.

There's an endless succession of English convoys at that place. If I engage one, does that mean I'm doing what I'm supposed to do?

I've only ever seen one there, 3 ships standing still, unarmed and unmanned. Maybe others are travelling through the area, but that isn't why you're there. Do you still have the tutorial text window? It explains how fights work while you try it on those harmless ships. But if you already figured out how to fight just skip it, this is the end of the tutorial anyway.

I had been fighting the convoys automatically, but now I see that fighting manually was the next step of the tutorial.

OK. Next question. I buy goods, but even after clicking on "Fetch from storage" in the "Trade route" options, the goods don't go onto my ship. Who can help?

Did you tell it how many to get from storage? Without a number there I don't think it will do anything.

Maybe thats obvious, but these options only apply if you let the ships run on automated trade routes, not if you want to grab stuff from storage to take along when you manually send your ship elsewhere.

There's a "Town - Storage" option but no "Town - convoy" option. There's nowhere to enter a number. I got around the problem by going to another town.

Next up, I did some trading, selling goods that were marked as scarce, but I lost money. Any idea what's up?

You were trying to trade in a town where you either had no convoi currently, or didn't have that convoi selected. And this indeed isnt the trade route menu, so disregard the numbers thing. You see how much something cost you on the far right of the trade window, if that number is greater than what the town pays you must have bought them where they were even scarcer.

Maybe you used the 10 or 100 at once buttons on top, depleting that place's supply more than you intended? Buy single until you get a feel for how fast prices increase.

The problem was indeed that I hadn't selected the convoy. Many thanks.

As for trading, I hadn't previously bothered to check what the price was prior to selling. I thought it enough that my wares were scarce. Having to check will make trading much more bothersome. If the price is too low, do I just go elsewhere?

If you avoid buying into the red you should be fine in general. Its pretty hard to lose money from trading in this game.
Or maybe you oversold, if a town consumes very little of a good it might be red when you arrive, but selling a whole shipload is far too much and the price will be in oversupply range when you're done.


Go elsewhere or wait, if the town doesn't produce what you want to sell, its stocks will diminish soon and prices go up again. Thats what automated selling from storage is great for, it only sells when prices are good and you can go do other stuff while the computer does the boring number checking.

You say it's hard to lose money from trading in Port Royale, but I'm managing. I tried not buying into the red, but that isn't working. I can never remember the price at which I made a purchase. On the trading screen, you have a purchase price and a selling price, but what's the number to the left?