Maybe something abnormal is happening, but every town i go in, and every transport convoy i partially loot (i take out the escorts but not the weaponless ships)....never has any hardware. Is there something i'm missing? is there some technique you use to get it?

Hardware is imported from the Old World so the supply is limited to the big ports, and it's also restocked only periodically. Vera Cruz and Havana, for example, will have Old World shipments coming in every once in a while, as will the rest of the Governor's Towns. Those towns are listed on the PDF map.

So, I've been to literally every town, ive ambushed tons of transport conveys going in all directions an i've even followed them. I have never seen hardware. I realize how hardware is brought to these ports, and ive still never seen any. I have about 6 six on automatic trade routes just looking for it, and still nothing.

PR2, I'm guessing?

Whoops, I assumed PR1.

No you were right the first one. Everything you said is true, and I doubt my game is broken. But i still can't find a single piece of hardware or wine, so i can't build anywhere.

If I'm docking at the same time the transport convoy is, sometimes glitchy things happen to me, like my average price paid is set to zero, or the game crashes, so I try not to be there at that time. But I don't usually buy hardware anyway. Building isn't really worth it, and there's rarely enough markup per cargo slot to make it worth hauling.

How late in the game is it? By the later game, 3-4 years, when the AI is flush with cash I've seen hardware pretty slim on the ground. My suspicion is the AI sets a buy order and snags hardware at any price and puts it in his storage. You might try the same wherever you have storage.

Thats sort of what i figured, that it gets gobbled up towards the end game. I've made my millions just through privatering..those poor poor Spanish. I have ships going to every port with a buy order at any price for hardware, as well as my own storage but still no joy. Oh well, life goes on.I was hoping there was some easy way to edit the supply or mod it or something.

If you just want to edit the quantity, my son used a program called Cheatengine to modify his gold in PR2. I assume it will probably work in PR1 -- its just a user-friendly memory editor. My guess is you would have to start a new game and sell hardware one by one in your original storage to find the memory location, then once you have it, load the game you are playing now and see if it uses the same location.

Good luck.