Ships in Settlers II: Veni Vedi Vici don't transport material to colonies but only move!. What's wrong? Sorry for my bad english.

Is this an installation from original CD? If it is, has it been updated to the latest version (1.51)? There are many bugs with ships in pre-1.51 versions and they don't work perfectly in 1.51 either, it only has less problems.

Ships have a lot of problems.
Try setting all your warehouses except the harbor NOT to accept stone and boards. This gets the material to the warehouse where the ships will pick it up faster. They will still go back and forth a lot while empty.
I did lose one scenario in the Roman campaign because they loaded all my stone onto ships and wouldn't unload it anywhere. I was almost to a Gateway but couldn't build one military building to complete it.
For the Roman campaign in Settlers III I was able to win all the scenarios except one without using ships.

I think you need to unset the "Expedition" mode, which makes ships not prepare for expeditions, but prepare for moving resources between your harbors.

I have the gog version (as everyone else here I guess) so I don't know about older version problems but my ships tend to go from one harbor to another being empty. But they only do that when they actually Follow a ship that really brings resources. I just thought they like to move in packs

I noticed that the ships sit idle a lot, and occasionally move to your first/base harbour when empty, but generally, when something is needed elsewhere, they will carry anywhere from 1 item/man to dozens.
Build 3 or more ships for best results. I seriously doubt more than 6 will be needed, unless you're running everything you can to expand as fast as you can : It's better to turn off the boat builder when one's done, or switch to rowboats for a while, then turn him off. Let the forester's and woodcutters rebuild the forest, then build another ship. (or have 3 or 4 patches of trees/cutters/foresters.

I also have a slight problem (GOG version, 1.51).

During the 4th Roman mission (first mission where you get ships), I've settled the island with iron deposits and made local smelters/armories there. However, I have a huge need for soldiers on main land, but I don't know how I can transport those swords/shields from the iron island back to mainland, where all my beer is (and unloading these items from the Harbors won't load them unto the ships).

On another note, I've raized all my smelters and armories on the iron island, but the ships don't transport the iron ore back to mainland, where I do have smelters/armories (they just sail empty).

Apart from this, I have numerous other questions and I would appreciate a link to a thorough guide (questions such as "how far does a mine gather ore from the mine itself" and essentially all the other details you wouldn't learn by playing).

Thanks :)

IIRC the mine gathers ore from ist own and all adjacent hexes (7 in total).
As for the guide, I used one from one local gaming magazine so I don't know about any online guides since I never looked for them. I don't remember reading about using the ships to transport certain goods, though.

I've played through "on the high seas" a few times (fourth roman mission).

A few tricks to make the ships work nicely:
- never land on your own continent, or make waterways "back" from an island (or the AI may think you like to transport stuff to your islands only to have them rowed back).
- you only need to produce a little wood and food on the iron island. Let the rest be transported to/from your continent. Try using local fish as much as you can for the miners.
- set all harbors to refuse coins, swords, shields and beer.
- have two shipyards producing nonstop until you have enough to make supplies be the bottleneck and not the ships (10 is alright). Just stop or destroy the shipyards when you don't need them.
- make weapons, tools and coins on your main continent.

You can set your main continent harbor to accept iron but then set it to "take out" the iron. This is because Settlers seem to fill up iron melters and other shops to the brim when they take stuff directly from the mines. But from storehouses settlers likes to just trickle one iron and coal whenever the iron melter runs out. Therefore you can use "take out" on both coal and iron to force them to fill your iron melters. Make sure you turn it off again if you get swamped.

Hi there, I have the 10th anniversary edition from gog but even when the ships are loaded with supplies (in Level 3) none of the points on the compass light up so I can't send them out to explore and expand my colonies. Can anyone help please?

suppose your ship or supplies came too late and all possible harbour spots are already taken then.

If you still care to get a fix for this... What I did was reset the priority of good transportation, and then place iron ore at the top. Suddenly my ships started bringing a good amount of iron ore back to the mainland where I needed it.
I also noticed that having a row boat connected to one island kinda annoys the ships as well in how they should act. So just dont do that.

Also, on a final note, I noticed that my soldiers move all over the place instead of filling up the military buildings at the front lines. They go from one harbor to warehouse to headquarters, exit, and just wander around until finally moving to the front lines I had an empty tower at one of the islands right at the frontline to the red enemy. I think that was the problem. But man, these ships should just work flawlessly. Or at least there should be another option that lets you choose goods that you want to be transported to a specific harbor or so.

Anyway. The impossible iron ore problem is fixed that way. good luck.

It seems the problem with endlessly wandering soldiers occurs when have multiple harbors on a continent (more precisely: connected by roads). For me, destroying one of harbors solved this.

So just having 2 harbors in mission 6 is what caused the endlessly wandering soldiers in mission 6. Are there any more missions with ships after 6?

But how do you mean connected to a road.

I had my main harbor going very far into the land with a road but the second harbor the road wasn't connected very far and i got this bug.
The expedition was found the land by just pressing down for the ships i think.
Edit:
Found out that the military settings close to border only set to maximum is the fault in my case after testing the save i had. Guess i should have increased center of country also to make them stay inside the fortress close to the enemy.