Customer Reviews

Patrician III

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As a sometime Ceasar III addict, I can tell you this is not just another city-builder game. You start out as a lowly merchant with limited funds & one or two ships in a hometown of your choosing. You then have to decide what goods to buy, load onto your ship(s), & where to take them to sell. But you have to be careful because the more you buy, the more the price goes up. Conversly, the more you sell, the lower the price drops. After you get some money & clout, you can start building factories, housing for the residents, more ships (four different types) & trading offices in other cities. Some goods require raw materials which you usually have to import from other cities. Others are basic foods which you must provide to the people, or they get angry and leave town, leaving your factories idle. After you move up the ranks of society to Patrician level, you can be elected Lord Mayor & become eligible for missions (founding a city, hunting pirates) which will put you on the track to becoming the next Alderman- leader of the Hanseatic League. Eventually, you will become as rich as Bill Gates, with feets of ships carrying goods all over 1300s Europe. That is, if pirates, plagues & Princes don't bankrupt you.

I really did enjoy the game. This game is addictive, you will be drawn in and forget about the world around you. Picking which cargoes to carry and what price to buy and sell at keeps you engaged constantly. This reminded me of Railroad Tycoon 2 Gold mixed with SimCity or one of the Roman citybuilder games like Caesar 3. If you enjoy slowing building empires, you will enjoy Patrician 3 (P3) as well.

The economic model is simple, but is realistic in function. The basic principal is supply and demand. The city produces commodities and consumes commodities. Your job is to bring items from where they are plentiful to where they are needed. You can build industries to harvest / produce commodities if you can't get them reliably or at the right price. Reputation is also important in the game. You must build your reputation so you can build in other cities, become town mayor, or leader of the Hanseatic League.

The game does have its weaknesses. One of the main gripes is there is no pause button. I literally had to save and exit the game to do anything else. My girlfriend nearly killed me several times for ignoring her while I was trying complete some task or the other. Even in the slowest mode the game still moved too fast to do anything other than step away to go to the bathroom. Another irritation was limitation on automating ship trades only to vessels with captains (captains are rare). I liked the use of the captains as they had special abilities, but thought this should not be linked to automation. The sea battles are overly simplistic. You can sail your ship and fire the guns, but boarding is done by calculation and you have no input. You are also not notified when your ships see pirates and they take no evasive action without your direction. There were many times that I wanted to speed the game up, but this prevented me from doing so. The battles also happened in real time so while you were in the battle you could not control the rest of the game. There are other complaints I won't go into here, but needless to say these detracted from game enjoyment.

Despite the weaknesses, if you like the genre, you will enjoy the game. Replayability is limited (only one map; cities make / need the same things each game) but not nonexistent. You can try to improve on past attempts by making more money, encouraging more grow, or simply completing the mission in less game time. There are several campaign games which shake things up and present interesting challenges too.

My husband and I used to play a much earlier version of this game when we were newlyweds. We were so excited when this new version was released! It's just as much fun, if not more now with the extras and upgrades, as it was "back in the day!"

This is a very good game. But I am not as good a player as I should be and so I find it very challenging. I believe an accomplished player could find this a great, fun game.

The graphics are not as up to date but the complexity of the game is awesome. I love the business and politics aspect of the game.

Excellent game. Enjoyment for hours, time will pass and you will not realize you have been playing this game for several hours. I do not recommend this game if you are like I am, easily distracted from doing chores or studies. Also after a while, you too may have to hide the game disk from your wife so it does not go missing for a while until "honey do's" are completed.

Even though this version isn't much different than the previous, it's a great buy, great game. It's definitely a real-time strategy game, focused on population and wealth building. It can be tricky anticipating and filling the needs of the citizens in the game, but there are plenty of other activities and challenges to keep things interesting.

My computer can't handle the best graphics, which is why I chose this game. That being said, the graphics could be better and more diverse. You see pretty much the same scenes. The game play itself is decent, though, if you like buying and selling things to expand a business.

Only one thing to say, I've brought 5 or 6 of discs. The first ones were from the original makers. So when I seen a new company was putting it out I thought I give it a try,. The reason I brought so many was because all the discs I had wouldn't download properly. All of them stopped at 58 % and then said retry or ignore. I kept trying to retry, but it wouldn't continue. So I press ignore, it finished downloading. When playing the game for long periods{months] and never being able to finished becauseit always stopped and said the discs is faulty. When asking the original company about this there really didn't have an answer. I sent an email to the latest company to put it out Cinamaware and they didn't even answer. [...]

No problem with supplier, received shipment on timely basis. Game play is too complicated to keep interest or desire to play.