[Pex]

Haven't really had a chance to play this game since I wrote the previous post, but I thought I should reply to this thread anyway.

Originally Posted by fortydayweekend

I had this too, in DosBox - try rolling your mouse to the top/left side of the screen if the bottom/right are inaccessible. It might "reset" it.

Usually all I need to do is save the game, exit to dos(box) and restart it, so it's not such a big problem, just a minor annoyance. It doesn't happen that often either.

Yeah, the default settings suck. I usually set everything to be equal priority - that way it won't try heaving grain halfway across the map to a Mill when there's starving Donkeys and Pigs right next door. You can then tweak this if you want to, or just turn buildings on and off instead.

I'm' putting everything on equal priority as well, though it also means that you need to have at least one raw material production per one building that uses it. The reason I used quotations it that it's not necessarily raw material - I build two iron smeltings, one for armory and one for metalworks.

The other trick is to have a storehouse near your buildings that need the raw materials, to catch the overflow. So the excess grain and ore goes into the storehouse, and then when it's needed it's just a short hop to the smelter or mill or whatever. The raw materials (mines/farms) can be a long way from the storehouse, but the manufacturing buildings should be as close as possible.

Yeah, I've been doing that. Although all that micromanagement tends to annoy me sometimes, it's also necessary to make everything work fine. But...

Make sure that the other storehouses/HQ are set to "not accept" the raw goods. If you've got one "city center" with a storehouse and all of your industry around it, the distribution will be very efficient. On huge maps you might need two centers.

Problem is with harbours. You can tell your harbour not to accept coal if you want to ship that coal to another island. But if you use same raw material in more than one place (as in different islands) that's when it becomes tricky.

Or you could just set one storehouse to "not accept" beer and weapons - it will send all the ones it has to the other storehouse. One at a time, yep, but quicker than reproducing everything :-)

Yep, but again the problem is when harbours come into play. If you set a harbour not to accept something, you won't be able to ship it to a different island. But if you have a harbour full of beer and another full of weapons, AI can't realise that it needs to move one of them to another harbour in order to produce soldiers. Like I said, I solved the problem by actually telling harbour that didn't have beer to 'take it out of stock' and that was the clue for my ships to bring beer there. Funny but efficient.

There's so many little things that can go wrong with expeditions and islands, it's the most annoying part of the game to learn. But if you get it right it will work fine. You have to plan a bit more carefully - do you want the Armory etc on the island, or back on the mainland? And what goods do you set the Harbours to accept or not accept.

Like I said, it only works to a certain level. And planning is possible when you're replaying mission and know exactly where raw materials are, but in reality you often just build one stage at time and sometimes using limitted space you have as efficiently as possible.

But don't get me wrong. It's still a great game. It's just a pitty some of those issues exist and spoil the overall experience sometimes.