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I'm selling tropical fruit from Cape Town to Salvador, but Im losing money due to port charges. Anyone have ideas for better routes?

[another_guest]

Very early in the game, when you don't have much cash on hand to buy more expensive cargo, this is imo one of the very best routes:
Sydney - Tokyo, hauling iron (or what was it again, grey commodity costing about $1150-1200 per ton) from Tokyo, taking coal on the way back.

However, if you're aiming to get a high "ranking", visit ports in other continents, as that seems to influence your score significantly.

Heya folks.
Great pages for us nostalgic people

Downed and played Ocean Trader just now, had to sue that Dosbox to play it. Worked fine, but the game are incredible slow. It takes a few seconds before it changes the screen. Are there any way to improve the speed in the dosbox, so the game will work faster?

[Icewolf]

Did you set up DosBox correctly?

[another_guest]

And increasing the number of CPU cycles improves the game speed (I seem to remember about 12000 worked fine for me, just to give you an idea). Note that there's an optimum for each computer; if you increase the number of cycles beyond that, performance will grow worse again.
If that doesn't work, try skipping a few frames as well (1-2 usually don't hurt the gameplay but make things go quite a bit faster).

How do you do the contracts? i mean i accept the contracts and then what? am i suppose to then BUY the cargo and then go to the destingation and sell it in port as per normal?


Great game though

It depends: there are 2 types of contracts:

1) Get a certain amount of a certain good at a port by a fixed date. In that case you have to buy it, store it there in own or rented warehouses. You get a fixed price per tonne. You can get the goods from anywhere you want.

2) 1 load of a certain good needs to be transported from a fixed destination to a certain port. You'll get a fixed amount of $ if you do this in time. You don't need to buy the goods, you get them.

-another_guest in Moscow

kewl thanx that is what i was after

I managed to get a above average tanker for 25 million. It was a little slower than usual, by about 10 kps, and had 83,000 unit of stuff. they usually go for 60 million. However, it only had 50% health. Overall, it was a good deal. So, buying used CAN give you great deals.

[another_guest]

True, early in the game it gives you faster access to larger ships.
But with only 50% of health, you'll spend a lot of cash and time to repair it... And not only the size matters, so does the speed (15 knots instead of 10 will almost give you 50% more revenue)
One last point: 83,000 units of oil will require about 7 million $ to fill the tanker, so at all times make sure that you can use those large ships you buy to their full advantage: it's not worth pumping your last cent into an even larger ship if you don't have money left to buy cargo...