Advice #5 - Your Port![Economics Advice]

The Port - the most important trade structure you have. Learning how to use it is quite helpful...

On the left sidebar are three things:

The thing you know, the upgrade box. Cost, time, and option to upgrade, along with the choice to demolish.

Below it is a new thing; the box that tells you how much each boat can hold, which is 500 resources. Then is loading speed. This tells you how many goods are loaded per minute. The higher this is, the better. You make this larger by upgrading the port. The bigger your port is, the more you can do with it. These are the things you can do with a larger port:

• Quicker resource evacuations when under attack
• Quicker trade

Two things, it may seem small, doesn't it? But let's say you judge the size of your army, and it may live, may lose, but you realize the resources are too important to get out. Because you invested in a large port, you manage to evacuate thousands of resources, and possibly it all. Know what that means? You saved resources!! That means you did things quick and efficiently, and that's what I'm trying to tell you this whole time, efficient-ness is necessary!

Move over, and you can see how many cargo boats you have, but more importantly, how much it costs. Below it, you can see incoming traders, your traders leaving, and and ships loading.

Now that you know the basics of that, now we'll get down to the cargo boat.

Does it ever feel like you never have enough cargo boats? We can fix that!

Say a building costs 1100 wood. It is about 20 minutes away, but you have other trades to do. It produces 100 wood per hour, and currently has 60 wood in town. Should we send 1100 wood, or 1000 wood? For that tiny 100, which would narrow down to 40 (which because of resource intake will probably lower to 0 very soon), your wasting a cargo boat! Why don't we go for the 1000 instead? 2 instead of 3. Know your empire, and don't use the bar. Type in how much you are gonna send, the bar is evil. Mwahaha it says, but you will not fall to its temptation. Don't be lazy - type in the number.

So if you had 5 trips nationwide that were like this, you could have saved 2500 cargo room (5 boats) just by using common sense and efficient-ness. Thats an entire shipment that could be used doing something productive! By typing, you can save lots of time!

Also, at your trading post, type in how much you will buy. The same deal happens here as it does at the port, save boats!

Hopefully now you will be a much more efficient trader, realizing the mechanics of your port.