I'm currently playing Dragon Age: Origins again, but after I finish that up I'll have to decide between Fallout and Icewind Dale; both would be a virgin playthrough.

My play style is the opposite that - I've reached millions in gold many times without any buildings (except the starting trade center). I earn enough from trading between ports to keep expanding my fleet. For a "pure trade" style of play, the scenarios seem forced. They contained goals for buildings or production, I think. How many scenarios does it take before Patrician III scenarios get good, in your view? I might give the campaign another try.

The hardest (self-imposed) challenge for me was not using my starting boat. I started with low starting gold, dismissed the snaika crew, and used trading in my home town to build up gold. That is both rough and requires patience. You have to be able to predict the flow of prices - of overstocked goods that will run out and be worth more, and wait for the opportunity.

Well... if your play style is "pure trade, without building" I wouldn't advise playing any campaign/scenario missions, building is a must in most of them. If you, however, want to widen your horizons, it would be best to play sandbox mode and play a bit with buildings first before starting campaign/scenario. Believe me, buildings are a lot more complicated than it may seem at the beginning.

First of all you cannot star building to early. You will have to pay wages to your workers and they are quite big. Furthermore you have to pay them regularly and more often then you are able to trade. Don't get me wrong, it's still profitable but it may happen that you have spend ~10000 for wages first and then you will earn ~15000 (or even more!) out of it. But you need this 10000 in cash first so don't build anything before you acquire reasonable reserves.

Focus on high-end products first then build complementary facilities to aid them. Example: find a city where people are experts in creating iron goods. Build a proper factory there. You'll have to supply them with pig iron manually but you'll be able to make a decent profit nevertheless (just remember about my previous point). Then after some time, when you are rich enough, find a place with expert miners so that you can produce pig iron yourself. It won't be the same city so you'll have to arrange the transport but in this way the production of your iron goods will be dirty cheap! You'll never be able to buy them at that price anywhere! And then your profit from it will be pure awesome!

Some businesses are not really profitable but extremely useful in certain situations. For example you won't earn much with bricks, timber and hemp but you can use them to please a prince and reduce your expenses when you build something else (especially if that's a new city you were assigned to build!)

The side effect of building businesses is that they attract more people and the population of a city grows rapidly. You can imagine how much you can earn from rents in this situation (remember to build a few houses before you expand the city). But the biggest advantage is that the bigger a city is the higher are demands. So by building a lot of factories you can influence the market. You can get tens of thousands in a very short time just by feeding those crowds (of course we are talking about the food you produce yourself, perhaps in another city).

That's just a few examples, I may even say it's the tip of the iceberg. Building part is at least as complex as the trade itself in Patrician III and I can wholeheartedly encourage you to give it a try.

Dead Rising 2, it's average and the time limit stress is.. Stressing but I want to save the little girl Katey now.. :(

I do prefer pure trade over building management. I tried running businesses in Patrician III years back, but I found businesses more of an annoyance compared to trading. When they lack workers, they slow down. When they lack raw materials, they shut down. And with all that effort, the goods can be produced by a competitor who drives prices down. Ultimately if you make goods, the profit comes from trading when I've played.

I've never had a problem keeping cities happy - they're usually "very happy" and I can feed the poor to grow the city. But come to think of it, I've never tried for 10,000 population. :) Maybe I'll aim for that. It's especially within reach using the new "default on loan, impound" situation where I tend to wind up with lots of grain.

Busy playing Fallout and Flight of the Amazon Queen

only CS:GO sadly, don't have much time anymore

Playing Witcher at the moment, and loving every second of it. I can't believe it took me so long to get to it (damn back catalog and just generally being a slow player), but the wait was worth it. This game is oozing class.

Just finished playing Divinity II: Director's Cut for the first time. It seems fun even though the traditional "ranger" build seems way underpowered, but to be fair, I'm only level four right now.

Overlord, thanks to Gyrocoptor! First time playing a game of this type and it's a lot of fun.

Currently playing The Witcher,Duke Nukem 3D Atomic edition,Fallout:Tactics and Treasure Island(which is surprisingly fun) These 4 games alone have made me realize what I have been missing in PC games...the future is looking mighty good.

The Forum. With my F5 Refresher controller.

Slogged through the rest of MoH:AA last night. The sniper missions kill the fun for me, along with the super-eyesight and some AI accuracy issues. Granted, this was early in the genre for that type of AI so I should cut it some slack. The action parts, where you're using the SMG, pistol, etc, are much better.

So hey, gonna move on to the next in the series. Heh. I bought it way back when but don't recall ever finishing.

Just finished the main quest in Scribblenauts Unlimited and now completing all shards/starites. Also playing some XCOM EW, still attempting C/I.

A good game, but for me it was never the amazing game others consider it. Mostly because all the issues that you commented, it´s a game without AI, is like shooting ducks on an amusement park. Still enjoyable, but far away to be "the supreme experience", not even back when it was released.

And I never understood how people was impressed by the "Omaha Level" that is just sitting down from cover to cover fighting a time script, nothing else, it show us how few people know and care about "gameplay". BTW the expansions are far better.