The ultimate cheat would be to cheat the political advancement to remove the 30 day requirement. Than it wouldn't take a year to become the Duke.
If anyone can figure out how to do that please PM me.
Otherwise, I've already tried adding thousands of storehouses, and it costs more money in daily maintenance than it's worth.
It's actually cheaper to let the game automatically rent the storage space for you. It's actually pretty ridiculous, but I think I've done the math right. To wit: Each storehouse you own costs 200 in daily maintenance. So, if you have 1,000 storehouses, it costs 200,000 a day just to maintain. Each storehouse holds 1,000 barrels, so you could hold up to 1 million barrels in 1,000 storehouses.
However, if you rent, the rate is only 10% of your barrels per day. Therefore, if you had 1 million barrels of goods, it would only cost you 100,000 a day to rent the storage. In fact, now that I think about it... that's half off the price! ...What's more, is that when renting, you only pay for precisely what you're using, and not for empty space, as you would with storehouses.
It's pretty crazy if you think about it. But, the goal is to find out the best way to be profitable. Cheating to acquire resources is in aid of that goal. It's pointless to cheat a financial simulation if you're still not making a profit.
Yet, it's interesting to realize that it's not always easy to maintain an empire, certainly not without careful money management, and good planning.
The ideal strategy would be to most efficiently get resources to the cities that have a need, or don't produce those goods entirely.
Instead of having a single hub, and sending convoys to untold distances... finding regional city pairs that meet each others needs is more efficient at producing a profit.
Ultimately, if you had a hub in every single city, you could control the needs of the market, by building hospitals, schools or businesses... or, even demolishing businesses, all of which drives the population up or down, which drives the amount of goods used and needed.
Then you could basically have every city trade with every other city, and eliminate redundant routes, i.e. routes that send a need that is filled by a closer city. If you own all the cities, than theoretically you can control the profit.
However, I'm not so sure that the game has enough scarcity programmed into the design. It's supposedly a perfect simulation, matching every 1 business for every 100 citizens. Even though those cities never use all those goods, the idea is that every city has enough other deficiencies to rely on several other cities.
So, while there is a perfect formula to trade with zero loss in the game, other than travel time and pirates... I doubt that it is a realistic simulation of the scarcity that is created by the multinational corporations we have in the modern real world.
Also, the game would require entirely too much micromanagement to ever maximize profits. For example, if a city has no goods, they will buy for up to 185% of the going price, from your warehouse steward, on Normal difficulty. But, each day that the need lessens, the only way to maximize profit while keeping goods flowing out is to lower the percentage slider every day or two. Basically, the game needs an individual slider for every single item, with a way to have it go up or down based on demand.
The only way to do simulate that is to have a hub at every city, and only keep the minimum amount of the items that the city needs in each warehouse. Otherwise the city will stock up and the price goes down.
Anyway, I'm off on a tangent, but basically the game would require entirely too much time to play correctly, i.e. maximize daily profits. Who has time to adjust the stewards slider in every single warehouse from day to day? Let alone all the time it would take to micromanage each route for cost effectiveness. It's too much like work. I should be getting paid big money to play this game.
It would be a great learning tool if they would bring it up to date with the modern economy. Fortunately, back in those times, excessive dilution of currency wasn't reportedly as rampant.
[Edited by tlv, 10/1/2013 1:59:49 PM]