![]() You can play to be nothing but a rich trader by the end of Patrician, respected in your home port, but the ambitious merchant will settle for nothing less than the role of alderman, elected leader of the entire Hanseatic League. It funded invasions, and created or toppled rulers with ease. ![]() Its favor could turn a military defeat into victory. Its ban could starve a people to their knees. (Enough to make Fletcher Pratt, one of America's great historians, refer to the Hansa in distaste as "Movement and monopoly, civilization in terms of creature comfort.intellectually sterile, politically acute, militarily formidable.") But the point is that the Hansa employed cutting edge technologies in the new field of extensive international trade to ruthlessly control its world, and did so with great effectiveness. They had many other ideas, some of them quite nasty by modern standards, for gaining riches. But the Hansa understood an important modern principle better than any of their European contemporaries: wealth translated directly into power, something that would later be the making of such Renaissance superpowers as the Republics of the Netherlands and Venice, and in modern times, Japan. ![]() At this point there still were no banks, no paper money or theory of bimetallism, nor had the Netherlands developed stock and bond markets in fact, there wasn't a Netherlands. Complex lines of fealty meant that the ruler of a province might hold it under an acknowledgement of allegiance to his own baby son, who in turn could own through a different line of inheritance a tract of countryside in which fealty went the other way.įrom out of this mess, the Hansa (or Hanseatic League) evolved: a series of "free" cities (actually ruled by local plutocracies of burghers) in different parts of Northern Europe that might be called proto-capitalist. The map of much of Western and Central Europe was a patchwork quilt in which a given Duke might own a town here and two others some distance to the north, and a piece of forest of undetermined extent far to the east, with nothing in between. Rulers hadn't yet evolved national boundaries, nor developed national myths designed to whip up patriotic feelings that kept citizens in line. During the 13th century ACE, nationalism in Europe was a nascent concept. What, you don't think bankers and lawyers work for the Dark Side of the Force? Starting Out Patrician III is all about the doings of the Hansa, but who the hell were the Hansa, anyway? Let's spend a moment briefly checking out the realworld on which our game is based. ![]() And by the time we finish, I think you'll agree that this title is a must for strategy lovers who prefer their combat using weapons of shrewdness, discernment and greed, rather than iron. In this review, we'll be taking an in-depth look at the latest release in the Patrician series, paying especial attention to its wealth of gameplay detail. ![]()
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March 2023
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