This guide discusses the cla*ses available to play with their pros and cons as applied to the Netherlands campaign in Port Royal 4. From there it provides a detailed walkthrough of the tasks required to complete the Netherlands Campaign and some tips and tricks to make doing so easier. **Warning Spoilers Ahead**
 
 

About this guide

This guide will take you step by step through the Netherlands campaign in Port Royal 4. If you have yet to complete the Spanish campaign you can follow my guide Spanish Campaign Walkthrough – [steamcommunity.com]  for help with defeating the first campaign so you can unlock this one.
 
 
As you will have defeated the Spanish campaign to unlock and play this one I will take some liberties that you will know the basics on how to set up trade routes, buy ships, hire captains, take part in battles etc. If you need help with any of those things there are other guides available.
 
 
The Netherlands campaign begins on January 1, 1622 and continues through May, 1627. If you fail to complete any objectives by their due date you will lose the campaign and have to start over from the beginning or a save game.
 
 
The Dutch West India Company was formed last year in 1621, the viceroy has tasked you with helping secure the future of the Netherlands through trade a thus begins your tasks in the campaign.
 
 
 

Character cla*ses Pros & Cons

The Merchant cla*s traits

 
 

 
During this campaign you will be required to almost exclusively trade or build businesses which make this the obvious choice for the Netherlands campaign.
 
 
For much of the campaign Spain will be at war with the Netherlands. Trading with a hostile nation does have disadvantages such as being attacked but not being able to trade with Spain due to war is a major disadvantage. Spain controls about half the map and you can still trade with them if you pick Merchant.
 
 
As a Merchant you won’t have to worry about trade licenses, every cla*s can trade freely with the Netherlands colonies but they have just 6 ports to start the game other cla*ses will have to pay to trade elsewhere.
 
 
You will not be required to fight at all during this campaign. That said you can get a letter of marque or attack as a pirate if you wish. Pirate attacks will lower your fame making the campaign that much harder to complete.
 
 

The Buccaneer cla*s traits

 
 

 
This is a good choice for cla*s during this campaign, the bonus discount for “Letters of Marque” will only apply once as there is only one declaration of war during the Netherlands campaign.
 
 
Starting with a bonus of 5 fame does help early on in the campaign and will be a theme of the campaigns it is a huge and always useful bonus which makes Buccaneer a very strong cla*s.
 
 
The penalty for piracy can be completely avoided by not attacking ships from nations your not at war with. If you want to be an active pirate just pick another cla*s. You will be at war with Spain for most of the campaign just buy your discounted “Letters of Marque” and go hunt Spanish ships they own half the map and are easy to find.
 
 

The Pirate cla*s traits

 
 

 
The obvious choice if you want to be an actual pirate but piracy won’t help you complete the campaign. You would be better off not being an active pirate but to each their own. Starting with a pirate Barque is nice to have a ship with guns but there is ample time to build up a military fleet though one is not required during the Netherlands campaign. If you want to go pirate and micro manage your ship to avoid military you can do so. As a pirate you also start with a random captain though if they are any good is subject to luck you can start over again and again until you get a captain you like.
 
 
Crew cost 50% less is easily one of the best perks of being a pirate. If you plan to have lots of military vessels with lots of crew (not required for this campaign) this is a discount that keeps on giving on a large warship convoy you can save anywhere up to 7,000 gold or more per day that savings adds up quick.
 
 
In the Netherlands scenario there is a ton of trade and business building required tasks to complete the campaign. As a pirate you will pay a lot of extra gold to build businesses up for the campaign tasks.
 
 

The adventurer cla*s traits

 
 

 
Gaining experience faster is a nice perk for your captains, you won’t be required to fight any battles during the Netherlands campaign so your captains levels will be generally irrelevant.
 
 
Being able to order ships you have defeated in battle will present some interesting opportunities in the campaign such as being able to build Spanish warships that would otherwise be unavailable. It’s a neat perk that can be useful.
 
 
Having a 20% penalty for boarding is huge in my book, it is my preferred way to fight so a penalty here is not one I look for. It can be offset by captain skill but I would rather that skill just be a bonus rather than negate a penalty.
 
 

Conclusion

 
As with all the campaigns each cla*s is a viable option with some having a bonus or penalty that will make them harder for the campaign but you should easily be able to complete the campaign with any of the cla*ses.
 
 
Merchant The bonus to trade is always a welcome one and being able to trade with Spain even at war is very useful since they own half the map during this campaign you will be forced to trade with Spain and though you will receive a special captain who can do this for you while at war the merchant is able to make these trades anytime.
 
 
Buccaneer One of the strongest starting cla*ses due to the bonus fame points. You will only benefit once from the “Letters of Marque” bonus in this scenario and can easily avoid the piracy penalty.
 
 
Pirate The discount for crew is huge but being viewed as a pirate could be a problem especially if you actively engage in piracy against the countries other than Spain. Any pirate attack will result in loss of fame. The fame is required for the campaign so I see no reason to go full pirate here. Pick pirate, play as a privateer the Netherlands is at war with Spain almost the whole campaign so get a discount on crew leave actual pirate attacks for free play sandbox mode. You will pay a huge penalty on building many businesses during the campaign.
 
 
Adventurer Leveling captains is not required during this campaign so that bonus has very little impact. Buying ships you have defeated gives access to some cool ships but the penalty to boarding makes capturing ships much harder.
 
 
 

Objective 1 tasks due by: Jun,1622 – Dec,1622

The Netherlands campaign begins on January 1, 1622 the Netherlands colonies occupy only six towns. You will start in the town of Crooked Island which is located far to the north east on the map. You are appointed as the administrator of this town which means you are in full control of what buildings and businesses are placed you can even buy out businesses that are owned by the AI and once you own them move them around in the town.
 
 
When you start the game you are given 300,000 gold, three convoys which has three total ships. The Netherlands is already at war with Spain who control about half the map. To start the game you are given these objectives.
 
 

 
Like the other campaigns the Netherlands starts with tasks to build your trade empire and your source of gold so you can complete later tasks. You are directed to trade with every Dutch town of which there is only six. The other two tasks happen almost automatically as you complete the first one, just buy and sell stuff and deliver the colonial goods to Na*sau.
 
 
You are given an entire year to complete this task which is far longer than needed to get started early on the next set of tasks. If you picked any cla*s other than merchant for this campaign you will still get the bonus of being able to trade with all Dutch towns so you can complete these tasks without paying for a trade license however you will have to buy trade licenses for every other port going forward.
 
 
 

Objective 2 tasks due by: Apr,1623 – Sep,1623

Even with minimal effort you should have completed the first objective within a couple of months. This should leave you with a year or more to complete the next set of tasks. While the next set of tasks is building up your businesses and trade empire I suggest if you have not done so at this point to explore the map and unlock some of the other nations towns so you can begin trading with them soon. The tasks you must complete for this objective are as follows:
 
 

 
 
 

Objective 3 tasks due by: Dec, 1623

By this time we have built some businesses up and have a solid workforce. For my game I built the required businesses in Crooked Island and some additional cotton in Cat Island. Those new cotton fields will help me increase my colonial goods deliveries to Na*sau which goes along with our next set of tasks.
 
 

 
For this set of tasks your colonial deliveries should get taken care of automatically by trade routes you have setup, If not get those colonial goods (Cotton, Tobacco, Coffee, and Cacao) to Na*sau.
 
 
Andros is where we need to produce our Cacao so just get those fields built there and these tasks will be taken care of.
 
 
 

Objective 4 tasks due by: Mar,1624 – Jul,1624

These sets of tasks continue building our trade network but also start focusing on supply chains and efficiency. Until this point in any of the campaigns we have never had to worry about the efficiency of our production businesses. To ensure your getting the most out of your production be sure when building to check placement bonus on businesses.
 
 
Some businesses get a bonus for being a large farm which just means four farms that are adjacent to each other. Other buildings get a bonus by being next to a production building or within so many tiles of one.
 
 
Let’s get started in building up these businesses to complete these tasks.
 
 

 
 
To meet these tasks you will need to utilize some concessions. To this point you may or may not have spent any depending on where you used yours you will need to spend up to three fame to unlock the forge.
 
 

Having trouble reaching 110% efficiency?

 
First make sure your forge is near a coal mine, then make sure a residence is close by. If both of these are true your forge will look like this.
 

 
notice the green house and the green barrel indicating this forge is getting a bonus from each of these things. So everything looks right but I am still short of 110% so what gives?
 
 
The second issue is people have to actually be living in the district for the bonus to count. You will still see the green house icon but the bonus doesn’t get applied until someone lives there. If you hover over the residential district you will see the green house bonus icon on the forges near it but in the bottom left you will notice “It is currently uninhabited”.
 

 
 
How to go about fixing this issue of currently uninhabited. There are several reasons the hex is uninhabited and they are.
 
 
Just takes time There may not be anything wrong at all, if you just built the residential buildings it takes a little time for people to move in, just wait for it.
 
 
You are hard capped on population This can happen for one of two reasons. If you have yet to build a small church your population is capped at 4,000 people. If your at this cap and you build a new residential area nobody can move into it.
 
 
The second issue is you are hard capped on population because there are not enough jobs to grow your town larger. This one is less likely as you likely just built the forges and thus created jobs but your population is capped at number of jobs times four. So if your town has say 700 jobs the hard cap max population would be 2,800.
 
 
I would bet your issue is in order.
 

• Missing the supply and residential bonus on every forge.
• Population cap likely from missing small church.
• Just need more time.
• Jobs hard cap on population.

Objective 5 tasks due by: Aug,1624 – Sep,1624

We are well on the way to building your trade empire but the next set of tasks are going to make sure that empire is YOURS The next tasks are:
 
 

 
To complete this task you just have to buy out the coal and wood production in your town of Crooked Island. You are already the administrator of this town so just throw some money at the competition and you can make all the production here belong to you.
 
 
 

Objective 6 tasks due by: Nov,1624 – Dec,1624

The next set of tasks are for increasing the efficiency of your coal and wood production in Crooked Island the tasks are as follows:
 
 

 
To complete this task I decided to move my newly purchased buildings to a different location in town which will cost you about 2,000 gold per building, this is optional you maybe able to complete the task without doing so depending on how you placed your buildings and where the AI decided to put the ones you bought out. I like my town to be clean so I moved buildings around.
 
 
To get the bonus to production and reach the goals you will have to have your sawmills grouped together in four for the large farm bonus, same with your coal mines. Additionally you will need a toolmaker near enough each sawmill and coal mine to grant the bonus to them. It is no longer required to have the bonus from the Forges next to your coal mines but you can get a bonus by having them setup that way.
 
 
 

Objective 7 tasks due by: Mar,1625

The next two objectives are to help supply our English allies at Port Royale. For this task you will be supplying wood and metalware.
 
 

 
There are several steps you should check for this task.
 
 

Check Port Royal productions

 
The campaign does have some randomization to resources so be sure to check what Port Royal is producing to make sure it is not wood or metalware. If they produce either you may have to adjust your trade routes. If you have an automatic trade route buying these commodities here you may never complete the task.
 
 

Manual or Automatic trade

 
As long as Port Royal is not producing either resources (And you don’t have an automatic trade route buying these resources from there it’s very possible these tasks will complete automatically from your trade routes depending on how you have them set up this will happen quickly or slowly.
 
 
You can do some manual trade routes and run these supplies to Port Royal yourself to finish it very quickly at any time you like.
 
 

Special Note

 
Several days after you get these tasks your viceroy should provide a couple Traders Fluytes in your home town of Crooked Island be sure to check the light house for some free ships. These are awesome trade ships capable of twelve knots and holding 800 cargo each.
 
 
If you take the requested cargo to Port Royal too quickly you will take a loss on the cargo but complete the task quicker. In my game I had over two years to complete this task so I spaced this out over a few months to not get as bad of prices.
 
 
To speed up the process with automated trade routes you can increase the priority of the goods in Port Royal as well as set minimum prices.
 
 
 

Objective 8 tasks due by: Jun,1625

Now that we have finished supplying our ally England with goods the viceroy wants us to turn our attention back to colonial goods. As you can see these tasks all focus on colonial goods, and lots of them. We have to have ten businesses each for the production of Cotton, Cacao and Tobacco.
 
 

 
I was already swimming in cotton and more than double my supply is going to give us lots of cotton to work with.
 
 
The good news is these tasks are super easy to complete, just build farms to produce the goods required. You can place them to get bonus production but these tasks don’t require that. The Netherlands campaign is all about production and efficiency along with trade so it would be best if you tried to be efficient.
 
 
 

Objective 9 tasks due by: Oct,1625

Now that you have built the required production facilities of colonial goods (or way more than needed by the viceroy) we move to our next objective. We are going to take over the metal and metalware production business. These tasks are for you to buy out the competition, easy enough throw some money at them and your done.
 
 

 
When I received these tasks one of mine instant completed, depending on if you have been buying any businesses you can auto complete this entire task upon receiving it.
 
 

Tips

 
The Netherlands does not require anywhere near enough colonial commodities in a single month to support the amount of production facilities they just tasked you to make. Adjust or create new trade routes to distribute the Cacao and Tobacco to the other Netherlands colonies as well as the English and the French.
 
 
Set up cloth and clothing production to take advantage of the huge amount of cotton your now producing then distribute Cotton, Cloth, Clothing to all of the Netherlands, French, and English colonies. You will likely find yourself just swimming in cotton otherwise.
 
 
 

Objective 10 tasks due by: Nov,1625 – Dec,1625

The next set of tasks involve control over metal and metalware in the Spanish colonies. The new tasks we are given are:
 
 

 
To complete this task you are given access to the captain John Hawkins as well as a free captain concession so you can hire him. He has the captain skill “Blockade Runner” which you will need to complete these tasks.
 
 
Technically if you picked the Merchant cla*s you wouldn’t need him but there is a task to hire him and a*sign him to a convoy so everyone has to pick him up. Any cla*s other than Merchant will need him to trade with the Spanish colonies.
 
 
Once you have hired John Hawkins and a*signed him to a convoy head to the Spanish colonies so you can buy up their coal, metal and metalware. As the resources are somewhat randomized just use the search feature to find Spanish ports who sell the goods your looking for.
 
 

Tips

 
If you have never used the search option before you will find it on the top left side of the screen next to the game speed button. It looks like a magnifying gla*s.
 
 

 
Once you click on the search window you will see a list of all the available products in the game. Clicking on any product such as coal will do two things. First on the town map at the bottom right of your screen any towns which produce the selected resource will be marked in a bright pink color. Second, when you are sailing around and or looking at the map with the search open each town that produces that resource will have an orange colored highlight of the town.
 

 
 

Note

 
Only towns you have found on the map are displayed by the search function. If you have not explored the map to find the towns you will not be able to search for what they produce.
 
 
 

Objective 11 tasks due by: Mar,1626 – May,1626

The next set of tasks is to build up our control of the metalware industry and keep draining Spain of metal. To complete these tasks:
 
 

 
You are going to need to build a bunch more Metalware at Crooked Island. Forges receive a bonus from being near a coal mine and a residential building. It might be beneficial to move some buildings around. Though this task does not require a high production rate you can build less production if your getting more out of each building.
 
 
To complete the purchases of metal from Spain just send John Hawkins back to their ports and buy up the metal there. If your the merchant cla*s you can send any convoy to make the purchase or even setup an automatic trade route to do it for you. Just be sure your net already selling metal to Spanish colonies as those sales will count against you for completing this task.
 
 
 

Objective 12 tasks due by: Jul,1626 – Sep,1626

Now that we have robbed Spain of metal and built up our own production we have forced a truce upon Spain. Our next task will be to sell a large amount of Metalware to Spain to help ease the shortage we just helped to create. You have to sell 1,000 Metalware to Spanish colonies by July of 1626 to complete this task.
 
 

 
You can either go about completing this task manually or you can setup an automatic trade route to distribute the goods.
 
 
Once you have completed the task of distributing to Spanish colonies you will be tasked with more Metalware production and distributing wood to France.
 
 

 
I already had an automatic trade route distributing wood to France so I just let this one automatically complete. If you don’t have such a trade route you can either set one up or complete the sales manually.
 
 
To complete the Metalware production step your going to need to build some more production facilities. You can place them anywhere you like but if you keep them with coal production you can get a bonus to your production.
 
 
 

Objective 13 tasks due by: Dec,1626 – Mar,1627

There is now peace between all nations so your free to trade to who you like. Our next task involves creating a production line for furniture and you also have to have a 110% production efficiency. Again they want us to build in Crooked Island so you may have to rearrange some buildings to get your efficiency up.
 
 

 
If you have yet to buy the concession for furniture you will have to do that before you can begin. It will only require one point as it’s right next to metalware which we have already unlocked.
 
 
Either just before or right about the time you complete delivering furniture to Spain you will be informed of a drought that has caused a shortage of grains and corn in Spanish colonies. Towns south east of Belize are particularly impacted and you need to send shipments to the Spanish colonies. Note that if you are buying either grain or corn from Spanish colonies this will prevent or slow your progress toward these tasks.
 
 

 
 

Tip

 
To meet the manufacturing goal you will have to build at least 9 furniture production carpenters. I would suggest you build either four or five so you can easily place them near your sawmills so you can achieve the efficiency goal, from there you won’t need all the production bonus if you choose not to build this production line optimally.
 
 
You may want to consider manual trade routes for the grain and corn to Spanish colonies it can take some time to move that much food depending on what your supply chain looks like.
 
 
 

Tips to make the campaign easier

The Netherlands campaign is all about trade, production and efficiency. None of the tasks are particularly hard or complicated but here are some tips to help smooth your journey.
 
 
Don’t choose the pirate cla*s You will feel the pain of the building penalty all campaign long. You will build many buildings and fighting is completely optional during this campaign.
 
 
Production efficiency isn’t continuously required If a task requires you to meet a production efficiency say 110% you only have to accomplish that at one time when it is required. After you have met that goal you are no longer required to keep the efficiency so feel free to move buildings around if needed.
 
 
Crooked Island is a busy place During the campaign you will be required to build production facilities for coal, wood, metalware and furniture. During my campaign I also put sugar and rum here so the place was packed with buildings. Plan accordingly for efficiency as you will have to have various buildings near each other for the bonus to efficiency.
 
 
Colonial commodities You will be tasked with building a huge number of the tobacco, cocoa and cotton commodities, far more than Netherlands needs per month. Keep on top of the distribution of these you may have to trade manually or configure an automatic trade with advanced settings for quantity and minimum prices to keep your stock controlled.
 
 
Bonus for being near residential buildings Some production facilities receive a bonus to production based on a residential building being nearby. Keep in mind people need to be living in the residential building to receive the bonus, you will still see the green house icon for the bonus even if nobody lives in the residential district but the bonus will not be applied.
 
 

 
 
Here we come to an end for the Netherlands Campaign Walkthrough – Port Royale 4 guide. I hope this guide has helped you with your gameplay. If you have something to add to this guide or believe we forgot some information to add, please let us know via comment! We check each comment manually by approving them!