ioticus said:
I can't proceed in the Resources Tutorial in the Platinum Edition past the point where the yellow arrow points to the "offer deal" option. How do you get past that?
By the way, the fact that I can't figure out a tutorial doesn't bode well for the rest of the game
I have the original version of HoI, patched up to the latest CORE, and it does the same thing for me, so don't worry. But since it already tells you how to set up convoys, the only other thing you should need to worry about is trading, and I can cover that pretty easily for you.
When you trade, you select which resource you want to trade on the left, and what you want to trade for on the right. Click on the icon to change from coal to steel, rubber, and oil. You must trade at a 1:1, 2:1, 3:1, or 4:1 ratio. You might be able to trade at a higher ratio, but there is no reason to. Basically, if the resource is scarce, whoever is willing to pay more for it will get it, and the tiebreaker for that goes to the first person to offer it at that rate.
Coal and steel are usually always available on the market, so you can trade at a 1:1 for that. Oil is rarer, and may need to be bought at a 3:1 or even a 4:1 ratio. Rubber is the rarest, and will almost always need to be purchased at 4:1, unless you get a 3:1 bid in within the first couple weeks of play. It doesn't matter what you trade for it, a 3:1 coal-rubber is treated the same as a 3:1 steel-rubber.
Remember that coal can be converted into oil and oil into rubber, so trading rubber for coal is probably not a good idea unless you really, really need it and you have no other source (and you have lots of spare rubber for some reason, like if you're Brazil or the Netherlands). Because of how flexible coal is, it is the most important resource in the game. If you have enough of it, you won't have to worry about oil or rubber, but steel will still be important, since it can't be converted or converted to.
One very important thing that a newbie needs to know is that when you go to war (it doesn't matter how, or what the circumstances or state of the war), your trade will dry up. You will still lose 100% of the resources you are trading away, but you'll only gain about 10% of the resource you traded for. Only continue the trade if you really have nothing else to do with your excess resources. If a trade deal goes red, then that means that the trade didn't go through; either because there wasn't enough of that resource to go around, and your offer wasn't good enough, or because you ran out of resources to trade.
Do you have any other questions? Are the other tutorials working out OK? You don't need to complete this tutorial to go through the others, BTW.
And if you're worried about trading, play as Britain or France, as they have tons of resources and don't even need to trade. Well...maybe you shouldn't play France until you get a little more experienced. They're fun, but in their own way.
