Just bought me first Frigate! Does this game like to have a certain number of sailers per cannon, or/and per sail mast+rigging, etc?
I'm going to have at least 3 cannons in each hold, so was thinking 3 sailors per cannon, ten more for other duties, and past that I'd just fill the ship with soldiers...?

Cheers

I've finished this game maybe 20 times since 1995. I'd like to impart some wisdom on newcomers.

You'll start the game with a Fluyt and it's a pretty weak and slow ship compared to others. So at least at the beginning of the game don't get into too many battles and stay around Northern Europe.

You can simply choose England or Portugal (England's better for future opportunities) and do arms runs from Liverpool to Madeira. This will make you enough money to buy a Frigate quickly. Carry passengers around to rank up quickly, and don't turn down "fellow countrymen" to your home port. The first promotion is really easy to get this way.

After you get your Frigate, which is an awesome ship, then you can definitely start getting out of N. Europe. A frigate is very powerful and fast, you can outrun any ship (well, corvettes are faster but if you run from a corvette, it'll stop chasing you before it catches up to you) so there's very little danger of anything happening.

With your Frigate, to make easy money, I recommend going to the new world. Load up on arms (and bring your friends :p) in Boston and New York, then go to Charleston, sell the arms, buy cotton, go back to New York and sell the cotton, and repeat. This I've found is probably the fastest way to make money in this game.

estate bug
 

I'm not getting any offers for estates, despite meeting all the criteria. I figure I must have my estate file missing or something. Cannot find an estate file in the directory. Anyone know what I should be looking for, or how to troubleshoot this?

You need about 350k gold to hand for a small estate, 500k for medium, 700k for large, then the dealer will always appear in your home port's tavern. Once you have it (and if you've already got everything else you need) leave port and re-enter for the promotion.

I have over a million gold and the art. But I keep re-entering my port and still am not offered an estate in the tavern. Not sure what to do.

I'm not sure if this has been pointed out yet, but you can enable digital sound effects + General MIDI (rather than choosing one or the other). All that you have to do is go to the DRIVERS folder and replace the relevant .MDI file with MPU401.MDI. For example, if you're using DOSBox, rename or delete SBPRO2.MDI (which is used by both the SB Pro II and SB 16 settings), make a copy of MPU401.MDI, rename that copy to SBPRO2.MDI and then choose "Sound Blaster Pro 16" in the setup program.