lly

Since the manual links don't work at the moment and this took a while to work out, a brief overview of workshops:

First, you must own a warehouse in the city (you start with one in London and can buy more there and in other cities at auction or through the property clerk at the various town halls).

Once you do, various master workmen will appear at the city's inn. They will usually blow you off until you are respected in the town (increasing respect may come from side missions but may be purchased by investing somewhere between £10k and £100k in loans to the treasurer at the city's town hall). If there is no master workman in the inn, you may be able to spawn one by reëntering the inn or you may have to wait for another day. Since it always costs £15k to equip the workshop, you probably need to have that amount of cash on hand to have a successful discussion.

Pay attention to what the workman is a master of: you'll only recoup £7.5k if you end up selling it off later.

There isn't any automatic profit. The workshop just turns raw materials stored at your warehouse into finished products in your warehouse. It's up to you to purchase cheap raw materials and sell the finished products for a good price. Obviously, it's a good idea to locate your workshop in a place with cheap inputs (i.e., a brandy distillery in French wine country or a textile mill in London near the English sheep herds.)

You start with 10 workmen and that's all you seem to need. Just make sure you transfer enough money to pay them, using the book at your warehouse. Their 'motivation' seems to be based on the location: Anglican spots like London give you 110% and Catholic Le Havre will only give you 70% despite supposedly being an 'English' city.

One minor gameplay flaw seems to be that some of the workshops can never generate a profit. A gunsmith will use 1 wood, 100 bronze, and 100 iron to make 1 cannon, meaning each one costs £1k-3k more to produce than simply buying them. Similarly, the 'armorer' who uses 1 saltpeter and 1 sulphur to produce 2 units of gunpowder will typically not be able to pay for his inputs and the £50/mo. in payments to the workshop staff. The brandy distillery needs 3 units of wine for 1 of brandy, but can break even depending on where you're buying and selling. Only a very few seem to be generally profitable: the weaver who turns £5 wool into £17+ cloth or the sail-maker who turns the cloth into £23+ sail.

A much bigger problem seems to be that there is no way to transfer your goods from your warehouse to your ships. You can sell your finished products from the warehouse to the merchant and then buy them off of him, but that means you're losing anywhere from £2 to £50 per unit in profit. (Please do let me know if there is some way to do this, because the warehouse and ship ledgers don't seem to be able to and it's a major failure.)