you are corrected, according to my calculations it's $1 per passenger per s.mile. my ship with a capacity of 2500 passenger made the route "New York - Tokyo" and payed me: 13037 sm x 2500 passenger x $1 /passenger/sm = $32592500 :D

and if you stablish a frequent route, the number of passsengers will increase until reach it' s maximum (my first trip betwen NY and Tokyo only took 2440 passengers, the second from Tokyo to NY took 2450 and the following ones were allways full)

oh, and you should save your game from time to time, to prevent that kind of hazzards - i do it, because i don' t want to lose my $360000000 passenger ship after a few trips knowing it's completlt new, and because when one of my ships sink, another one or two follow it' s fate and sink too. that leaves me completly mad :ranting: i mean how can someone have that amout of bad luck :D

Thanks, that's good to know!
I do save often, but so far I've been playing without reloading. After all there's about $ 1100 million in passenger ships being built right now. If only it wouldn't take that long...

Another advantage of passenger ships is that you only have to take an insurance for the ship. In the case of cargo ships, the value of the goods they're carrying is huge, so to be really safe you would have to insure those goods as well.

Hmm it´s a bit of a dilemma whether to insure ships or cargo. My cargo is usually far, far in excess of the ships´s value.

True! For large freighters I would still take the risk of sailing without insurance -except maybe for quite expensive loads-, but not for the bulk good carriers or large tankers...
And by all means always insure your passenger ships.

It's a bit surprising that so far no one seems to have done the calculations of cost vs. merit for Ocean Trader.

Sorry for the double-post...

Figured something out: for passenger ships the monthly insurance cost is 1% of the ships new value. In other words, do you expect a fatal accident in just over 8 years or not?
Also, the standard passenger ship isn't really interesting because its range is just too short to link most very important ports, unless you only sail at 55% speed or so. So it's a better investment to design your own, with a range of 15000 miles preferably.
Passenger ships seem a lot more trustworthy when it comes to collisions, haven't had a single one so far. So this makes them imo a lot better than tankers or cargo carriers, even if the initial investment is bigger.
One word of warning: make sure that your passenger ships never run out of fuel. In that case, your ship is tugged to the nearest harbour, where the angry passengers leave it immediately. Not only do you lose your income, but it lowers your status significantly.

In addition, the company status thing still has me puzzled. All I know is that buying your first passenger ship gives it a nice boost, that disappears the moment your ship sinks. Also, selling a number of ships takes a huge bite out of your status, but simply buying a few passenger ships has little or no effect. :blink:
I've had excellent financial results for several years in a row, assets that rise quickly, and still my status doesn't increase anymore.

This game looked interesting but I can't seem to get it to work on winXP. Is it possible to get it to work with XP? what OS are people using?
Thanks

I'm using Win XP (SP 2) and most of the time this works fine. Every now and then the game shuts down, but I've learnt to save often.
Have you tried running it through Dosbox? The reason I don't use Dosbox here is that it takes up a lot of processor time and I've got a lot of programs running in the background. But Dosbox should do fine...

it works fine on XP. which file are you trying to run? i allways run _trader.exe :ok:

umm...could anyone please tell me how to start this game if you are running on XP? How to go about the UNIVBE? Pleaseeeeeeeee....anyone???!!! The last time I play this game was on my Windows 3.1 and I've been searching for this game since 2003...

when I start the game by clicking trader.exe and _trader.exe I got this message:

fehler: VESA_Treiber nicht gefunden

Hybrid rewls! bug off... send email to: electro@tripnet.se

so please anyone HELP ME!!!!