So I’m going broke trying to move my population and such to the electrified stage and found someone who said commuter piers kill your happiness. I wonder if this is true? He didn’t link any evidence and I don’t have a way to test it because if I yank my commuter piers I won’t be able to produce anything as I moved all my production to a secondary island to avoid pollution.
I have to report that I must now end my lonely crusade… in shame. I picked up 2070 on sale, and noticed in the keyboard shortcut list there is an option to turn on captions, so that when people talk to you it gives you the summary and the direct quote, as the default in 1800. “Great!” says I. Then, going back to 1404, I notice that there is… that same option. So this whole time I’ve been complaining about something I could have trivially fixed. I will now hang my head and slink away.
I both think this game is fantastic, yet am simultaneously kinda not enjoying my time with it.
As soon as I get to Artisans, and you start having to build out The New World, I find the game just requires you to start spinning too many complicated plates at once.
Anno 2205 was so much simpler than this game (to a fault) - resources were basically static once you established them, and just became a fixed number you could count on when trying to balance your production lines. The only logistical question was how far you placed your industries from a delivery truck depot, which was pretty trivial.
Maybe I’m just missing something, but I’m basically being forced to eyeball supply levels in my storehouses, to make an educated guess as to whether a “needed” good is being consumed faster than I’m producing it. As an example, last night while I was focusing on a New World island, suddenly my cash flow plummeted, and I had no idea why. After like 10 minutes of trying to make sense of it, I realized I had run out of schnapps on my main island, which caused my worker population to shrink - all because I hadn’t even realized I had tipped the balance of that particular resource into a tiny deficit like two hours ago when upgrading a couple of houses.
I actually dread upgrading houses in Anno 1800 at a certain point, because the supply lines get so complicated (starting to involve multiple resources from multiple islands, new world and old word etc.), and I can’t see any way to concretely tell at a glance, if I’ve tipped the balance into chewing through my reserves of anything. In Anno 2205, the status of your flow of ALL resources was right there at the bottom of the screen, any time you wanted to see it.
Oh, and I wish you didn’t personally have to make choices for the expeditions. You should just supply them, send them off, and have the game update you on how they are doing. When you have 3-4 expeditions going at the same time, that dude seems to bother you every 15 seconds.
Yeah some live spreadsheets would be nice indeed.
I’d settle for what Anno 2205 had, where you could just see exactly what your production surpluses and deficits were. If it said you had a surplus of 14 units of Water, you knew exactly what you could build, and exactly when you were consuming more Water than you were producing. Creating stable production lines as you progressed through the population types and different technologies, was more of a puzzle.
In Anno 1800, by contrast, it’s extremely fuzzy unless you’re running clear, massive surpluses of everything. Though again - maybe I’m missing some vital information pane that has exactly what I want. Please tell me there is, haha.
If you mouse over something you are producing in the warehouse, it tells you if you are stable, increasing or decreasing, and also the number of units of said increase/decrease show. :)
Yeah, I find those arrows to be too vague, and often not even all that accurate. They also just seem to be tied to how your stock is trending, no matter how they are increasing or declining - so if you burn through a bunch of stuff by trading, for example, it’ll show your supply as trending downward, even if you’re running a PRODUCTION surplus. Anno 2205 let you see both: what your overall stock was, and what your production supply was relative to demand.
Furthermore, if you’re only running a small deficit (or a small surplus), the arrow seems to register as stable, not increasing or decreasing. When I fixed that schnapps problem I mentioned before, I could clearly see my schnapps stock very slowly recovering, but the arrow marked it as stable… not increasing.
I just wish the game was less vague with these kinds of details, because it’s hard enough trying to keep all of the game’s plates spinning at the same time, without also having to guesstimate the state of your goods production.
I made myself this list.* I think that’s the only information that’s really missing ingame… and maybe a quick overview of the buildings I have.
The rest – the way this Anno works and as it was wished for by fans – is to watch and adjust. And that’s a bit cumbersome, I agree. I need to click the warehouse and the residential buildings to see what causes balance fluctuations. What I do know is my supply (chain) basically is good.
So if rum’s down it must be because my newly installed ship is too slow or too often attacked by pirates.
*source:
(https://anno1800.fandom.com/wiki/Needs)
Not the arrows, the numbers are shown either +1 -1 or whatever it may be. Maybe its on the item maker.
I know I checked canned goods yesterday and the factory told me it was making +1 extra. When I checked the cannon factory, they were showing a decline of -3 as I was building quite a few ships. There are surplus and or deficit numbers to see just like in 2205.
Into chapter 4 now, still enjoying the campaign. :)
Started making hats and fur coats last night, so much logistics involved.
I’ve been finding that as the series goes on, the visual information layout gets worse with every title. I still find 1701 to have the best UI layout.
(1800 is better than the last two’s neon blue though)
I agree. This will help a lot.
https://nihoel.github.io/Anno1800Calculator/
The next problem is the difficulty of trying to figure out how much of an item to send to another colony if you have production all in one place.
So the Royal Tax.
Apparently any individual in each class over 1,000 pays Royal Tax, and it gets worse the higher the number goes. The reason Blue Byte did this was to try and force you to not have one mega-island. When you get deep into the investor stage people are paying well over $50k in Royal Taxes.
So to combat this, I’m going to design 2 islands for max levels. One will be my polluting crap island, and the other will be the beauty-zone. The problem I see with doing this, that me and others are having, is figuring out how much goods to ship from one island to another to keep their needs met but not over balanced so it pulls all resources from the producing island leaving them in a lurch. There seems to be no easy way to figure out shipping needs.
I’d be curious if any of you have ideas.
Jeff, I might call on you to optimize my empire when it gets too sprawling and sloppy for me to manage anymore.
I’ll have to look for this, as it sounds like exactly what I wanted.
Anno games have always been terrible at giving you needed information, from population metrics to forcing you to go to websites to learn the appropriate ratios for raw materials to manufacturing buildings.
I’m not sure why they don’t improve on their UI - it’s like a point of pride for them to have it be inscrutable and difficult to manage. The game succeeds in spite of these things, in my opinion.
I think the UI is quite good, given everything it has to do (although I’m less a fan of 1800’s particular iteration on it). I think not simply exposing the ratios behind things isn’t a matter of obscurity for its own sake, but is an intentional choice to bias the core gameplay loop more toward fiddling with dials than following formulae. There is something a bit silly about that, because it’s only ignorance that keeps it working that way, as the information exists if you want to go looking for it. But I think there’s a real way in which not knowing the formula actually makes the game more engaging (although it certainly can be a matter of taste).
I might agree, if the game wasn’t also based around trying to run like six cities at the same time. Trying to keep track of that, plus “fiddling with the dials” of your production, is unwieldy. It also just leads me to end up wildly over-producing everything, so I don’t have to worry about it - whereas in Anno 2205, it was more of a puzzle as you progressed through the population types, and unlocked different technologies that required you to switch out resources and stuff.
I’ve gone a bit OCD on the game.
If you want to do just two Town Halls in your city, this is the most efficient layout I could come up with. It drastically minimizes the number of utilities you need to use too.
Note: it’s based on brick. If you have dirt roads you won’t have as much coverage.
This is what it looks like in use:
You can see how the Town Hall is driving Happiness off the charts (those 3 cards on their own are +30 Happiness) for my Engineers which are all centered around the Town Hall.
There’s another plot free in the lower right to put another Town Hall (if I wanted) to extend the range of all the major services like the Hospital, Church, School etc.