The pioneers give you militias, which you’ll continue to need, but no: the colonists are superceded by the townsmen, who are superceded by merchants. That said, each class of villager uses more goods per house than the previous class, so if you upgrade them all at once, you can easily have shortages.
Finally broke through the Merchants barrier and I have to say all the waiting is getting to me. It makes it really hard to tinker with your economy or trade routes. The game also seems to expect you to recycle your early, small islands to make bigger ones and fuck that. It is really making me wish there were a real, but streamlines Anno game for mobile.
You 100% have to do this. I’ve mowed through all my size 12’s and am now chewing through the remaining size 14’s.
It definitely transitions into more of an idle experience. I spent probably two days of fairly active play setting up production of luxuries for my townsmen. But now I’ve been working on getting merchants satisfied for about a week and am only half-way there. I don’t mind the pace; I fire it up, set up a couple of battles, send ships out for whatever is running low, tweak production to shore up weak points, then let it sit until the evening. It’s kind of cool to set up a trade route before going to bed and wake up to find my island’s stores full. I’ve now got nearly a full complement of knights and just discovered my first size 18 island this morning.
The problem with this as an idle game is that the numbers don’t always go up. If I misjudge supply an demand, or trade route capacity, it can be ages before I find out, and then ages before I’m in a position to rectify it. There’s very little immediate feedback to let you know you’re on the right track, or to give you that dopamine hit.
Paragon Pioneers: Oh, I’m a durned idjit. I only noticed today that I can select which resource will be on a newly-discovered island. What did I think the squares that look suspiciously like checkboxes were for? ¯\_(ツ)/¯ How did I manage to avoid even accidently tapping one until now? ¯\_(ツ)/¯ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Paragon Pioneers has hooked me pretty good! It really does have a lot of that Anno vibe (if a little sloppier and, yes, slower). But since you don’t really lose much if your economy breaks for a bit, I just drop in when I have a chance and see what I can conquer or improve, or if I’m ready to seek out a new island and new goods. I’m just getting a gold ring supply going so I can turn my merchants into Paragons.
By the way: My starting island? What a mess! Kinda wish there was an easy way to rearrange all the buildings on your island.
I bought Paragon Pioneers on the recommendation in the Android games thread and it was the perfect thing to while away at on flights and transits during vacation. No mobile game BS - just freebase city-building right into my veins when I open the app. Love that its portrait mode as well.
Anno dev team take note and do a 2d mobile-first Anno game (and design it for portrait mode :)).
Yeah, I mean you can just overbuild, but it is a bit of a pain.
I upgraded to paragons a few days ago and have been ramping up production of their necessities, which is a bit tricky because you can’t just upgrade merchants. You need to retain merchants to provide tax income. So you end up having fairly large populations of both, which means you need to beef up all of your supply chains. I’ve been slowly working my way through those and then will move on to some more paragon luxury production.
I’m a little stuck right now. I can’t access new islands until I have Paragons, and I can’t upgrade to Paragon houses without marble. I’m going to have to sell off one of my islands and then go exploring for an island that can provide what it had plus marble. Or maybe just explore for a big island where I can consolidate multiple industries? I’m guessing I’m using one more island than they expect me to because I explored for a hops island before I realized that you needed hops and wheat for beer. So I turned that island into a cloth island. Was this something you ran into, Matt_W?
You can sell off islands to earn favor; you don’t need paragons (though making them happy also gives you favor.) Yes, I definitely recycled many smaller islands in order to earn favor, increase production capacity with the larger area on the bigger islands, and earn cartography by beating up bosses. I currently have no islands smaller than size 16 and only a couple of those that I’m planning to upcycle soon. Earlier when I had more limited island inventory (I currently have 12 total) I left one unoccupied specifically to churn favor/cartography and not even do production.
And it’s not really a problem to have a production gap. You can sell off one island (with, say only hops) and then explore for a bigger one (with, say, hops and wheat) and the production gap will only reduce your tax income for a bit.
Yeah, I’ve sold off a bunch of islands after conquering them. My issue is that I need Paragons to explore for a new island. I’m at the max of eight.
But, yeah, I was going to say it seems like the economic system doesn’t collapse if you are missing a resource for awhile, which I think overall is good. The game is pretty forgiving and strictly compounding, without a lot of gotchas (not to be confused with “gatchas,” of which there also aren’t any!) that can screw you over long-term. It means you can just check in whenever you want and you don’t have to worry about things going to total shit, just being low on this or that if your production lines aren’t perfect.
I think this solves an issue some were having, not sure if new?
Settings - Show in/out rate in storage
Ah! It is new. Just added on 14th.
So I did something radical. I sold ALL my islands except the starting one, and I’m reexploring for big islands that can hold multiple industries and are more cleanly organized. A little afraid I might have trouble beating the orcs. But if it totally fails (if that’s even possible), I won’t mind starting from scratch.
I think it helps to focus either on crops (no mountains) or mining (all the mountains all the time.)
These upgrades with the update are really nice:
• Quadrupled Paragon favor production
• Improved general UI performance a bit
• Islands can now be reordered
• Trade route waypoints can now be reordered
• Added option for main screen ship button
• Added option for in/out rates for stock history
• Added quick demolition for animal farms
• Show stock of build material needed during build preview
• Show current gold and materials in shipyard
• Added hint if building has no island storage access
• Added link to wiki in settings
and even more!
Hey @tomchick if I start a Paragon Pioneers thread, can we move all the apropos posts from this thread to there?
Of course, happy to do it! Just drop me a PM when you’ve started the thread and I’ll take care of it.
Just to nitpick the thread title: “Anno-like” is much more accurate than “Factorio-like”, I think.
They also added a minor UI bug where every time I clear land (the “bomb” button) it opens up the menu. Go figure!
I’ve actually never played an Anno game. Maybe I should…
Sorry if this has come up before but does farms (potatoes etc) need a warehouse nearby to collect the output?