f13.net

Seems Steam might have released it a week early in America. Managed to purchase it while it still said Buy Now instead of Pre-Purchase. Is installing instead of Pre-loading!

Will let you know if it comes unlocked. Here's to hoping.

Yup! Released early.

Ouch on their part. Yay for you!

Why ouch?

This one looks like a good one. Took the plunge too.

I thought they fucked up and released it early on steam by mistake, but the store page says the 23.

Been meaning to get into the series.  Should I start with this one, or one of the older ones?

This one is just as in depth if not more so than the prior ones and they've done a good job of streamlining things. I was decent at the previous ones and jumped into a hard game in this one, may have been a mistake. Gonna drop down to easy to get a grasp on the resource flow (they added a good deal, saw about 30-60% more stuff in lots of places.

Start with the Wii-version  :awesome_for_real:

Yay runtime Error!

Also, a Liam Neeson-alike (or IS it Liam Neeson narrating?) telling me "You've been playing 2 hours, perhaps I should take a break" is a little hilarious.

This is going to be released 26june at 50euros price in Europe.
I presume I can safely buy it with no regret?

1. It should already be out. At least on Steam.
2. I just played 4 hours straight and wouldn't have known if Liam hadn't started telling me.

In fact, I'm about to go in and start a new game. No run time error will stop me. But hay, now I know the build order better.

Anno needs to be converted into an MMOG. :( NOW.

also: http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=16839.msg664903#msg664903

Edit: Decided to play a couple small world games without any opponents just to get all my shit in order. There's a lot going on here.

Hmm, I may have to pick this one up. I toyed with the demos of the previous ones but never actually got around to purchasing them.

They're new-world-colonization 4X games, right?

Basically, except compared to space games the GUIs don't suck, the progress makes sense, and they actually provide a decent amount of fun. I'd say they're halfway inbetween a 4x game and Pirates! Particularly when you get to the late game. Also, the huge worlds are HUGE.

Do they still have the native populations you can trade with or crush? Maybe this release will push down the gold version of the last one so I can afford it!

Still, I wish someone would do a quality remake of Seven Cities of Gold. There were some cool little bits like getting notifications on discovering geological formations. And the increasing drums when the locals started getting pissed off.

Always naysaying!

Once I figured out it was called "Dawn of Discovery", I bought it and it is currently downloading.  Because, you know, I have so much free time. :uhrr:

Also, thanks to schild for playing this at 0830 Central time so that I was able to see what Steam called it. :oh_i_see:

I'm playing no such thing!

This has to be one of the worst manuals ever.  It's less informative than my Demon's Souls manual, and that is in Chinese.

Also: I need to get a nun from my church to the warehouse and I have absolutely no idea how to do this.

Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Actually, those are easy and I didn't figure it out until the campaign explained it. Zoom in on your church, you'll see someone walking around with a subtle outline, just click on them! Fucking obscure shit, man! Seriously though, I hate things like that in games, but once the game told me how to do it, I was like (wow, easy quests). All of the "deliver x to warehouse" quests are like that.

She was not anywhere near the church, but now I know what to look for: blue outline.

Bingo.

You compared this game to Pirates!.  There's no numpad dancing?  Say there's no numpad dancing.  What are the quests like?

The comparison to Pirates! is a pretty piss-poor comparison. Of course there's no numpad dancing. The quests are simple delivery things. It's mostly a civ-builder of sorts somewhere halfway inbetween a 4x and simcity.

I'll have to check this out, sounds like! It's going to eat my head, isn't it. :(

It's like a city builder where you need to build multiple cities at once that send shit to each other.

It reminds me of Tropico a good bit, except much more complex.  My first town is a pretty sad example of resource management.  I just figured out how to work the trade routes!  And I sent seven tons of hemp to a sultan!

Ran into an annoying bug which basically killed a campaign game I was doing. After loading my saved game I could no longer build Oriental Markets, the option to build them was just grayed out like I didn't have the prerequisites to build them even though I did. All buildings need to be in the sphere of influence of a market so therefore I was unable to access most of the resources on any of the Oriental islands, basically making it impossible for me to advance. Laaaaame. This seems to have far more depth than Anno 1701, as I have yet to even get to the 4th level of building. The amount of shit you need to get to level 4 is like the same as what you needed to cap out in 1701.

I don't want to hear that it has bugs.  I'm pretty sure I'm not getting any iron ore delivered from the mine due to supply chain bottlenecks, but now I'm going to be wondering if it is a bug.  It's probably that I need to ramp up coal production but I don't know why ore isn't stored in the warehouse like everything else, so it's possibly a bug?  Does ore go straight to the smelter?

Ore goes to the warehouse just like everything else.

To refine iron (do they call it steel? I forget,) you will need:
-Coal
-Ore
-A smelter

If you have all 3, then most likely one of those 3 vital pieces is not covered by a market building (which extends the range of your carts.) You can build outside the range of your carts, but the buildings will be useless because they can't receive goods to process or ship out finished goods.

This game reminds me of operations management. And that's somehow a good thing.

I'm worried when the combat comes in because I'm having such a great time with city management.

Shit, maybe I should get SimCity games now that I'm old enough to appreciate them.

:uhrr: Clearly I'm confusing the thing that extends your construction area with the thing that your carts are tied to.

What's weird is how you can build something that produces fields right on the edge of a construction area but not fields outside that construction area.

Making efficient use of space will be interesting. I'm already seeing how things can get quite packed.

No, they're the same thing. The game is just special sometimes and lets you do what you shouldn't be able to do.

Cover your resources with a small market building, and it should start working.

And if that doesn't do it:
-You have an iron mine on the resource, right? (not a stone quarry?)
-You have a road to the mine itself, with green dashes showing on the mine?

Other than that, all I can say is "congratulations on finding an amazing bug."

My iron mine is on the hairy edge of my construction zone.  I will try building another market center or whatever and move the fringe one out a bit more.  I hate destroying my pristine forest.

Shnikies, I think I figured it out whilst messing about last night.

Processing buildings have an area of influence, just like the market building. If the market building is outside the processing building's area of influence, the crafter is not able to get raw resources.

So I'd recommend building your processing stuff immediately around warehouses and market buildings, while you put your raw material harvesters on the outer edges of the market building influence. Just be careful because your resources can't be outside the market building's influence either (this constantly screws up my charcoal burners.)

Processing buildings can also pull resources directly from resource producing structures if they are close enough, bypassing the need for a cart to bring the good to a market and then another cart to bring it in for processing. In fact, if you put building right next to each other they will transfer goods almost instantly. However, the market will still be necessary to provide the area of influence needed to place the buildings and crops.

Not really a spoiler, but some people enjoy figuring out this kind of optimization stuff themselves.


You can always check if a building has market access by selecting it and seeing if there is a market in range that lights up green. However, if there are too many buildings within a market's radius it can sometimes become too much work for the carts and buildings that are far away may not get visited. In this case you can upgrade the market to get more carts, add a new market to ease the load, or use the small 'emergency pickup' button in the upper right of the status window.

I had some trouble getting a Paper Mill to work even with boatloads of wood, but it seems like it kinda worked?

Has anyone been able to get to Chapter 5 and get the Optional Mission "Emergency Call from the Sultan"? I thought completing all Optional Missions before moving on to the campaign would be a good idea.

Also, this game? Very, very fun.

Chapter 5 introduced me to efficiency that I had before then not seen. You definitely don't want to auto-assign fields once you get rolling. Wheat is pretty good about being very efficient.

Yeah, I started Chapter 5 last night and spent the first few minutes marvelling at the crop organization. It blew my mind, maaan. Completely changed how I preplan my resources.

So, does playing the campaign give you some sort of tutorial/guide?  I'm just playing the open game.

The campaign is like one super long tutorial.

This explains the horrible manual.

I started out playing a Scenario and found it to be very overwhelming with victory conditions that included the daunting task of having 2,000 nobles. After building myself into a spghetti mess I decided to start over and try the campaign and found it to be a very good gradual introduction that doesn't punish you severely for crappy logistics along the way. Would have saved me 6 hours of flailing blindly had I known.

Noted.

Campaign mode went pretty smoothly for me. Some doldrums while I figured out how to keep my economy black. But yes, mostly a huge tutorial.

However, I just started the mission that introduces land combat, and I must admit to feeling a little overwhelmed. Especially since the residual effects of the invasion are so sudden and unavoidable. It's also a little too heavily scripted.

Anyhow, I think I know enough now to play the other game modes, which really seems like where the fun is at anyways. Maybe I'll come back to the campaign when I have a little more patience for that sort of thing.

I bought this last night and spent a couple hours playing it this afternoon - the first three campaign/tutorial missions, and then on into a "continuous game" where I've already begun to overstretch my resources before figuring out how to get spices.

I'm liking it; it's the exact sort of resource-system-building and colonization game I enjoy. Still muddling through figuring out what does what, when to build stuff, when to expand my cities, etc.

I really wish there was a better way to see production/consumption figures for the various commodities though - I have a difficult time balancing the supply of the various goods my cities demand and end up just running a surplus at all times, expanding whenever the surplus disappears.

I really, really, really like how ground combat is handled. It's not twitch at all. It's very strategic.

I like what little of the combat I've seen from the campaign. The slow pace allows for pretty interesting strategy, but I worry how it will play out in open games with less scripting. It also seems like you could be totally screwed if an enemy attacks a crowded island with little room for defensive camps.

I hate when a perfectly good city builder/trading game adds in combat, even if it's perfectly good combat. I don't want to do combat.  :angryfist:

It's why I suck at RTS games, I just want to build and gather resources in peace WHY ARE YOU ATTACKING ME WAAAAH.

Hmmm Settlers of Catan, the RTS!

I think the Wii / DS versions are sans-combat. Not sure. They looked way more cartoony and goofy while the PC version is just right for that.

There's always room for defensive camps. But I haven't gotten into the part of the campaign where you are on the offense, i.e. I'm the one building a castle.

Sigh, going to be hard waiting for this one to go on 1/2 price sale on Steam.

I assume the Steam version has no DRM (other than Steam's usual stuff)?

I didn't have any DRM craziness.

Just get it. This is one of those genre breakers that needs more love.

How's the replayability on this?  Is it Civ style, with a new world each game that requires new strategies each session, or is it a series of campaigns, a la regular RTS?

Have none of you guys played an Anno before? This is the fourth one!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/33250/

Does it vary from the other Anno games at all?

So I played the first couple missions - one thing I'm not sure, does your population actually matter at all beyond opening up whether things are available to build? It doesn't appear that there's any actual 'employment' in the game, like I could have 324 lumberjacks with just 2 peasant houses if I for some reason wanted to?

From what I can tell population has no effect on providing workers for resources or production. In fact, you can have islands with no housing at all, just production and markets. The reason you need citizens is to unlock new technologies and collect taxes as income, otherwise the costs of the economic buildings will put you in the red. While it isn't exactly the most realistic approach it does simplify the economy side of things and allows you to use the resources on multiple islands without having to import food and drink just to keep them from deteriorating into chaos.

Yep. Fuck that. Loved Anno 1701. I won't be buying this.

I've never even heard of it until this thread.

I have seen games that could only be activated on 3 machines at the same time, not three times total. That is not as unreasonable. No idea if that was "Tages(TM)"

:drillf:

It's a gender neutral term these days. :-P

Is there a reason some of the peasant houses stay peasant houses despite being very well satisfied on every account?

The population advance does elude me just a bit. I spent maybe... what... 16 hours? It was a until-7am play session (starting at noon). I did the Electress scenario and I was kept busy the entire time learning production chains and cycles. The ratio of Products in a production chain are something I need to learn. For instance to make Marzipan you need 1 Confectionary for every 2 Almond Fields, 1 Sugar Mill, and 2 Sugar Cane fields.

I think if you're not granted licenses in one settlement for Patricians and Nobles, you need to develop your Orient town more. Those bastards love carpets...

It kinda seems like there's a minimum amount of peasants you'll always have, and only people above that amount will advance. You can see it happening - plop down some new peasant houses and those old maxed out ones will usually instantly advance.

Oh yeah, click on a Marketplace to see if you have any room for Citizens. You need more Peasants / Beggers to open up Citizens, you need lots of Envoys to open up Patricians, and you need a certain number of Patricians to get Nobles, I *think.*

Yep, it seems like building more shacks is the key.

So, yeah. It ate my head. I actually like that there isn't really an unemployment issue, I always hate when I'm supposed to have X number of people but I'm trucking along perfectly with a smaller number, and then I have to create a bunch of bullshit jobs, etc.

I didn't totally hate the combat once it was introduced, but I would be perfectly happy if it never showed up again. But it will. IT WILL.

You can configure the non-campaign modes to remove AI opponents. It's totally up to you.

Yeah, but I plan on finishing the campaign before I do any mucking about. Plus I didn't HATE it, so I won't mind if it pops up, I just won't be doing any KILL EVERYONE scenarios. I skip those in pretty much everything I play.  :drill:

Last missions of the campaign actually focus less and less on combat. The final mission has zero combat. It's all about trading your way to victory. The game really does hold your hand, but doing everything on Hard and with all the side missions isn't THAT easy.

Not once during my 14-16 hour playing session did I have nothing to do. Growing and meeting the needs of the settlement was a full time job until I was ready to cal it quits.

Jesus christ this game has me by the balls. This game oozes many things I'd associate with Blizzard.

I still have a bitch of a time orienting my fields when planting them, but other than that the interface is just plain good, as schild mentioned. I've been referring this to all my friends.

Well I downloaded the demo to check it out, but for some reason the game took issue with my mouse, where the pointer was displaying half a screen away from where the game thought it was. Needless to say, I never got out of the option menus. So I just deleted it, not going to spend god knows how long troubleshooting a demo I can only play for an hour.

I need a fucking table of what outputs what at which rates and so on. Monitoring all the little arrows drives me batshit.

Also, I have no idea why, but stone keeps disappearing out of my stockpiles; do citizens upgrading to patricians consume stone or something?

Yes, and it's very frustrating when the things they need require stone to build. I usually block ascension rights for a few to get the economy up and running before I set them loose.

Someone needs to make a little webapp like they used to have for ATITD: punch in a commodity and it lists all the things that produce/consume it and at what rates.

Upgrades for population take stone? Had no clue.

If I need something for a quest I usually just block the consumption of that item, through the 'needs' window. If you click on the part of the needs graph that represents the item (say, leather jerkins for patricians) it'll keep them from consuming them and start lowering their satisfaction rating.

Weird that it doesn't show you that you need stone to upgrade though .... I'll have to watch for that.

This was funny. I was playing Master Builder scenario and my Envoys needed Perfume to advance, and the peaceful, weak, non-militaristic nun AI opponent had conquered the only big island where it'd be feasible to make roses.

So, well, she had to die. Nice introduction to combat. Different types of units are very very important it seems. Cannons are the only unit that can hit all but Keeps out of range. Miners take down walls, Trebauchts buildings so your troops can move into place. Orient camps are good because of their smaller size, but if you have the space, you want the Big camps.

It all works very very very well, but keeping track of your military units can be a problem sometimes.

If you click on a house that is ready to upgrade there's a small scroll icon in the upper right that tells you what materials it is waiting on. The problem is that you don't really see this unless you lack the materials or there's a whole bunch of houses waiting. Off the top of my head I think it's (edit: fixed, thanks Lorekeep):

Peasant -> Citizen: 1 wood, 1 tools
Citizen -> Patrician: 1 wood, 1 tools, 4 stone
Patrician -> Noble: 1 wood, 1 tools, 3 stone, 3 glass

One thing I find frustrating is trying to set up a trade route in which I control how much material is left behind for the source colony. If I want one island to produce enough materials for two islands to share I find it difficult to keep the trade route from pulling too much from the source unless I use it at a very predictable rate on both. Worse yet, if the target island is full then the resources stay on the boat and prevent it from picking up other things I want it to transport. For example, I find tools are a feast or famine situation and I usually just make tools on any islands I'm actively building to avoid having to mess around with transferring them all the time.

It's 4 stone for Citizen -> Patrician and 3 Stone, 3 Glass for Nobles. Given that stone is also used for defenses, storage, and all sorts of construction, you should get as much of it as you can. Wood and Stone are two resources you should over-do in the early stages. Tools Production is usually sufficient to have one Ore Mine, One Smelter, One Coal Source, and 2 Tools Workshops to keep you supplied.

From the Steam Forums, pretty useful and something I've already guesstimated:

Rope needs 1 hemp farm
Weaver needs 2 hemp farms
Smelter needs 1 ore mine / 1 coal maker
Tools needs half a smelter
Weapons needs 1 smelter
Bread needs 2 crop farms / 1 mill
Tannery needs two pig farms / half a salt mine
Brewery needs 1 herb garden / 1 crop farm
Salt works needs 1 salt mine / 1 coal maker
Book maker needs 1 lumberjack / 1 paper mill / 1 indigo farm
Butcher needs 2 cattle farms / half a salt works
Carpet maker needs 1 indigo farm / 1 silk farm
Mosaic workshop needs 1 quartz quarry / 2 clay pits
Glass maker needs 1 forest glassworks / half a quartz quarry
Coffee roaster needs 2 coffee plantations

I think the Paper Mill is off because a Paper Mill produces a fuck ton of paper. 3 Coffee Roasters are enough to support a super large Envoy population. Perfume requires a *massive* amount of roses though.

I think also:

Marzipan requires 2 Sugar Cane, 1 Sugar Refinery, 2 Almonds, 1 Confectionary

Seeing the trend in this thread, I actually bothered to get this game from Steam. Huge mistake; I keep falling into the pattern of wanting to finish setting this production chain, or that new settlement up, before I stop; leading to 6+ hour long sessions. Been awhile since I've gotten sucked into a game like that, and really wasn't expecting it since I didn't really take to the first Anno game. But finding suchandsuch person (knights, nun, spy.. whatever) when you have a large sprawling, developed island? That quest can go fuck itself.

I haven't really done much other than the first couple Campaign missions and several goes at the Elector scenario, to get the hang of things... always seems to be more stuff I learn every game about how to go about things. I can't even fathom, at the moment, throwing in combat.. especially given how shitty my harbour areas tend to be designed. I do wish there was a way to slow the game down as a toggle rather than a keep-the-button-pressed, though.

After getting through Elector I've made 2 tries at the Master Builder scenario investing a total of about 10-12 hours and I'm about to restart on my third try. I came to the horrible realization that you actually need 3500 nobles ON THE SAME ISLAND to finish the cathedral, which seems really difficult (if not impossible) if you decide to build your city center on a medium sized island. In addition, if the computer player places a market on an island you can't get access to it without military action so there needs to be an early push to 'tag' islands early that you plan to use or else risk not having room for production.

I don't remember if that was the exact mechanic, but I do remember the early push being important in the first couple games, too.

Yeah, I had a nun so she was lightly defended and I steam rolled her. The island they start on should be of a decent size though. I just finished Master Builder but what really bugs me is that these "find the little dude" quests can be so damn frustrating and time consuming in large cities. In the Campaign it helps you by pin-pointing their general location, but in the Continuous Mode it'll only pinpoint the first guy's location. After that they could be *ANYWHERE.* One time I just saved my game and demolished my entire city until I had a general idea where they were.


Oh hey.   :awesome_for_real: Me too. But I actually managed to get to 10 hours. Liam Neeson (god damn it schild) asks me if my family is worried about me. I knew the answer and kept playing.

By the way, the VO in the game is above and beyond what I've come to expect from video games.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=909970

Christ.

At least you know you're not the worst one. :oh_i_see:

What I see them doing there is making one or two slots appear out of the influence area. It might take a 5% - 10% hit in efficiency, but if it buys you an extra farm from space conservation, then it's worth it. I always try to make all the slots appear in all the influence area.

I've only gotten the four hour warning from Liam, because it resets when you start a new part of the campaign.  :awesome_for_real:

I'm finally going to put on my big girl pants and start messing with the scenarios. Watch out, world!

Make sure to go in order. They are a good introduction to certain mechanics.

Thanks for this thread, I never would have thought of buying this without it. I too am gripped by my balls with it.

Anyways. When placing farming stuff (cider, goats milk, hemp, etc) the building itself has a number next to the farm fences.  I found in a few cases I could cram more than that number in, and it would say 6/4 or 4/3 for example. Does that make any difference?

Secondly... when placing workshop style objects (linen shirts, ropes, flour, etc) the relevant resource buildings will highlight green if it's in the little influence radius of the workshop. But I can place the workshop anywhere in my influence and it still plugs away making whatever it's supposed to. So is there any benefit to placing, say, a ropeshop so that it highlights as many hemp farms as possible, or is it the same as just sticking it anywhere that's convenient?

Manufactories (e.g. rope shops) that highlight resource buildings (e.g. hemp farms) don't rely on market cart deliveries. They instead dispatch little walking dudes to get goods as they become available/needed. This is why you see near-instant movement of goods if you sandwich your manufactories between your resource buildings.

Realizing this has substantially changed my layouts and vastly improved the efficiency of my supply lines.

Right; if they're highlighting the resource building (hemp farms for the weaver, for example), they don't tie up carts and it should be more efficient. I've found, however, that occasionally having a few production buildings just crowding a marketplace as more efficient -- if you can't sandwich the weavers close enough to the hemp fields, for example, it can be less efficient due to walking time, or how it can work with the overall lay-out.

I'm starting to make massive use of secondary and tertiary islands for production (a island devoted to iron ore/steel/weapons/tools, one for farming, etc) and then shipping finished products to my islands with population on them; which lets me maximize population on those islands (more room for the bloody houses), and often can net more income on trading runs from AI players (they seem to have a cap on what they can spend at each port, not total, so if you have a massive surplus of something and its spread over three ports, they'll buy from three ports, thus buying more).

My main problems right now are my harbour (they look so ugly and inefficient.. small storehouses keep screwing up the tiles available for me) and getting my timing down for expansion and, still, tweaking my initial builds (I've noticed AI players tend to go nuts on wood production early, and lose a lot of time on getting tool production going because of that, whereas I try to rush some tool production as tools often limit my growth first, even with buying them from the default orient and Lord AI players).

Oh, and Jobu; if you place 5 hemp fields for a single hemp farm (making it 5/4) it won't help at all, unless at 4/4 it was running at less than 100% efficiency.

I have real trouble with the trade routes and goods. For a game based on it they sure when to great lengths to hide critical information.

You can tell general trade ships to keep X number of goods in your local warehouse and buy anything more. You can't seem to do the same thing for your trade routes. I want to be able to keep my goods balanced on each island, have a few of wood,tools just in case I need them or I want to expand. There doesn't appear to be a way to do this unless I've totally missed it.

Instead, the best you can do is "Pick up X from here and put it down here". Which is great, if there was ANY WAY AT ALL to track what your consumption figures are over time. It's extremely crude and there's no way to refine it beyond guesswork. Even the arrows "your storehouse is filling up" is useless because it takes into account large stores that you sell or transfer so you can expand to new islands, so it'll say your stock is decreasing when in fact you might have a large surplus.

Extremely frustrating. How do you all deal with this? Also, is there a way to add more resources in the upper left? I really do start to care about, say, food, and I don't like my first indication of issues being a giant warning that there is 0 fish in my storehouse.

Oh, what's the point of the eyedropper/clone tool? You can only clone a single building? I was hoping it was kind of like a stamp tool where you could stamp out a specific field/road/house configuration block.

The supply/demand stuff is really crude and I think that's one of the game's big UI failings. For industrial supply/demand, I ended up using Lorekeep's list from this thread and it's worked pretty well. The only industrial goods I run a huge surplus of are salt and paper.

For city-based supply and demand, I build up my supplies until they hit maximum. Then I check back every so often; if the supply has dipped more than 5 units below maximum, it's time to build another supply chain for that good. Tedious, but it works for now; I've only just gotten to the level where you have nobles and envoys to maintain.

The low granularity of the automated ship transport tools has kept me with one main island that produces the main construction goods, with multiple outlying islands. Each outlying island contains 1 or more full supply chains for some city commodity, with the exception of my Oriental city island - that one contains the Oriental city, its basic supporting industries and one outlying island to produce coffee. I manually haul over tools every so often.

I've also found that, even though you can build several harbormaster's wharves around a single island, automated ships will insist on going to your warehouse. This makes warehouse placement on an island vital, as sailing around a large island can considerably slow down a supply route. Building extra harbormaster's wharves does make your life easier when you're dealing with your manually-controlled ships though. My main island has 3 of the things arranged in a triangle pattern around the edges of the island, so I don't have to sail terribly far around it regardless of the angle I'm sailing from.

edit: grammar

When you get an island full of Patricians, your paper stocks will start to run thin.

Bread, Beer and Wine are the major items for Occident that require massive quantities that you should really think about running a massive surplus of. It helps to have extra Candlelabras and Glasses too, if you can manage it. Perfume and Carpets for Orient. Perfume is a bitch to get rolling.

Wood production *is* critical at the start. You need a lot of wood to get everything going for all the basic industries before Tools Production kicks in. I usually start with 5 Wood shops located away from my central house location. I pump as many tools as necessary from the NPC to get Citizens rolling and get the Tools Production going.

Warehouse placement isn't as critical as you make it out to be. You need to build Harbor Master offices around your island and tell your ships to go there instead of the warehouse. Multiple piers also need to be built if you have multiple ships attempting to access one port. It doesn't hurt if you are being attacked to have a repair crane at each port as well. They will automatically go to it as everything routes through the Warehouse / Harbor Master Office you've selected.

I'm playing this on Wii (anyone?  anyone?) and really enjoying it.

It's definitely an Anno-lite console/Wii "streamlined" experience but in a good way while keeping the same addicting economic engine building gameplay as the real deal.  The past several nights I wanted to play for 30 minutes and 2 hours disappeared. 

I'm about halfway through the campaign story where King George basically keeps sending his two sons Goofus and Gallant out to build stuff.  We play as Gallant.  I have yet to see any combat other than me running away from pirates corsairs.  A small surprise is the quality of the voice work and funny banter between the characters.

The only negative is sailing.  I hate everything about the boats - clicking on them, moving them around, fleeing from corsairs, etc.  The rest of the game is great. 

Notes:

Working with the Corsairs will eventually unlock a quest, "The Feast", that results in a permanent alliance.

Building a Mosque eventually unlocks a quest, "Duty", which requires you to kill 50 Corsair ships, which ALSO has the side effect of permanently forcing them from the region (I think!).

In the continuous game, if you kill enough corsair/pirates, you'll eventually just get a quest to kill a small platoon of them to get a permanent alliance and remove their ships from the high seas.

There is a bug where you are given quests to kill Corsairs whilst allied with them. That's where Letter of Marques come in. The game does have a number of bugs that could corrupt a game session's stability.

I just watched a video on Youtube.  Looks good.  Watching it for 15 seconds it reminds me of Caesar II.

I haven't found keeping islands topped off all too hard, once I discarded the idea of more than one or two population centers. There's really no way, in-game, to easily track consumption of goods by your population, other than experience. I have been using http://www.anno1404-rechner.de/ (http://www.anno1404-rechner.de/) though, as it'll calculate how many of what you need for however much population figures you drop into it. Not English, but its easy enough to muck with.

One of the things I've started to do with my supply runs is to add an AI stop over at the end of the route to drop off any goods the ship is still carrying; if the port the ship was supposed to supply has filled its storage space with the good, then it can dump the excess on the AI. You won't get a great price for the stuff, but it helps keep things from getting bogged down without worrying too much about micromanagement.

I also generally top off each island with the building resources if I notice one getting low, using the Flagship which I keep in manual control for quests and personally running goods here and there.

As for adding resources to the upper left, you can. Just dragging the resource icon up there should work; much like you can plug things into the two hotbars to quickly select what to build and such without having to go into the build menus.

Unless you click the link to get it in English. :awesome_for_real:

http://www.anno1404-rechner.de/index.php?lang=en

... Oh, man. Don't do that. You'll shatter my self image by pointing such basic things out.

I'm stuck in the campaign, I'm supposed to build some indigo farms for a quest but I lack the necessary diplomatic rank to do so and I've ran out of other things to do. Any pointers on how to get the rank?

edit: I overlooked the necessary scroll in one of my warehouses

I tried the demo out this morning.  Damn this game is fun.  Did the first two easy mode campaign things.  One bug I found was that the quest to put "another hemp plantation around your weaver" didn't register.

I think I might go buy this.

I'm stuck in the campaign, too. I'm playing the second mission and it says "Build a marketplace north of Falconcrest" (or whatever city it is). I build a marketplace north of the city, and nothing happens. I connect it with a road, and still nothing. I cover my island with marketplaces, and...nothing? Looks very fun though. The first mission was great!

Heh, nm. It was a market building, not a marketplace, or something. Feh, a bit confusing, that one.

Don't worry I was building market buildings instead of peasant housing for a while.  Then I felt stupid.

So I bought this game and ended up playing it for 8 hours yesterday.  I stopped playing on chapter 5, looked tough.  It's the one where the cardinal attacks your island with a shitload of troops.

I'll need some practice.

Great game so far.

Small spoiler for chapter 5: You can't win. Just try and survive. I restarted a whole bunch of times thinking I could hold him back and just wasn't doing it right.

I finished chapter 8 (the end) last night. I'm kind of annoyed that you're both under a time limit and also lacking in some specific things (indigo) making it hard to tech up.

I wish there was one final mission where you have to get X nobles so you can really perfect the end game - though I guess that's what endless play is for. I may do one game of endless before i wrap it up. I really, really hope the next version expands the crude trading interface, I get that it's a large part of the game but that micromanagement of "oh god I am out of spices again and max on fish but didn't know because there's no real history tracking" aspect really saps a lot of the fun out of the game.

The game takes on a new challenge level in Medium+ Scenarios and Endless play when you start running out of cash!

I run out of cash in Easy Mode.  My problem with these games is expanding too fast.  I still don't have a way of measuring how much fish do I actually need?  So I end up making 3 fisheries and saying fuck it, but then I end up having excess and not trading it and then get taxed on the building's maintenance.

I'm doing the whole campaign and then go on with endless play.  I'm really looking forward to it.

I like the trade window.  Other than lacking information on what is being bought and sold, I like managing the trade routes right there.  It took me a while also, but I always forget that I can sell stuff in each wharehouse that is piling up but don't have a trade route for it.

The difference in tax income from regular Patricians and Patricians who have their basic needs met is insane. I setup a Beer and Tannery run and the tax income doubled from these guys.

I'm finding that the investment/tax output ratio seems to be a lot better for Envoys than for Occidental guys. I've never had a fire or disease strike my Oriental city, you don't need to manage the overlapping comfort zones of 4 different buildings, and the quantity of goods demanded seems to be far less compared to the absolute number of people involved.

When I improved and expanded my Oriental city to completely use up the coverage radius of its first bazaar, my tax income, after meeting all demands, was somewhere like +500gold higher than when I'd started.

As a side benefit, you also get more Patrician slots from the Envoys, if you can be asked to keep the greedy bastards drunk and gorged.

Can someone explain how to build up a port?  I played only one big chapter so for (Chapter 4?) where it got you into the Noble unlocks, but not far into it, and I still had my basic warehouse (upgrade with a few little supply houses).

What are the benefits of a harbor master thing with piers etc?  I had to build one for one chapter but it went by so fast as I didn't get to really understand why.

Edited to ask:
Can you actually place the fields for your farms?  I had just hit autoplant or whatever and got messy results, then I see these neat and pretty pictures so I'm assuming you can place them where you want them.

My ports used to be an atrocious mess, especially at my main city. My last few games I've really started to try and 'clean' it up. Extra piers become essential, unless you want ships waiting a long time to get in. The Pier building will give ships an additional berth to use, so you can take more than one ship at a time at your dock. Harbourmasters can be used to extend your "harbour area", or built on other beaches where you have no harbour warehouse, so you can build harbour related buildings there, or use it as another manual berth on another side of the island for quick access.

And yes, you can place fields manually; there's a small fence icon when you have the building, such as a cider farm, selected. Click that and you can manually place the fields. Its pretty much required to make efficient builds without wasting a lot of space. Some of the efficiency tweaks you can do with these farms can yield massive bonuses; in some areas I went from having 4-5 farms to 10+ with better layouts. Wheat farms are annoying, though, to make efficient in field placement, as you often have to build a second wheat farm, have the second farm build a field placed just so, then demolish that second wheat farm, and the field will switch to the first one you built. You can make an extremely efficient beer and bread productions with this, with either no or minimal space wasted.

Another odd question, whats the difference between using stone roads vs. dirt roads other than making your city cosmetically better?

I know in Caesar II it helped make your buildings upgrade.

Deliveries are done twice as fast on stone roads.

Oh snap.  My awesome empire would of been twice as inefficient.

Would have.

 :why_so_serious:

Do the "beautify your town" things do anything at all?

 :Love_Letters:

Can't stop playing, theres always something else to build. :ye_gods:

there's

Just found an excellent way to make cash. Turns out Northborough has a hardcore Oriental rug fetish. If you produce an excess of carpet (easy to do), he'll buy them for very good money. Excess stock can be sold for a decent amount of dough but you make the real money selling from your ports.

Same holds true for a lot of the later goods (books, leather jerkins, fur coats, meat, etc.); carpets are one of the earliest ones you can access, though. I generally have my main city sitting on a surplus of goods delivered (such as books, spices, both shirts, fur coats, etc) that I sell from the warehouse there. Generally it will gross 20,000-40,000 gold when either Northborough or the Orient guy comes through for trading. Do similar with my main oriental city with carpets, pearl necklaces, coffee, spices and such. I generally run a deficit based on tax income, but gross so much trade income that tax income becomes irrelevant.

I wish late game didn't get so bogged down, though. Once I get past around 2,300 nobles or envoys in a town they start demanding things that just require more stuff that I find a pain to produce; so I tend to cap my cities around there and start new ones when I can, and just support massive citizens in them.

I just hit ch6 in the campaign where you build a strictly orient city.  Good times with carpet making and profit.

Now I'm learning how to avoid a cash crunch and stay ahead of the competition. This is invaluable since the mid-game right around where Patricians hit is so valuable.

There's so much shit you have to do at the same time to stay more powerful than your opponents. 1. Scout new islands and settle key resources. 2. Develop to Patricians. 3. Develop large Envoy colony.

The talk made me buy this. Seven hours later on the first day I must say that I hate and love you people. This game is awesome and yet they tell you absolutely nothing about how to play it. I'm basically on quest for fire here, but the thread has helped me numerous times so far. This is more complicated than Civ 4 and that manual was like 60 pages.

This one was 7. WTF!

Next you should try a Paradox game, to take that experience to the next level.  :grin:

I will admit my first major error was getting pissy because I didn't realize that Brine was not Salt. I was getting mad because my tanners weren't working, and I finally figured out that I was missing a major conversion step.

Wrong, sir.

Don't start that pissing match. I should qualify that with the statement that I'd played all the other Civ games, and none of the Anno games.

So to me, it was way more complicated. In many ways to the savvy user, it's way easier.

I'm not saavy. The game does leave you to discover a few things. If you hop right into Sandbox (Continuous Mode) then yeah, might have some trouble.

If yall are waiting for me to admit an I'm an idiot, I'll do it early.

Just saying. This game isn't obvious to me in many places. They seem to be the same places as others by the advice in the thread though. I still enjoy the shit out of it. I just wish they'd taken the time to explain the facets in a little more detail.

The campaign is a 30 hour tutorial.

Edit:
Typo from my G1.

I was actually wondering what a game would be like if it was tutorials all the way through. I like learning new things, so when the game stops teaching me to do stuff, I get a little bit bored with it. The last half of Warcraft 3 for me was like "Okay, so I gotta do this again? Um, ok."

Verdict so far is...eh. I'm not too far into it, but it seems like I'm still doing the same things, just with narration. It makes it a bit more directed, with all the pros and cons that entails.

I still haven't totally grasped what at what level peasants give me citizenship. I know you fill their needs, which is easy, but I'd like to know the actual base number of peasants you need before they start to upgrade themselves.

90, IIRC. That's when the Church unlocks and you can upgrade to Citizens.

When I get home, I'm going to start a endless game radicalthon so I can document some of the things I've learned and my city building and trading strategies. Plus, it's a much more pretty game than dwarf fortress was.

It's either this game or SotS, and I think this game is more visually appealing.

I was planning that once I hit continuous but it's taking awhile because those scenarios take a looooooooong time. :) I'm finishing up Diplomat then it's on to Guild Master.

I'm on the last level of the campaign (I think) where you have to build the Cathedral before the Cardinal.  It think I'm going to hit up continuous before the rest.

I also had an issue with the nomad chapter.  I had a full population block and couldn't get the last 150 nomads to upgrade to Envoys.  Nothing worked.  I stockpiled everything you could need.  Then I bulldozed a few nearby milk farms and they immediately started upgrading.

I thought that was strange. 

Time to murder someone.

I just lost the last campaign because I was 1 milimeter away from completing the Cathedral.  Fuck this game.  That was 4 hours right there.  Mother fucker.  This map is terrible too.

They give you *plenty* of time. Are you using the Advanced Carpenters each time? Did you notice if you get the last one, the timer resets back to an hour?

I used all the special buffs,  the guy took back the special crafters and said I don't need them anymore.

I don't feel like playing that level again.  It took forever.

There's three different quests at each stage that give you a unique Carpenter for each phase. That's three separate quests and three separate carpenters. If you just want to finish the map you should be able to. Doing so while completing all quests is a different story but it seems like you're not after that.

Note: After rescuing the Academy, he places the third item in the warehouse of the island, but only after you build a warehouse there. Also, I believe just having a road to the Academy and supplying Dates / Milk speeds up construction.

Done with campaign easy mode. It's not that bad, but the citizens are a pain in the ass. Also hiding the only island that can produce indigo on the SW point of the map seems a bit cheap on the last mission. We shall see how I fare in the scenarios which are next. Good lord this game may encompass 100+ hours of my time given achievements, medals, campaigns, and freeplay.

I'm trying to find out how to get Sultan / Emperor quests to happen. Diplomat and other scenarios require them, but from what I can tell it takes a loooooooong time to get them and I want to finish the scenario and move on to the next one.

I think its 500 hours for the last time medal.  :awesome_for_real:

According to my google search.

    * You can only trigger Emperor or Sultan quests if you have both a metropolis (3500 nobles in one city, or 5000 envoys in one city) and have built the monument for that culture.

I'm going for that right now in the Guild Master Scenario.

I have gotten two quests, I just need to know the frequency. Having a huge time gap between Sultan Quests = OMG JUST END THE SCENARIO ALREADY.

Finally finished Guild Master. The Emperor gave me a chain of 5 quests, one right after the other. It sounds like I could have been lucky, and that you ended up with single quests. I probably spent an extra hour waiting for the damn thing to start though. Seems flawed that you have to sit for a long time holding the + button to speed up the game. (and there's no damn toggle for it that I can find)

Edited because I got the name of the scenario wrong.

Yeah one chained quest from the Sultan and I'm done with that scenario.

Now waiting for Emperor quests in Guild Master. *sigh*...

One of the problems I'm seeing is excess Honor Points. When you've developed to the point that you're just running the clock, one activity is to cycle the loot options that Richard and the Grand Vizier have. But it's a pain in the ass to do. I'd rather they cycled their inventory or I could force them to do so instead of sitting there and buying / selling the items that I know have a chance (chance!) of cycling into a rare / epic item.

Just started. Decided to start continuous rather than campaign. Yes, I know.

But so far I'm only really stymied by one thing. The "Confused Ambassador" quest: I cannot figure out where the motherfucker actually is. Quest text seems to imply he's at my port, but I don't see him either in the warehouse screen or on the map.

Just do the damn campaign. It's not unfun for a long tutorial. You literally learn everything that might be remotely confusing in a continuous game. There are three things to check on if a quest isn't working:

1 - Check your warehouses for items you didn't know were there in the second item tab. ALL warehouses on all islands.
2 - Look to see if it's a finding a person quest. If it is, isolate the island the person is on and he will be outlined in blue wandering around. Make sure to look at all your housing areas on said island.
3 - Check buildings on your island that are run by NPCs. Sometimes you have to talk to an NPC to get them to send an item to your actual warehouse. Sometimes you have to do that twice. For example, if Brother Hilarious is going to give you a flag, you can't just go get the flag from your warehouse. You actually have to click on his house, talk to him, make him give you the flag, then loot the flag with your ship from your warehouse.

But again, you learn all that fun stuff from the campaign.

When searching for people, mouse over the quest on the left bar - it highlights their exact place with a red circle. They are at the center of it. It makes it pretty easy to find people.

I've not ever had that problem. Are you buying your warships with Honor? Are you upgrading everything like speed on all ships and reduced envoys to citizens?

I have never seen either of those...


how do you buy ships with honor?

I suppose I could start buying ships with honor, but when I need the ships is typically when I don't have the honor. At end game where I'm drowning in honor (and my opponents are cowed and I don't need a large fleet), that's a different story.

You buy the ships in the diplomacy window, just click on the independents, it costs 400 honor.
You can buy global upgrades to things like ship speed or the number of warships or noria size by clicking a button on the lower right in between shipping routes and the menu button.

I don't think I ever opened that window.

Lulz and stuff.

Me either. Diplomacy? What's that? Either your ships come by and buy my shit or you're shooting at me.

You can turn honor into gold and vice versa through Northborogh and Al Jazier, and you can demand tributes from the NPCs that help supplement your economy. So, yes, Diplomacy has its advantages.

Also on big maps, if you are allied with NPCs, you uncover their map.

The game starts to fall apart when you start noticing the AI. It's fun when you're doing relaxing city building and generally being a punk, but the harder AI's are harder because they cheat like fucking crazy and game mechanics help support that behavior. For instance, a trade market that is being captured can be destroyed, thereby denying territory control to a capturing army.

As a fan of previous games like this (Caesar and such) I am really enjoying this game.

Playing the Wii version.  The scenarios in the campaign seem a bit different than the descriptions from those playing the steam version.  I have not had to find individual people in a city to advance a quest.  Also have not had my cities decimated by an invading army.

There is combat in the Wii version though, the corsairs made a pathetic attempt at an invasion, and I have taken over 2 of their islands in a search for the missing sultan.

Wii version and PC version are two completely different games.

OK, I'm on tutorial mission 5.  The scholar guy is asking me to protect him with 3 warships.  I built 3 warships, move them down by him, but its not completing the quest.  WTF do I need to do?  He even begs me not to take them away when I move them out of range, but the whole tutorial has stopped advancing now, until I complete that quest..

Short answer, you wait until Marie finally attacks him. I think she does it 3 times and gives up.

Also, fuck the scenarios are LOOOOOOOOOOOOONG. I actually hit the 6 hour "you should have taken a break by now" mark today.

You can really lose yourself in this game. The only time I notice time is when autosave LCMs I. Every half hour. If there wasn't an unusually high risk of crashing, I would turn it off.

Hmm, haven't had the game crash once so far.  I am using a pretty new computer, however, running Windows 7.

I've crashed once during the campaign, but not since then. However, after 6 hours in a row my game was getting very very slow. I could tell I had to save and stop or the thing was headed into the bad place.

There is something very fun about redesigning a resource allocation network in order to maximize population growth on a home island. I could use some more mother-fuckers to kill though.

I find myself hating nobles.

You want what now???  :ye_gods:

I'm pretty annoyed with part 6 of the campaign atm.  It's not that it's difficult, it's that the method it has of teaching you the ropes is to do something unexpected so that you will pretty much need to restart the level to counter it.

Set up your army in the north but move 1 unit to the south?  Hey, look the entire landing force is in the south, you really should have set up everything there initially.

Build a supply house?  Hey, look there's not enough stone, you really should have built an extra quarry at the beginning of the mission.

Build supplies for the army?  Whoops your nobles have been drinking all the beer, you should have built extra breweries first thing.

Make some war machines?  What there's no wood?  Yep, should have built more loggers at the beginning of the scenario also.

Hey look, you're out of cash after all that building and there is no one to trade with so you should have built up your tax base earlier...

It's the poorest design of all the campaign levels, but that makes sense as it's explaining the poorest element of the game. Land combat is very silly in this game and I wish they didn't have it. I would have preferred to keep all things on the waves.

If you're engaged in land combat in Continuous Mode, then you're doing it wrong. You can dominate with a strong enough fleet.

I like how they went with a slower paced, strategy-focused combat model though. But in execution, a good player can take down an AI opponent before they get within striking distance via a strong navy.

Yeah, that Campaign level has one too many side objectives.

Bought this last night. Walked into EB Gamestop and the doofus working there asked if he could help me before he saw it was me. I gave my normal "I highly doubt it, I'm a pc gamer" answer. He actually apologized and said "That rack is all we have". "I know, and it's fucking pathetic" They of course don't have Anno 1404, but I had to try since I still have that $10 or whatever worth of console tradeins that's been sitting on a card for over a year, since they never have anything I actually want to buy. I go next door to walmart and buy Anno 1404, and hey there's Sacred 2 for $20. Fucking EB Gamestop.

Only had time to run the first  part of the campaign, last one I played was the second in the series, so there's some nice upgrades. Actually seeing the little green line(s) that tell you a structure is connected to a road is such a nice change.

My only gripe is the text is tiny and tough to read from across the room. Game looks great, though. No, I have one other gripe. Give me a fucking chance to lay a road out before you start with the "NO RAODS? HOW ARE TEH PEAZENTS GOING TO..." Blah.

 :awesome_for_real:

The grid system could be improved with thicker lines every 5 spaces or something to help line things up and break apart the mass of squares.

I think I'm overplaying the campaign. I'm in the second or third part where you have to start up the shipyard, you go by the lady's island after she sails off for the crusade and start a quest to stabilize her island. I went into full on stabilization mode and finished her island, my island and the monastery island and got them all up to a very profitable setup before finishing the part...and still somehow missed three quests!

It was a good lesson because it doesn't unlock all the stuff you can do, so I was struggling with limited resources/goods to make a profit before I finally figured out how to properly set taxation  :oh_i_see: I had a pretty solid economy going by selling to the friendly lord dude, but was always -300 or so in the hole. Bumped the tax lever and blam, a thousand in the green with happy citizens! Life got much easier after that.

Documentation, do they just expect you to buy the Prima guide or something? Quite a bit to figure out by trial and error.

I figured stuff out by reading threads and trial and error. To find quests, you have to click on EVERYTHING. Random buildings that you own, that they own, even if there isn't an arrow. One quest is launched from you clicking on their church. That kind of thing. It's dumb.

If you're in the hole, you either don't have a high enough population or they aren't being satisfied.

Not having a high enough population is just when you've got more auxiliary structures than your population can support - too many extra harbors or small warehouses or ships. The solution to this is to (obviously) build more housing (and the proper infrastructure/goods)

A good indicator of issues like this is when costs get out of hand when you leave auto-ascension on and they bump themselves up to the next level before you have any infrastructure/goods ready for them - you get less cash than you did having a fully satisfied lesser house in it's place, and you have twice as many people living in the same housing square, making it worse - they're eating twice your resources and bitching at you for it.

In general, I block ascension rights and manually upgrade houses to citizen and then keep them there. Citizens are a great balance of annoyance and profit. If you want, you can easily game the system by creating goods and a trade route solely to sell them - Carpets, Rope, War machines all sell very well and a few factories churning out goods that go straight to the NPCs will pay for quite a lot of tax shortfall.

I have never messed with tax rates, but it occurs to me that I can tax citizens as "happy" and they will never advance to the next level (you need euphoric to jump to the next level). This is better than denying ascension rights because all houses will upgrade until they are citizens and then stop. I will have to try this.

I should come up with a list of things you should know or that will save you time.... here's a few off the top of my head.


All trade routes should go from Supply->Main Island->NPC so that any overflow will be automatically sold off.

Oriental boats are cheaper and better than Occidental counterparts. They're harder to make (shipyards require mosiacs, the orient glass equivalent). Switch to an all orient fleet when you can to keep costs low. Small = 3 cargo, 2 item slots and only cost 10 upkeep. Use the smalls.

In later games (where you are having to deal with nobleman) having a 'production' island separate from your population island is an absolute must, both for construction space and management reasons. With everything separate, it prevents storehouses from filling up and production to stop, since all your routes end with the NPC, any overspill gets sold directly for profit.

Once you're stabilized and ready to expand to new islands (this should be when you are looking at the orient) you should create a trade route called resupply which pulls tools, wood, stone from your construction island and dumps them at every island you own. You might want to have stop 4 or 5 to go back to your construction island for more goods. It takes a bit but eventually you'll have wood/tools/stone at all your islands which is perfect for when you want to start up bread/beer/whatever, you don't have to send a ship. It's also good when you need to expand any given good due to population, you don't have to send a ship. It makes life MUCH MUCH easier. Do this. Eventually send them to all your orient islands, too.

Don't worry about filling every square centimeter of your island out to the edge. This means don't build on the edge and try and squeeze stuff, build in the center and move outward. This saves a lot of time and rebuilding, the game moves faster when you can just plop down stuff instead of having to fiddle, sell, re-place and wedge stuff in. Thou shalt use the pictures linked in the steam page for designs. I use the wood, carpet, bread (two farm in center, bakery and mill on edges, not what's shown), and perfume designs myself. I use my own design for the rest and generally don't bother with roads to the intermediate steps.

Selling to the NPCs with one of your trade routes or manually piloted ship nets 1/4 of the price of them coming and buying it through a local sell order. Fill your local sell orders up, you'll need to upgrade your storehouse to get all 8 slots.

You can buy honor through the diplomacy menu with a 5-10m cooldown (success percentage gets higher until it hits 100%). Buy it from both the vizer and northborough.

Once you have an oriental trade fleet, you should have enough honor to upgrade them. Use the uprgades icon on the lower right to increase their speed/cargo. It REALLY helps.

Exactly what I did. I had a trade route set up selling cloth and rope from my massive hemp plantation, which made ends meet for a while until I inherited the bigger island and everyone started upgrading. I was blocking ascension until i figured out the tax hike thing and was able to bump up taxes on the citizens, which at this phase of the campaign can't ascend any higher anyway.

I'm starting to do the same thing with the next part of the campaign, need to focus on objectives and stop going full colonist. I'm on chapter 4 now after I finally decided to stop colonizing in chapter 3 and actually end it. But instead of running through the objectives, I see stone and iron deposits, so I build a nice setup to get a bunch of stone for roads and a tool supply line fully built. I've finished maybe three quests in and I've already got a full harbor with four storage buildings, population center of three marketplaces/churches wide, and a dedicated agricultural area that's a quarter of the island, stone roads connecting it all. Woops.

I just checked out the Steam thread pics, nice! But I've already started the field layout minigame, it's part of the fun making something that's both useful and aesthetically pleasing. The list earlier in this thread (which I should reread now!) with the requirements for supply chains should be useful, I've just been winging it by how much extra resources end up in the warehouse.

I've got to master setting trade route levels and that sell order thingy. In chapter 3 I was just dumping everything the ship could hold on the NPC.

This game is fun, the polish level and tweaks have really delivered on the promise of the early games.

I'm digging  this.  Is there an easy way to deal with the trade routes?  That is something I typically don't have patience for.

Not really, though you're a bit vague to be sure. Most of the game is sort of based around it.

Hmm. Can't seem to call up the strategy window (f6 iirc) to set up trade routes in chapter 4. I'm glad in a way that I massively overdid my island before contacting the orient, learning their construction layout required a couple tear-downs (and the island shape sucks), and when they want me to make patricians all I have to do is bump the tax rate. But I've got a massive population on my main island that wants spice from my orient isle (which I way overproduced because it started slow) and now bread from my occident production isle. If I have to run them manually, I'm going to rush the end of the chapter, it's a pita.

I'm good with resources and all that and I understand the flow of one resource into a product.  I just hate micromanaging the process of having the ships take things from place to place.  Maybe it's easier than it seems and just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something.

Little star icon on the bottom right tool bar.

Trade route planner.  Pick ports, pick goods to drop off or pick up, pick ships, go.  Fully automated.

Ahh.  Nice.  I really should play the tutorial, it seems.

I've heard rumors that the draconian (and undocumented except on a read.me file), installation restrictions (install 3 times only, or 3 PCs only, or something similar) were removed in patch 1.1.  But I can find nothing from Ubisoft that confirms such.

Can anyone confirm or deny this rumor? 

Also, is it possible to play this without an internet connection?

You know what I like? People who use the search button.

Yeah me too.  Musta been having a bad spelling day, because I really did search!  I blame it on the drugs.  I'm just not sure if it's the ones now, the ones back in the 70's, or something inbetween though.

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=18164.msg739258#msg739258

I stopped on Part 6 of the campaign because I found it annoying and very unlike the rest of the game in its appeal. I should get back into it.

I can't believe it took me half a year to figure how to transfer a profile between systems.

I'm picking this up again since I can't get XBox Live at work.

Just picked this up.  It's awesome.  Played till 3 this morning, that hasn't happened in forever.

One question.  I'm on the campaign mission where we're rescuing children and delivering them to the bald pedophile... the Sultan dude says he gave me a letter for the mine manager... where the heck is it???  Anyone remember?  The mine manager just tells me to fuck off and I can't find it anywhere.

If you can't find letters, make sure to check all your warehouses to see if they things stored in inventory. Often, letters and the like don't go to your ships directly.

Oh, of course, it was on my autopilot trading route ship...

Took me forever to think to look there... but I guess it makes sense.

So, they just released an expansion (http://store.steampowered.com/app/33340/) for this.

Is has multi-player apparently.

Also schild just bought it on Steam.

Thats about all I know.

Oh fuck.

Also? Released with as little fanfare as possible, it seems.

Funny, I never thought about this game, "Wow the one thing that would make it ultimate is multiplayer!"

It was a lot of fun, but I wouldn't want to try to complete a game in a sitting.