Anno 1404: Dawn of Discovery

[Ceryse]

Unless you click the link to get it in English.

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.

[lac]

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

[Draegan]

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.

[Slyfeind]

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.

[Draegan]

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

[Draegan]

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.

[bhodi]

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.

[LK]

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

[Draegan]

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.

[LK]

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.

[Yoru]

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.

[Draegan]

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.

[Ceryse]

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.

[Draegan]

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.

[schild]

Deliveries are done twice as fast on stone roads.

[Draegan]

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

[Sky]

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

Would have.

 

[Ingmar]

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

[Sjofn]

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

Would have.

 

 

[Pennilenko]

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

[Yegolev]

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

there's

[LK]

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.

[Ceryse]

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.

[Draegan]

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

[LK]

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.

[Paelos]

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!

[Ingmar]

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. 

[Paelos]

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.

[schild]

This is more complicated than Civ 4

Wrong, sir.

[Paelos]

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.

[LK]

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.

[Paelos]

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.

[Draegan]

The campaign is a 30 hour tutorial.

Edit:
Typo from my G1.

[Slyfeind]

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.

[Paelos]

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.