Anno tipps: Anno 1800 tips guide: how to get your empire off the ground

Anno 1800 tips guide: how to get your empire off the ground

Usually found in the shadow of more complex management games like Cities: Skylines, the Anno series offers more streamlined city building. That doesn’t mean that it’s without complexity, however, and newbie mayors will benefit from a handy Anno 1800 guide. Like any good city builder, there are layers to Anno’s formula, and things tend to get more involved as the game goes on.

In this approximation of the industrial revolution, you’ll start with a simple farming population that needs food and clothing. Before long you’ll find yourself spinning several plates and managing three or four tiers of citizenry, as well as complex production chains, naval expeditions, trade routes, and diplomacy.

To help newcomers to the series, we’ve assembled this list of Anno 1800 tips that cover many aspects of the game that are easily overlooked. From city planning to emergency preparedness, these hints should help you build the best island empire possible.

Use Blueprint Mode

Planning your city’s layout is one of the most important parts of Anno 1800. Success depends on your ability to fit all the necessary amenities on your island, so you’ll need to efficiently use the space you have. If you’re worried about the permanence of building placement, the game includes a very handy Blueprint Mode. This lets you test your plans without committing to anything and allows you to experiment with different setups.

You can also use the ‘move’ tool by right clicking to relocate your buildings after you’ve built them. But, on higher difficulties, it costs money and resources to use. Instead, play it safe and use Blueprint Mode.

Low on money? Build more houses

The game doesn’t do a great job explaining this, but your citizens pay taxes. The happier they are, the more they’ll pay. So, by building and upgrading houses regularly, you not only meet the needs for the production of goods on your island, but you’ll also boost your income. Happy citizens are the foundation of any successful empire. And, speaking of happiness…

Monitor happiness

Keep your population happy by closely monitoring their needs. Each tier of citizen has different needs. For instance, farmers require the most basic stuff – fish, clothing, and a nearby marketplace – so set about erecting these. Once these needs have been met, you can upgrade them to the next tier of citizen with more complex needs, and so on.

Monitoring contentedness on a citizen level also contributes to the overall happiness of your island, which has several gameplay ramifications. Sometimes a happy populace will throw a festival in your name, which improves your city’s appeal to tourists or temporarily buffs production. Meeting luxury needs is also effective, so drop a church or museum into your town a watch the joyful numbers rise. Merry people are also far less likely to riot, which leads us to our next Anno 1800 tip.

Establish emergency services ASAP

There are few worse feelings in Anno 1800 than watching a fire or riot break out and being totally helpless to stop it. It takes time to train emergency service staff, so drop a fire department, police station, and hospital in your city as soon as you can. Riots and sickness have adverse effects on your island’s happiness, so be prepared with the necessary public utilities.

Jet fuel can’t melt: Our Anno 1800 steel beams production guide

Keep an eye on their area-of-effect, too; you may need multiple fire stations to cover larger cities. Also buildings like the Schnapps Distillery are more prone to explosions and late game advancements like electricity only increase the probability of fires. It pays to be prepared.

Settle a second island early

No island contains every resource in the game – usually you’ll at least find basics like clay and grain – so finding an island capable of producing goods your first island cannot is crucial. Set up trade routes between islands to ensure your entire population benefits.

This also makes you less dependent on trading with opponents. You can’t rule out the chance of an especially evil AI player betraying you and cutting off your precious beer supply. This heinous villainy brings us nicely on to the next part of our Anno 1800 guide…

Bolster your defenses

Anno 1800’s AI can be fickle: one minute it’ll pleasantly trade with you, the next its entire naval force arrive at your shores. So make sure you have at least a few ships and mounted guns defending your harbours. Throw in a repair crane or two and you’ll be fine against most acts of enemy aggression.

Beautify your community

Successfully leveraging the handsomeness of your home can be financially lucrative, so keep your island’s beauty in mind as you grow your community. Attract paying tourists by cultivating free, natural space with trees and parks, for example. Museums and zoos can provide huge attractiveness boosts, too, as long as you have items and animals to stock the exhibits.

Customise your settings

The pleasantly soothing experience of planning your city in Anno 1800 is so relaxing that the existence of opponents can ruin an otherwise peaceful time. Luckily sandbox mode lets you customise your rules and turn off AI opponents. Everyone should play at least one game of Anno 1800 this way; the satisfying gameplay loop of building houses, meeting population needs, and upgrading to the next tier is almost meditative. You can also choose specific victory conditions to suit your chosen playstyle, too. As a result, Anno 1800 is one of the most relaxing games of 2019.

Brick by brick: Construct away in the best building games on PC

There you have it: thanks to our Anno 1800 tips guide, you can put your feet up knowing that you’re a mayor so damn good the Industrial Revolution won’t know what hit it. Or your treasured people are unwell/on fire as you sip Schnapps from the comfort of your palatial digs. Either way, if you’re looking for more ways to test your tactical skills, look no further than our list of the best strategy games on PC. Then there are the best 4X games around, if you’re really in the mood for conquest. Whatever floats your mayoral boat, just make sure you’ve looked after your shipbuilders. Just saying.

Anno 1800 tips: production lines, money making and more explained

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Anno 1800 is one of the most entertaining city-builders of recent years, as I explained in my review last month. But constructing a thriving industrial metropolis requires players to master many different systems, from learning complex production lines to understanding the nuances of trade. It also boasts a surprising amount of depth, to the point where it’s easy to neglect some of its smaller mechanics to your own detriment.

But fear not, young industrialists! PC Gamer is at hand with this handy guide, which will help you navigate through the Old and New worlds of Anno 1800, taking you from a quaint farming village to an industrial megacity.

Anno 1800’s production chains are crucial, but there’s more you need to know

The backbone of any Anno 1800 city its production chains. Most buildings you construct will form part of a chain that inputs raw materials and outputs an item that your city’s populace needs. As a simple example, potato farms produce (wait for it) potatoes, which can then be transported to a distillery to make schnapps, a relatively basic product used mainly to keep your farmers happy.

Effective production, however, involves more than just constructing all the buildings in the chain. The building in question needs to be connected to a road (or in the case of some late-game buildings, a railway), and be situated close to a warehouse so that the produced goods can be quickly stored. It doesn’t matter how distant two buildings in a chain are from one another. If they’re both close to a warehouse, they’ll be able to access the resources they need.

Moreover, every farm and factory you build requires a certain number and type of population to function effectively (we’ll get onto population types shortly). A potato farm only requires 20 farmers, but a steelworks requires 200 workers, so your city needs to be able to support that population surplus there’s any point in building a steelworks. It’s important to check you meet the quota of required citizens before proceeding with any construction project, else you might end up wasting money and resources on a building you’re not yet capable of supporting.

Two other things can affect your overall production. These are population happiness and resource access. You can artificially increase or decrease the production of any resource by clicking on the relevant population tier at the top of the screen, selecting the resource in question, and adjusting the slide-bar accordingly. Be warned though, increasing production reduces happiness, and in the extreme, they could stage a riot that might halt production entirely. Hence it’s important to ensure their a population tier’s needs are catered for before you start forcing them to work harder. 

Lastly, some produced resources, like iron ingots, are used for making lots of other products, so you need to ensure you have enough of them in stock, whether that’s by building more smelting plant, cranking up production, or importing them via trade.

How to make money in Anno 1800: build houses and grow your population

The most important thing you need to know for playing Anno 1800 is that it’s households, not people, which form your main source of income. Each farmhouse you construct earns a set amount of money at regular intervals, while upgrading that farmhouse to house higher population tiers increase that overall income.

This means the best way to earn money in Anno 1800 is simply to build lots of houses. You will need to do this anyway to fill your farms and factories, but it’s important to bear in mind that you can keep on building houses after you’ve met those requirements. Anno 1800 doesn’t simulate unemployment, so there’s no punishment for having a large population surplus. In fact, it’s practically encouraged.

However, while building houses is straightforward enough, growing your population is more complicated. Each house you build starts off empty and gradually fills over time, based on how well you meet the needs of the local population.

Needs and desires are different for each of the seven population tiers Anno 1800 features. There are five in the Old World—farmers, workers, artisans, engineers and investors—and two in the New World—Jornaleros and Oberos. Anno divides needs into two groups; basic needs and luxury needs. Frankly though, you need to fulfil all these needs for your city to thrive. A more pragmatic way to think of need types is production needs and civic building needs.

Farmers, for example, have the basic needs of fish, work clothes, and access to a market. The first two are provided by production chains, but the third requires that every farmhouse is close to a market, which basically means building them at regular intervals. This is the case for any civic building need, whether it’s schools and churches for workers, theatres and universities for artisans, or a boxing ring for Jornaleros. You can check the basic and luxury needs of any household by clicking on it.

Once a house reaches its maximum population, you can upgrade it to the next population tier. When you do this, it’s worth building another farmhouse in its stead. Otherwise, you’ll end up without enough farmers, which will have a knock-on effect for production across the city. Remember that while you can build as many houses as you like, you still need to ensure your city is producing the right resources in the right amounts to cater to those additional needs, else you’ll have a riot on your hands.

Fertility explained in Anno 1800

Fertility is a sneaky little mechanic that you probably won’t notice until it blows up your construction plans like a big seed bomb. Each randomly generated island of an Anno 1800 map has a different soil fertility, meaning they can only grow certain crops. For example, you might discover your starting island cannot grow hops (used for making beer), or that your New World colony is unable to grow cotton.

To maximise your corporation’s production, you’ll need to own multiple islands. Colonising an uninhabited island is very easy, all you need to do is load a ship with 10 wooden planks and 8 steel beams, then sail it to the island of your choice to build a trading post. You will also need to find an island suitable for colonisation, so it’s wise to send your flagship on a grand tour of the map at the game’s outset.

In fact, taking note of your starting island’s fertility should be one of the first things you do. This is because other players (human and AI) will start colonising islands quickly, and it’s much harder to wrest an island from an enemy’s grasp than it is to settle an uninhabited one.

Use trade to boost and balance your economy

During Anno 1800’s early game, you probably won’t have to think about trade too much. When you start colonising multiple islands and reaching the higher population tiers, however, trade becomes much more important. You can trade products and resources in a couple of ways, through your trading post, or by setting up specific trade routes.

These are slightly different mechanics used for different things. Your trading post is essentially a balancing agent for your economy. At your trading post, you can set each item your city produces to automatically bought, sold or “balanced”—alternating buying and selling to maintain a specific number. If you’re producing a healthy surplus of a specific product, like cannons or clothes, then you can set your trading post to sell that item. Meanwhile, if you can’t produce an item yourself—perhaps due to a lack of fertility—then you can set your trading post to buy it, and fill that gap until you can resolve your production issue.

Trade routes, on the other hand, are used to send specific goods to specific places. For example, if you have one island that can produce beer and one that can’t, then you can set up a trade route to export your beer surplus to the island that needs it. Trade routes are particularly important for getting products from your New World colony, such as rum, to your Old World city, where the hoi-polloi are desperate to get their hands on exotic goods. They’re also highly customisable, letting you set up multiple stops, drop off one item and pick up another, and so forth.

If you don’t have your own ships, or you simply don’t want to micromanage trade routes, then you can set up a charter route, which creates an AI-controlled ship to ferry goods from one selected destination to another. They’re more limited than trade-routes and cost a small amount of money to upkeep, but they’re useful if you want to set up quick trade route without committing one of your own ships to it.

And speaking of ships…

Don’t neglect your navy…or your neighbours

It’s very easy to think of Anno 1800 as a city-building game, because most of what you do revolves around city construction. But it is in fact an RTS, featuring naval combat, diplomacy and conquest. In the early game, none of these appear that important. But they become hugely significant in the mid-to-late game as competition for islands and resources becomes fiercer.

Because of this, you should start preparing for conflict as early as possible, while mitigating the possibility that it’s you who ends up on the defensive. Check the diplomacy screen regularly to see who likes you and who doesn’t. If you can keep your opponents sweet with nice words and the occasional bribe, it’s a good idea to do so. Meanwhile, start building gunboats and frigates as soon as your economy can handle it, and assign a protection flotilla to accompany any schooners or clippers committed to trade routes. Even if you’re not at war with anyone, the seas are prowled by pirates searching for easy prey. If you need to declare war, try to make sure you’re in a position to blockade your enemies’ ports before you do so. 

Lastly, don’t forget to build up your own harbour defences and improve them with newly unlocked technologies. Anno 1800 isn’t all sheep farms and windmills. Things can get nasty, and your want to be ready for that.

Electricity explained in Anno 1800

Once you unlock the fourth population tier—Engineers—you’ll also unlock the ability to build oil-burning power-plants. In other words, electricity. Electricity is a slightly odd component of Anno 1800, as it acts both as a powerup and a necessary resource.

Electricity is quite a complicated resource to produce, requiring an oil-drilling plant with added derrick modules, and a special oil-drum dock at your port connected to your oil-plant via railroad. To build an actual power plant, you’ll also need to produce concrete, which is an entirely separate production chain.

Power-plants can be used to provide a significant boost to the production of any late-game factory built within its area-of-effect. But some factories require electricity as a standard component to function. What’s more, before you can upgrade an Engineer’s apartment to the final population tier—investors, you will need to power the Engineer’s apartment with electricity, which means you’ll need to start thinking about where to place those power plants in and around your city.

Zoos in Anno 1800

One way to boost your city’s economy is through tourism. Once you unlock Artisans, you can build a special visitors pier on your waterfront, which lets tourists explore your city. They’ll only visit, however, if your city has a high “Attractiveness” rating, which can quite hard to attain when you’ve got two-dozen factories belching a blanket of smog into the sky.

There are various ways to increase your city’s attractiveness, such as keeping your factories away from your residential areas, and building lots of parks and ornaments. But the best way to entice tourists to your city is to build a zoo and a museum.

These buildings are unique in Anno 1800 in that building them is only the start of your interaction with them. They also need to be filled with attractions, artefacts in the case of the museum, and animals for the zoo. To get these, you need to send your ships out on expeditions, dangerous adventures that almost act like a separate game.

We’ll be doing a separate guide dedicated specifically to expeditions, so look for that soon. For now though, it’s worth bearing in mind that while your museum can be built more or less wherever you like, you should set aside plenty of space for your zoo. This is because the zoo is a modular building that can be expanded with enclosures, and there are lots of different animals to find, each of which has its own enclosure. A large zoo filled with animals will be a massive tourist temptation, so it’s worth planning your zoo’s layout well in advance.

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Anno 1800 — Important New Features and Game Changes

This chapter of the Anno 1800 Walkthrough describes the most important features introduced in the latest installment of the series. Some of these functions are:

Going back to the history of . Anno 2070 and Anno 2205 presented a futuristic vision of amazing technological breakthroughs. The previous release even allowed players to travel into space and set up their own colony on the moon. Meanwhile, Anno 1800 takes us back to historical times and players’ places in the 19th century, where steam and electricity ruled. You will be able to build your city at the beginning of the century and turn it into an industrial power. nine0003

Blueprint Mode . Anno 1800 allows you to use the blueprint mode, which makes it easier to manage the available space on your island. You can plan your city ahead of time and continue building buildings when you have enough resources. In addition, you can select a building and move it to another location if necessary.

Additional game session — Amazonia . Like the previous installment in the series, Anno 1800 offers an additional game session. After exploring the impressive city in your main location, you will discover South America — you can build a new city there and purchase unique goods. nine0003

Cultural buildings . Satisfy the needs of your workers and you can get artisans for your empire. You can use them to build two cultural buildings: a zoo and a museum. These unique buildings will increase the attractiveness of your city. To acquire new species of animals or legendary artifacts, you will have to participate in special events — Expeditions

Expeditions . Move the camera away from the world map and you will notice some interesting developments. Select them and you will find out that it is possible to send an expedition to the region. All you have to do is select your ship, supplies and important crew members, and confirm the mission. As soon as the ship reaches its destination, a short briefing will be held — you can decide how your crew will behave in case, for example, the inhabitants attack you. Complete the expedition and you will receive valuable rewards: rare animals for your zoo or legendary artifacts for your museum. Nothing stops you from having your own, like Stonehenge on the island! nine0003

Urban attraction . Your empire is defined by six factors: culture, nature, celebration, vulgarity, pollution, and instability. All these factors will affect the attractiveness of the city — the larger it is, the more guests and tourists will visit your island.

Exploration and trade . The game designers focused mainly on exploration, finding new resources on your map, and trading with other factions. Establish contact with other islands for luxury items. You can also send your fleet to invade enemy territory. nine0003

This chapter of the Anno 1800 game guide contains some useful tips for beginners to help you build a successful empire.

  1. Focus on building more houses for your people . Start the gameplay by building many residences for new residents. Once they reach the needs of this social group, they can be promoted — however, you will lose some workers. For example, if you promote your farmers to workers, you can assign them to your mines. Unfortunately, they will no longer be able to work in the fishery. So you need a lot of houses and villagers that can switch between social groups. nine0003

  2. Create many objects that generate building materials . You’ll get by with some planks at first, but it won’t take long before you need bricks and steel. Make sure you have enough production facilities so that you don’t have to wait too long to put up new buildings.

  3. Use blueprint mode . Planning your buildings is one of the new features in Anno 1800. Use this option to plan ahead for the development of your city and acquire buildings as soon as you get enough resources. nine0003

  1. Send your ship to scout area . Choose your ship to scout the surrounding waters. You will find additional islands containing, for example, new resources. In order to use them, you will need to build shipyards on newly discovered islands and ship enough materials from your main island.

  2. Establish small colonies . This statement is directly related to the previous one. Try to use the islands surrounding your city as quickly as possible — the most profitable areas are the ones where you can build mines. You can also build factories on other lands, away from the main residential areas — this will increase the overall happiness and attractiveness of the city. nine0003

  3. Keep performance high . Click on a building to check its performance. Your priority should be to assign the maximum number of available employees — sometimes you also need to make sure that there is enough free space around or a large farm field.

  1. Remember to trade .