Anno 1800 Ultimate New Player Guide
This is an essential guide to Anno 1800 that is going be an ultimate starter guide but should have some useful tips, tricks and strategies in there for regulars of the series as well. The goal of Anno 1800 is to grow your population and to build beautiful cities. To do this you're going to need to supply your citizens with increasingly complex goods that you can find on various islands and link them together with trade routes. You're not alone in this task however, there's usually three other AI companies looking to do the same thing and as you grow your citizen count, you’ll pay more taxes, and this allows you to do economic buyouts of competitor islands and protect your own from the same fate. If your economy isn't strong enough to do that you can also resort to military intervention, declaring war, seeking and seizing the shares for yourself or wiping out an island altogether. This Anno 1800 Ultimate New Player Guide will show you the best way to quickly set yourself up for a strong early game.
Other Anno 1800 Guides
- How to get Electricity, Oil and Trains
- In-depth Island Shares and War Guide
- Dealing with natural disasters and diseases in Anno 1800
- New World Guide, Tips and Tricks
- Trade Routes, Items and Expeditions Guide
- Managing Island Items Inventory and Harbor
- How to Advance Population Tiers, Deal with Needs and Happiness
- Production Chains and In-Depth Population Guide
- [Popular] Top City Layouts and Best Production Chain Setups
Starter Guide Contents
- Sandbox Settings
- Settling an Island
- Buildings and Blueprints
- Making money early
- Building Range
- Production Optimization
- Conclusion
Sandbox Settings
When you’re starting a new Anno 1800 Sandbox game you can either go with preset starting conditions or customize them with your own settings. For now, we’ll assume that you've gone with a preset either normal or advanced difficulty, both of which I would recommend if it's your first time playing. If you do customize the settings, you can turn off all the AI and all the NPCs in Anno 1800. This could provide you with a relaxed experience of building a city or maybe you just want to learn some of the production chains before you kind of go against the AI.
Settling an Island
With the standard settings you'll find yourself set up on an island already with a harbor and you'll also have your flagship and enough material to colonize a second island and once an island is colonized nobody else can build on it, so you'll want to claim another island early on. Make sure to find one that is suitable. An island is suitable if fertility and raw resources are good, this is what you're going to be looking out for as you'll notice on your starting island that you have the fertility for potatoes. You always start with this as it's enough to satisfy your first tier of population completely. Using potatoes, you can make schnapps that will keep the farmers happy which is one of the most important thing early game thing we teach you in this
Anno 1800 Ultimate New Player Guide. Chances are you won't have something that is needed for your next tier population; which is bread, sausages and beer so what you'll be looking for on another island is the fertility for wheat, the fertility for hops and the resources for clay. You might already have some of this on your starting island, but chances are you're missing one of them so when you’re settling your second island make sure you settle an island that has something that your current one doesn't. That's a good rule in general as every island you take should have something unique to it. To settle on an island, you just move your ship up to the coast and click The Blueprint to see what's required, settle it and it's as easy as that. You don't have to worry about that island for a while and you can just leave it alone until you're ready to start building up on it but it will prevent anyone else from claiming it or building on it themselves.
Building and Blueprints
One of the great features about Anno 1800 is the ability to use a blueprint mode so switching on it whenever you’re building complex layouts will be great for planning layouts. Your first goal once you’ve settled on an island is to choose a city layout (check our Anno 1800 Best layouts guide) and start building a framework for the city that you found. In case you don't want to copy a premade layout, we've got you covered in the latter sections of this Anno 1800 Ultimate New Player Guide. With blueprint mode on what it does is it creates shapes of houses and buildings. This way you can click and drag in order to place as many buildings as you want. Don’t forget that you also need to place roads and connect buildings to each other. Now, these buildings aren't actually there yet as they are just blueprinted in place. This means we can upgrade the entire city and build the houses around central parts of the settlement where there are services enabling us to keep our precious resources and only upgrade when needed. Going forward, to make sure you have plenty of building supplies you're going to want to build lumberjack huts and for sawmills. At the very least they are one to one ratio so make one lumberjack Hut per Sawmill and make sure they're in range of one or two warehouses for easy transportation. Make sure to build your warehouses first before you go and build your living quarters or other houses or farmer houses because they cost lumber to build whereas the Sawmills and the Lumberjacks Hut only cost gold.
How to make money early?
To make some extra money you'll want to set up trading as soon as possible. Click on your trading post and there you can assign the goods that you want to trade. Now if you click a symbol you'll get the option to start trading it. The first symbol that comes up is balance, that means that the goods will be bought and sold up to the limit set so this means if you have a limit marker it might sell it down to the marker but if you have less in stock it will also buy from traders. I recommend only what you want and then selling the rest. Selling is the button to the left and there you can just say sell everything above a certain amount which is most optimal in early game in order to fasten your progress.
Building Range
If you decide to build a city freehand and not use one of the preset layouts be very careful about the range of the buildings as this is very important with service buildings such as the church and the pub and other public service buildings as well as the warehouses. If you click on a building such as the church, you’ll see how far its range extends. Other buildings like the fire station have a much smaller range and you can see which buildings are best protected by the color of the road so if it's dark green those are the houses and things that will be best protected by that certain fire station whereas buildings at the end of the road will not be.
Production Optimization
It's far better to build a second warehouse rather than upgrade the first one if you have carts waiting on the loading ramps as they are much more expensive. If you upgrade the warehouse, you'll see it costs 20 to maintain the regular warehouse and it's 50 to maintain the upgraded warehouse and it only adds one extra loading ramp whereas adding a second one you would have less cost and add two loading ramps instead of just one. With production it's tempting to start off with a minimum number of buildings so most people would probably start off with two knitters and two sheep farms. These are one to one ratio that just about provides for a small city but if you start off with four of each instead, you'll produce enough to sell through your trading post and that will give you a little bit of gold and a little bit of leeway on producing for your colony. Always build more than you think you need.
A great thing you can look for on the Internet is an Anno 1800 calculator. These basically calculate everything you need for X amount of people so say if you have a thousand farmers and 1,200 workers the calculator will tell you how much workforce you need to deal with them.
Conclusion
Anno 1800 is an incredibly complex game that you can spend hundreds of hours on and still not learn everything. Hopefully this Anno 1800 Ultimate New Player Starter Guide has been useful to you. Also, don't forget to check out our other Anno 1800 guides, we've got plenty of the game covered!
Also, some of the information found in this guide was taken from RepublicOfPlay on youtube as it's very much useful and we could not make it better ourselves. Make sure to check out his youtube channel for more high quality content!