Trying to play 1602 AD

[Richard Bruns]

I got this for Christmas from the bargain bin, but I can't figure out how to get started. The economy just seems to stagnate. I've read the manual and done all the tutorials, but they don't help much.

The biggest problem is that I run out of tools before I can get a quarry built, and there seems to be no way to add to the initial supply. I am then trapped, as there is no way to build the tools I need to get more tools.

Also, the game is never clear on whether structures like hunting lodges need roads. The manual says that only buildings that make consumer goods need roads, but it seems that goods just pile up unless everything has roads.

Thanks for any help you can give.

[ChrisiusMaximus]

You can buy tools from traders, not the other nations but the free traders. They sail around the map independantly from any other teams and will buy and sell from your warehouse quayside.

if you click on your warehouse on the right side of the screen there are some icons vertically, one is for selling excess goods, another for purchasing needed goods plus several other buttons for different modes.

Find the one for Buying and you should see some empty squares in the box to the right of the buttons. Click on one of the empty squares and you should be able to choose what you want to buy by clicking on the required items icon. you can cycle through the three types of goods to find tools which is on the building materials section. When you have clicked on tools you are back at the selection screen where the empty squares are but one should now show tools

You can also set quantities to buy and to stock etc etc and adjust the buying or selling prices

Most buildings do need road access, the hunting lodge does. The only buildings I can think of off hand that dont require roads are sheep farm and cattle farm.

There should be a help button on the bottom left of the main screen, if you click it you should be able to get info on most things in the game.

On the tools thing, in some scenarios there are no free traders and only limited tools to start with. In these harder scenarios it is very easy to run out of tools, but one way to help prevent this is to click the icoin off to stop providing building materials to your people, which can also be found when at the warehouse sub menus

Hope that helps you out a bit.

[lord of the mark]

yeah, IIRC you need to start buying tools from the traders as soon as possible, in lieu of anything else. And fairly early you want to start some exports, so you can pay for the tools. That makes it easier to survive till you can build an iron mine (make sure you have an island with iron) once youve got an iron mine going youre in good shape, at least until the mine starts to run out and you need a deep mine. Thats about where i stopped playing, IIRC

[Kassiopeia]

I always start a game by chopping up and selling wood for a while to build up my treasury so that I can buy tools from the traders. Then I start to develop the actual colony itself. It's also a good idea to colonise as many islands as you can in the first few moments, since conquering them in Anno can be quite a bit more annoying.

I did run into the same problem myself when playing for the first few times, it was very agonising when you were still so far from getting an iron mine. Also remember to familiarise yourself with the method of making ships do automated trade tours between your own colonies to provide your main colony with products from your production colonies, I arsed only after having upkept a colony of a thousand aristocrats and a few thousand merchants manually for quite a while...

[pg]

basically it's a puzzle but once you figure it out the game becomes easy. timing the expansion of your economy seems the hardest thing to get down. if you over extend you'll have a really hard time. the key is to get aristocrats since they bring in buckets of profit but to do that you need to run almost all the way up the whole economic ladder iirc.