Anno 1800 – Tips to Deal with Debt

How to Deal with Debt

Building more homes is usually the solution to debt. Residents consume goods which generates taxes which is how you make money.

The tutorial is pretty aggressive about telling you to start supplying goods that you can actually wait on. Steel is expensive to produce, but you don’t get any income from producing it.

Hit Ctrl+A (or Q, not sure my keyboard isn’t qwerty) to see the most important screen: what your people consume vs what you’re producing. You just need to make sure that you’re producing just enough, and not overproducing because then it’s kinda wasted.

This way you’ll get to see if you have enough of one factory or not, and if that’s the case, you can build more houses which will generate money, as long as your supply is stable.

Beginning is always rough, you can expect to lose money until you provide fish+work clothes+pub to enough farmers, then you’ll have a positive balance and you can catch a breath at this point.

The campaign will tell you to go steelworks and weapon factory way, way too early, it’s a death trap, those things cost an awful lot and generate zero profit. Delay that until you have a solid balance.

This game is a game about spinning plates. Once you start spinning one, you need to spin another to keep the first going and so on and on. The game does explain this but it can be easy to forget since it also keeps prompting you build X building (since it will supply a new need).

The most important building is the market. This is where your money actually comes from. You build houses to attract more people to your islands who then shop at the market for their basic needs. You then employ some of those workers to create those needs and send them to the market. However, the more of each tier of worker you have, the more needs they will require, eventually forcing you to head to the new world to satisfy them. If they’re needs are unmet, they’ll be unhappy and they will complain in the newspaper before leaving your island, making all other workers upset.

Supplying worker needs is the main gameplay loop. You should think ahead and plan housing districts or even blueprint mode them because a surplus of workers is what makes your economy strong. Each tier of worker provides much more income than the previous but also consume the previous needs plus a few unique ones so don’t immediately upgrade your housing buildings. Try to get each island to specialize in something and ship that between your islands so each place has enough space for large housing districts.

But remember, you’re spinning plates. Large housing districts require pubs, fire houses, police stations, churches, schools etc and you can click on those buildings to see your “coverage” highlighted in green. As you build, you need to also keep track of those or else the ensuing disaster will wreck all your hard work.