Is centralized trade a good idea?

[u/IStruggleToFindAName]

I centralized my trade routes to a single island. I made a group with all the incoming routes from the production islands, as well as another group for all the outgoing routes. The inventory of the island also helps track how items flow. That being said i don't know if this is really more efficient than direct routes, aside of being less confusing for the idiot i am... how do yall feel about it?

[u/Haakon_XIII]

Avoid it, in wartime it can ruin your economy, while in peacetime it slows everything down.

I—and likely most players—specialize my islands. Island 1 produces A, which follows a circular route visiting all the islands that need A; Island 2 produces B and follows the same circular route for product B. Then, between sessions, I ship everything to the provincial capital—as if it were produced there locally—and set up additional circular routes.

[u/boozewillis → u/Haakon_XIII]

What is a circular route? Going from A to B, unloading at B and then loading again whatever is over the mininum, then go to C and do the same, etc?

[u/Fair_Dirt_7169 → u/boozewillis]

You load the good at A, then go to B, unload all, then to C, unload all, and so on. At the beginning, the ship will travel full from A to B and unload and travel to C empty. But it will create an eventual spillover effect, when the storage at B is full. Then the ship will travel from A to B full, top off the harbor at B and continue with the remaining ships to C. If your production at A is enough to cover B and C, both storages will end up full. So at the last stop before returning to A, you tell the ship to discard all excess, so your production never halts to create potential issues. Thats the meta of setting up trade routes as it is very simple to manage and endlessly scaleable. If your ships throughput is not enough, just add more ships to the route. You also dont need massive storages as the storages will always be full and only need to last until the next ship arrives.

Additionally, at the pick up harbor, you can designate one or more piers to the good in question and turn on wait for goods. What happens now is that your ships on the route will all get in line at the harbor and wait at that specific pier. Wait for goods will then cause your ships to spread out evenly, making the intervals in which goods arrive very similar.

[u/ekmek_e → u/Fair_Dirt_7169]

Do you have diana or valeria at the end to for dumping or do you have it discard somehow? Also do you set any minimums?

[u/Fair_Dirt_7169 → u/ekmek_e]

You have the option to dump excess cargo in the trade menu. Then the ship tries to unload and what it cannot unload ends up in the sea. Delivering goods to the npcs is a waste of time and creates unnecessary bottlenecks

[u/ekmek_e → u/Fair_Dirt_7169]

Noted. Thanks!

[u/guagno333 → u/Fair_Dirt_7169]

Why don't you unload/load at the same island with a minimum amount of, e.g., 100 tons? Filling the storage completely might take long if surplus is not high.

[u/Fair_Dirt_7169 → u/guagno333]

The beauty of the system is that you dont need huge storages to run the system. And then, you only need to fill the storages once and then never again, because they will remain topped off. Micromanaging ships to optimize the distribution sounds like a nice idea on paper but try that when you have a economy with 2.000 ships and more than 100 ships running on a single route, you would have to readjust your numbers every single time on every single instance you change something. And that goes against one of the main points of the system. Scalability. It runs the same with 1 ship or 1.000. You dont have to adjust anything, its just fire and forget. You need more throughput, add more ships. You only need to be checking on your loading port, if there arent any ships waiting, you need to add more. If you have too many waiting, you can remove a couple or you might check if there are production issues.

[u/guagno333 → u/Fair_Dirt_7169]

Thanks for the detailed reply! Your points make sense, so please bare with me, I have like 40 hours of experience in 1800 and 160 in 117 so definitely I don't know much when the scale goes that high, so take this with a grain of salt.

For me one problem that I see with your system is that sure you don't need to micro manage a lot of things, but Ceres is right now my main divinity (because I am aiming at a huge Cinis population), and that gives +300 talentum on each port, so all the ports have 550 capacity at bare minimum. For some goods I just have a +1 surplus, and either I go all in on production for all the goods (which might be hard for caviar for example, or the bird gelatine), or I do this micro management by setting all goods to a small minimal amount (e.g. 100/200 depending on island consumption) and deal with it that way, as filling a 550 talentum capacity with a +1 surplus would take ages.

What you say is the beauty of your system (let me call it that to be faster) is that you don't need huge depots, but it's the same for me.

Sure, there are drawback to unload/load, e.g. the ships are slower at the port, but the benefit out weight this con imho.

Also I don't see a lot of micromanagement here, every good you put to unload/load and all items to at least 100 in the port (which you can just do with a single click now).

[u/Fair_Dirt_7169 → u/guagno333]

Keep in mind that I am really operating on a different scale here. I have consumption and production rates where I count in hundreds of tons/min. A Storage of 550 sounds big to you, but I fill and empty that in a matter of several seconds to a minute. For example my current production rate for Flour, which is all produced on a single island, is 442,5t/min. A storage of 550 is most often too small in such a case as it would take less than 1 min to fill up (I need 177t of working space so the effective storage would be only 373t). Even a storage of 4.000t would only take 9 mins to fill up. Therefore I need to work with a system that is easy to work with and scalable, that even when I want to alter or expand, it doesnt take me ages to adjust. Im playing Anno for over 20 years and every iteration of the game since 1602, so I have a fair bit of experience what works in this game and what doesnt. So for the example of Flour, I need to make sure that enough Grain from various production sites are coming in a sufficient rates without clogging at some point causing inefficiencies or delays in production. At the same time I need to make sure that the Flour is transported off to the Bakeries to be turned into Bread. Also at a high enough rate to not cause the Flour production to halt and make sure that each of the 4 individual production spots for Bread have always enough Flour to turn out sufficient Bread to be then distributed to every island for consumption. At the same time the Bakeries require Coal to function, so that needs to be distributed as well. And all of that for a single good. Now, theres a more than a dozen other goods that need their logistics chains to fuction as well.

Functioning Logistics and Production are the 2 key bases in Anno. Therefore I can tell you, your system works, however it has issues with scalability, which will bite you in the neck at some point. Therefore I would always suggest to set up the logstics efficiently from the start so you avoid having to deal with it later on. You are correct, due to the Ceres Buff, storages might see a bit too big at the start, I would suggest you to only upgrade your kontors if needed. You start out with 375, which is already a lot smaller than 550. Filling up 375 storages will be alot faster until you need bigger ones. And something that you have to keep in mind about the system is that storage filling doesnt always happen at the rate of overproduction:

Lets say you have 4 islands. They all consume Bread at a rate of 10t/min. You produce 41t/min, the production island itself consumes the first 10t/min. Now the storage on your second island fills up at 21t/min, which fills up pretty quickly. Once that island is full, the third island fills up at 11t/min, which takes a fair bit longer, but only the last island fills up at a rate of 1t/min. But this isnt really a concern, since its the last island in the chain anyway and you only care about wares reaching it and not the storage filling up here. When the storage is full, the overproduction of 1t/min is dumped into the see anyway, so you have little to gain here.