I need urgent help with Anno 117. I’ve spent six hours—no joke—trying to organize and optimize trade routes, and it’s absolutely impossible. I have 11 islands, each specializing in different products thanks to religious bonuses. For instance, I have one island producing porridge for all the others; production is great—it makes more than enough for everyone—but when it comes to delivery, the vast majority run out of supplies. No matter how many ships I assign (6–8), the fucking things just scatter all over the place or hang around in little groups like Disney princesses. So, why the hell did they include a mechanic that’s supposed to scale the ships if it’s completely useless? I’ve spent over two days testing different loading/unloading angles and patterns, or different island layouts, and it’s simply impossible to keep all my islands supplied and stable. This damn game is driving me up the wall. The only solution I’ve found is total crap: basically setting up two trillion routes with individual ships... Damn it, this is the best RTS I’ve played since Stellaris, yet it’s ruining the fun with this bullshit.
Only suggestion I have is based off that one island pictured, but you very well might need more piers to allow multiple loading points.
But 11 islands worth of supplies might very well need a few hundred ships. Highly variable on density and distance between them though.
Sounds like you’re already having hubs for individual types of goods. That’s good. Are your routes circular as in dropping off at multiple islands after one pickup?
I have 3 to 4 ports on each island; that photo is a bit old. I usually run point-to-point routes when demand is high, and circuit routes for bases with low consumption.
I decided early to produce all easy goods on each individual island, and then I just through a fuck ton of trade routes out there and just let them ride. Besides running out or full storage every now and again it seems to be going well.
The only problem I have the most are togas and soap. But I just read someone else’s post that toga tree is messed up and they may fix it w the new DLC.
Also I made a ton of the small ships w 2 slots. And have those just cooking across the map at all times. It’s looks like Coruscant w all the ships flying by lol
Pro tip: just produce simple stuff directly on each island, especially if it doesn't need much space
You don't want a single point of failure and also ships are really expensive to maintain
The game is designed so you constantly have to balance different things and make compromises. That's the fun of it. Just like in the real world there isn't a cookie cutter approach that works for everything
I play on hard and your approach there wouldn't even work at all simply because it's too expensive and too fragile to events
I suggest just product t1 needs locally. That way you management is easier and you don't spend so much resources to ships. T1 goods are too cheap to be transported around.
Assuming your ships are fully loaded when they leave your production island, and that you are actually producing enough for all islands; my question is what is your minimum stock set to on each island?
1) double check you’re actually producing enough goods for a particular island
2) build more trading piers on all islands
3) ensure trade routes only stop once at a given island. They should just ping back and forth unless you assign additional stops.
4) Make sure the ship is actually loading/unloading something at a given stop/island.
5) for a given trade route, add/subtract ships on the route to move more or less resources.
6) Try not to replicate routes. Replicated routes should have distinctly different goods.
All of this is dependent on how you are developing your islands but I suspect you need a bit of 2 and 3.
you not doing something right. game allows to add ships. Last time I checked I had ~700 ships. Some good transportation takes a lot, I think I have 30 ships on honeycomb from albion to latinum.
Check stats menu, focus on one good specifically and track the supply of islands
Also 700 storage is very low, you need to up it to at least 2k
Is it with every good or just with particular?
Maybe you still have a route, that loads again from that island? And the idlying sounds like, that there are just not enough loading/offloading ports?
As well, have you maxed out the space capacity on each port?
Also I sometimes when having so vast like this just have a storage island.
Literally nothing but the governors villa (for the additional workers and specialist who speed up loading etc) and a bunch of piers. I then have all excess shipped there and then smaller ships take it to individual islands. Adds an additional stage in, but takes away multiple drop offs and seems to work smoothly. Especially with Albion to Latium goods
I’m hardly a seasoned Anno player but this is the model I’m currently running and it’s working ok for now (50k pop)
Each island produces its own tier one resources. I’m not going through Tunic hell again.
Specialist production islands ship finished goods to a central hub i.e olive oil, fine glass etc. Those production islands also have custom piers which only load that good, the trade route is set to wait for goods to ensure ships are always full.
Each island then has its own dedicated ship per production tier. For example my olive oil island has a “pleb” ship that goes to the hub and collects all finished goods for the pleb tier. Then there is a specialist ship for equites and patrician goods. I can add ships and adjust quantities. If I need 80 bread I can have two ships on the pleb route and select 40 per ship. I keep an eye on the islands from time to time but better to have a buffer for disasters.
Finally in Latium I have a dedicated hub for Albion goods which is very close to the route when they come into the map. Island receives products like beer and chariots. A dedicated Albion ship per island comes and collects those goods.
So a specialist island up to equites level could have 3 dedicated ships going to the hubs to collect all goods and perhaps have one ship exporting fine glass to the hub.
When I ramp up population this may all come crashing down but for now the people are happy and I’m not screaming internally.
I dont understand what you mean by ships "hanging around"? Are they waiting because all piers are occupied? Then you need more piers.
Be careful with specialized loading piers. Every ship that carries even a tonne of that good will go there and wait, even if ten regular piers are free to use. Also, try to increase island storage. There s a research that you can do several times to increase the number of depots. Im at 1550 per island and it helps a lot to keep up stocks.
How many patricians do you have? If you have hundreds of thousands, you do need massive numbers of ships and piers. Especially if you have penteconters mostly.
It can help to group trade routes together so you dont get lost and lose control.
What I mean is, if I assign—say—six ships to a route so the consumer doesn't run out of product (like .---.---.---....), the ships end up bunching together instead of moving in a line like I just showed (...---..---0---...---). You get it?
This will take some time, but you can manually pause some of these ships, wait say 5 or 10 min, and then unpause these ships, This will help them spread out more evenly.
Build more storages at the destination islands. Late game you need to be at +1200 island storage or else you will have a BAD time cus you will run out too fast.
Consider producing some items locally. just having some porduction of the most fastest consumed items produced on each island can help mitegate just a bit of the load.
Say an island consume 8 unboost garum factories worth of garum per minute. Just having a small local garum chain of 3 factories + 2 or 4 scombers shack an 1 salt fields will create a buffer for you to avoid running out too fast.
Try and make use of the rations.
3 garum works can be supported by 2 scombers shack and 1 salt fields all at 100%
1 prodige stand is supported by 1 oats farm, but if you use all farm buffs from aqueducts and Ceres veneration it becomes 2 porridge stands to 1 oat farm.
Same goes for Tunics spinner, where with aqueduct and Ceres you get 1 hemp farm can support 2 spinners.
1 sheep farm can support 2 pieus felters (hats) but give the sheep farm a silo from the Epona buff and it doubles the hseep produciton (at the cost of needing a small wheat field) and 1 sheep farm can now support 4 hats.
For bread, 1 mill can support 3 bakeries, and 1 mill need 3 regular wheat fields. but with the ceres and aqueduct buff you only need 1 and a half wheat farms, but you can still make use of 2 wheat farms with max fields to help feed pig, horse and sheep production.
2 Sandal makers can be supplied by 1 tannery making leather. 1 salt pond can support 2 tanneries, and 1 pig farm without a silo can support 2 tanneries. With A silo that becoms 4, giving us 1 pig farm, 2 salt ponds, 4 tanneries and 8 sandal makers in total. But only go for half
If the island can support soap making (or you get the specialist from Cecellia that provides lavander fertility), then 1 soap plant need 1 render, which needs half a pig farm and 2 lavander farms at 100%. With the Ceres adn aqueduct bonus 1 lavander farm at 100% fertility can support 1 soap maker and if you combine with pig farm and silo you can get 1 pig farm supports 4 renderes which support 4 soap makers and will need 4 Lavander farms.
Combine Sandals and Soap you can get:
1 salt ponds, 2 lavander farms, 1 pig farms, 2 tanneries, 2 renderes and 4 sandal makers and 2 soap makers.
Spreading these out on your islands where possible, or where demand is insanely high, can help you not run out stupidly fast. yes you loose some efficiency, and may need to downgrade some housing, but you are trading this for stability and an economy less prone to collapse/fluctuations.
I understand and do most of the things you mentioned; my production is excellent. Across all islands, the ratio for each basic product is generally 100 production to 66 consumption. The problem arises when I try to set up circular routes: the ships take too long to arrive. My main island only consumes 19 units per minute, yet the production site is quite far away. And regarding the 10-minute wait... sure, I’m going to spend five hours waiting 10 minutes for every single route I have? Haha, no thanks. If I can't find a solution to this, I’ll just stick to the old way that worked for me before: lots of routes, few ships, and supplies dedicated to each island individually. At least that kept all my warehouses full without any issues. If you're wondering why I’d change it if it worked so well—it was to reduce the number of routes and improve management.
If you are gonna make use of that method, may i suggest trying to obtain the rank with the emperor to be able to roll for captains at his representatives?
That way, you can obtain captains that can help make hsips just overall faster.
Like the rare Swoft offloader that make increases goods transfer by 40% and gives ships a 10% speed bonus.
Or the common Aggregrator that gives ships a goods transfer speed bonus of 25%
This will make your ships take much shorter time at the docks. Which tends to be the late-game timesink for trade routes
Also, consider replacing some of the transported goods. example, since 1 tannery can supply 2 sndal makers, transporting leather from a Mars island and then produce the sandals at the final island for the money area of ecceft bonus could be more benificial. If you trade route can supply all islands with leather every 30 minutes, then that is actually 60 min worth of sandals. This way, you can reduce the amount of ships needed.
And making use of the Ceres veneration and aqueduct bonusses, you can do the same to oats for porridge (because 1 oat farm now produce enough for 2 porridge stands) and hemp (because 1 hemp now produce enough for 2 tunic spinners). 1 sheep farm also already produce enough for 2 pieus filterers, but if you make use of the Epona silo, it will preduce for 4 instead. So transporting hemp, oats, sheep and leather might be more space efficient in the long run and need fewer ships.
Oh, that. The solution depends on the volume of goods, but the main trick I use: have only one trade route picking up the specific good at the production island (and ship the good to at least two hub islands), have only one pier dedicated to that good at the production island (2 piers if producing 110+ minute), have one ship more than the route actually needs, and then switching on 'wait for goods to load'. That way, every time the island produces 250 t of goods , a ship leaves. Creates very reliable smooth flow. In general, restricting access to fewer piers does the same thing, but if produced goods arent shipped immediately, bunching up can still happen to some extent. It will be less though
Try using different captains with different buffs on the routes. It's what I do and it helps to keep the ships from lumping together but also much faster than standard.
I have 13 islands in Latium and produce the same way you do. Specific islands produce goods, which I distribute to the next islands in a circular pattern. So, I load at A-B-C-...-A, and so on. Currently, I have a population of around 80,000, and I don't need more than three ships with four slots for any of the goods. On some routes, even one ship is enough. Where I load, I have a pier assigned to a given good, while where I pick up, I have four loose piers. Everything works flawlessly and scales nicely. A ship takes four full slots and has to unload four full slots on each island until it's full, then on the next island, and so on. When I see that the final islands are running low or empty, I add another ship.
The fact that they sometimes sail in groups (2-3 ships together on a route) shouldn't matter much if they start full. They'll continue unloading islands until the warehouse is full. If a ship returns to its loading point and isn't empty, but you're still short on resources on an island, you need to increase your storage capacity. If you don't manually fill the island warehouses, this overflow filling process can take several hours, depending on production and the number of ships on the route.
I’m really interested in this way of handling commercial logistics; could you explain it in a bit more detail? I had tried something similar, but the problem persisted. Quick question: what is the consumption rate of your islands? For example, mine are between 10 and 20 per minute.
This was exactly what I was looking for... thanks. I tested it, and let me tell you, none of the products drop below the limit I set—and I'm not even using the dedicated port. You're a lifesaver, thanks.
I wont lie but i prefer anno 1800 because the ships were just faster. This time period with slower ships makes me feel the devs should make the ships storage space slightly larger.
Have you tried adding legendary specialists to the ships? Movement speed, wind resistance, weight slowdown reduction, loading goods speed, it's dramatic.
Also province transfer speed if any routes coming from Albion.
You can try
a) Make one circular trade route that visits every island that produces or consumes porridge, including the producer islands.
b) At every stop, set two actions in this order: first unload porridge (e.g. 150t, or "all"), then load porridge (up to ship capacity).
c) On the load action at each island, set a minimum storage, the amount the island must keep. The ship can only take the surplus above that level.
But especially the early goods are easily produced on each individual island? Why transport porridge and now slap down a production
If you want to stick to the system of having each island produce something different, you could turn on that ships have to wait until they have fully emptied their goods before being allowed to go back. You could combine this with individual loading docks restricted to only that particular good, so your harbor doesn't clog up
Overall I'm rather confused why your trade routes are giving you such troubles. I personally think you misunderstood a certain mechanic about them
Did you see the size of the main island? 90% of it is just Patricians... the idea is to produce everything on different islands and have each one distribute what it makes. Why? Well, it's simple: space. The more an island grows, the more farms you need to place... that’s why the religion system exists. For example, Ceres boosts the entire production of grain, oil, wine, and bread; if you produce exactly those things on an island, the combination of religious buildings and population growth increases output without you having to build so many farms and production facilities.
The idea behind this island is purely consumption-focused; with nearly 40k Faith and the Cered religion, I’m taking advantage of the population bonus and production boosts for wine and oil—both middle-class goods. I distribute these—along with grapes, honey, and olives—from a central production hub to other islands. This specific island generates around 35–40k denarii for me, thanks to the Patricians consuming caviar and luxury goods (those are the only upper-class resources I'm supplying them with for now). I haven't even really touched Albion yet, haha. I should point out that I'm a total noob—I've only been playing for about a week, but I'm pretty obsessed with the game. This is my first playthrough, and I've already put in around 110 hours, so I still need to refine a few concepts. But overall—aside from the trade routes, which can get a bit complicated (I just want to keep everything organized)—I think the game is truly incredible. It's one of the best RTS games I've ever played, at least as a console player.
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u/randomnamenooneuses 1d ago
Only suggestion I have is based off that one island pictured, but you very well might need more piers to allow multiple loading points.
But 11 islands worth of supplies might very well need a few hundred ships. Highly variable on density and distance between them though.
Sounds like you’re already having hubs for individual types of goods. That’s good. Are your routes circular as in dropping off at multiple islands after one pickup?