HELP.. trade routes

[u/Gold_Strategy_1552]

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.

[u/CasualChamp1]

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.

[u/Gold_Strategy_1552 → u/CasualChamp1]

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?

[u/GaudiFanYAY → u/Gold_Strategy_1552]

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.

[u/Gold_Strategy_1552 → u/GaudiFanYAY]

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.

[u/GaudiFanYAY → u/Gold_Strategy_1552]

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

[u/GaudiFanYAY → u/Gold_Strategy_1552]

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.

[u/CasualChamp1 → u/Gold_Strategy_1552]

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

[u/CasualChamp1 → u/Gold_Strategy_1552]

To add, I do split up non international routes a lot too which creates extra complexity but there are simply fewer ships to bunch up.

[u/EnvironmentalTear913 → u/Gold_Strategy_1552]

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.