How do you know these things?
I have to read this forum, to understand how I go about playing Anno!
One thing that is stumping me - collecting 'stuff' and taking it to the warehouse. More and more often I'm seeing messages about my buildings needing produce to be collected. There appears to be one guy walking around, slowly, with a rickety old cart. Can I produce more of these people?
I just picked them up playing the game. I still discover new tricks all the time. For example, I knew you could build your own fields, but had no idea how until I finally noticed that little tiny icon in the corner
You can produce more of those people, by upgrading the warehouse. Click on the warehouse, and in the bottom right corner, where it shows the goods, etc. , there should be a semicircle button at the top, in the middle (the same place where the auto-fields button is for farms). Click that, and if you have the resources, it'll upgrade. You can upgrade the warehouse twice, and each time you do, it'll get another man with a cart. You can also make the carts move faster by building stone roads between buildings instead of dirt paths.
If that still isn't enough:
1) How many buildings have you got linked to that warehouse?
2) You can build an additional warehouse to get another cart.
There are also some items that you can place in your harbour to add an extra cart to every warehouse on that island, but chances are, by the time you can get that, you'll probably have enough resources to have maxed out warehouses with stone roads anyway. In most cases you shouldn't need more than a "lvl 2" warehouse.
Its very difficult otherwise, to plan for carpenters, prisons, churches etc in the early stages. Is this a bad idea to do it this way? Or am I better off leaving lots of open space right from the start?
I usually plan it out a little, but not much. I don't put carpenters in my towns, and you can forget about firemen if you're playing on easy (if fires are starting from riots, no fireman can help you there
).
One sec, I'll just load up a game and show you how I set my towns out.
On this one, I have ALL my houses on one island, and nothing else (there are a couple of lumberjacks, just so I could get the timber for houses). As you can see, I tend to just leave small spaces for things, and put them in when I get to that stage. I started from the marketplace in the center, and expanded to the side, leaving 1/3 of the island for the nomads. Where the church is, in the middle, I had a chapel and empty space, at the start. When I reached Patricians, I replaced it with a church. After that, no-one actually NEEDS a chapel, I only added a few here and there for the extra income from patricians.
A very useful trick is to hold shift when placing something, it'll show you the area that is already covered by other buildings of the same type. So for example if you're placing a church, and you hold shift, it'll show where your current churches cover, so you don't "waste" space by overlapping them.
http://i31.tinypic.com/5121k4.jpg
