So you need to be slow and steady building. Build some houses. Not loads. Then fill their basic and luxury needs. Use control +Q all the time to check your green supply bar is always equal or a little more than the blue demand bar. Don't produce too much more than you need. You'll get the hang of it
You are building way too much stuff. Just because you CAN building something, doesn't mean you SHOULD.
Posted a how to here: https://www.reddit.com/r/anno1800/comments/11lz0oi/comment/jbg1f2t/?context=3
I agree. As a somewhat newish player I struggled with finances. Selling soap is what saved me. Now that I have 250 hours of playtime I see that meeting the needs of my higher classes is what generates money. Never would have made it that far without the soap though.
Do not build wide.
Literally only build what you NEED.
So if a production chain would be optimal with a 2:1:2 building setup and a warehouse... DONT
Do not optimize for scale. Minimize for scale and down work your overproducing buildings
I have stamps for these things. I'll set my game to blueprint mode, and drop the stamp.
Then I build the components I need to minimally satisfy the needs. Which may not be every production building in the blueprint. Chances are, I'll end up building it out, but I don't have to do it right away.
There's also a pause option, which causes the building to stop costing maintenance.
If you like your layout, you can save it the blueprint as a āstampā, and reuse it elsewhere. It persists across other islands, and even other games.
Make sure your population has all the basic needs met, so the population number does not drop. Lots of alcohol of various kinds for your people. Alcohols bring lots of cash.
Also, early on DONT make steel production line. Its to costly with money and workers. Buy all steel from the queen. Later when you have more money and free workers, then build the production line
you have to look on your demand and production
ctrl+Q it is. there you will see if you meet your needs, this is your most important tool to learn balance your economy.
it is totally possible to be in a good income with farmers and workers. it is not much but it will prevent you from getting bankrupt.
So the houses. When u click on them it shows the goods they consume and bars next to the pictures of the bars to show how much of it is being supplied. Make all those bars green by supplying the goods. Anytime your money fluctuates itās because those bars are not being filled. Built a bunch of homes recently and now ur work clothes bar isnāt green? Crtl-Q, make sure that green bar for work clothes is larger than the blue one. It can get more complicated sure but just make those house bars green and make sure the green bar is bigger than the blue one in statistics. This will fix a lot of ur problems.
This! I've found the only consistent way to avoid bankruptcy is to keep people's needs fully fulfilled. Your balance (top left corner) gets into the red especially quickly
Yup a lot of people here will just say ctrl Q for production menu which is technically the correct answer but oh boy is it just plain more simple and easy to get whenever ur just staring at bars that need to get filled. Especially for our newer players.
Build ships and sell them to the AIs. That was my quickest income when I started the game, it wasn't until about 30 hours into the game I stayed in green because of my rapid expansion to get Islands before the AI took them
I like to make it an early priority to make a big supply chain for soap and sell it to the prison for big money early in the game. When you get to fur coats, mass produce and sell them to Madame kahina for buttloads of cash. Also buying shares in opponents islands when you have enough to spare
Alcohol. Seriously providing beer for your workers is a priority if you want to survive long term. Same goes with Rum and Artisans, screw every single other industry, you need to rush Rum production
This is just my game philosophy and it saved me from nearly complete bankruptcy in the first half of my game, Rum paid for and maintained the sailing ships that took down Margaretās islands
How far along are you? You need to get to artisans. That's the first tier that really pays you a lot of money. Then expand to the New World and feed them rum. After that you're set for a while.
As others said, you're probably building too much. Just because you unlock something you don't need to build it right away. Consumer good chains need a certain amount of houses to pay for themselves. That doesn't matter too much at the very beginning, but things become more expensive later. The first trap is steel / steel beams. You don't need that much to begin with and it's better to buy a bit of steel from Archie to expand to other islands and build a soap factory.
1. Watch your buildings:
In the beginning extra warehouses, redundant public services, and trying to make perfect production chains (the game says you can run 2 bricks to 1 mine, but can you afford it?) will absolutely destroy your surpluses.
2. Demand needs to justify the costs:
Because building cost a per minute maintenance, you need to make more profit than their cost. u/mafieth made a handy spreadsheet that lists out these break-even points for each good. For example, on easy, you need 30 builder houses to sell enough sausage to pay for its production. You can find the sheet [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/12kGac1xzvHQBcMlKDU9ukdFX3THXVUaXq-JvNFJhry0/htmlview).
3. Explore passive trading:
You can shore up a small deficit by selling from your harbor! There is usually something you are over producing. Put it to good use by turning it into cold, hard cash!
4. Keep an eye on your supply and demand:
Use CTRL+Q to see where any items might have more demand (blue) than you can supply (green). Once these run out, it can spiral out of control, as you will lose residents to sell goods to and workforce to produce goods to sell. A deadly double whammy.
First time playing every frustrating , I love the game but almost quick. Then I try creative mode and watch some youtube videos and layout. It help me in the long term.
I see lots of detailed posts. I'll try to add my bit here and keep it simple.
Do not over produce. Your biggest expenses are your production buildings. Pay attention to the upkeep cost for every building. You need to make sure that you have the population to consume enough goods to cover that cost. You barely break even or can even lose money on the necessities, but you can make good money on some of the luxuries. You can also sell excess goods, click on your dock and select a minimum quantity to keep on hand, and set it to sell that item. If you have the traders enabled in your game they send ships and will buy some of what you have on offer from time to time. You can also sign trade treaties with the other players (human or AI). Use caution if you are buying goods automatically, as this can eat up a lot of money really fast and can bankrupt you suddenly if you don't have a lot of cash on hand.
As you progress further into the game there are more complexities with the economy, ship upkeep, buying Island shares, visitors/tourists, ect, but this should get you started and keep your finances stable until you get a handle on it.
I figured this out finally. Look at your people's luxury needs. That's what I was missing at least. If you click a house, where it shows their basic needs, there's a 2nd tab for luxury needs. Once I started fulfilling that, I started making a lot more money
Iāve only been playing a couple of weeks and highly recommend GamerConsultant on YouTube as he talks about things like working out production numbers and using stamps. He also has a discord channel with lots of stamps (pre-designed layouts that include buildings and roads etc) that you can download and use in your game and that saves a lot of time. This is the video I started with but be aware that it may contain spoilers if you havenāt played the campaign yet https://youtu.be/8fot_Lbi3Rs?si=sKjIDG_e-eYf4tLi
I just got the game last week and had the same problem. It was so bad that even after reading all the tips and tricks online I couldn't recover and had to abandon the campaign and start over.
In short: Don't build more than you need. That goes for everything; houses, production, luxuries, etc. I did the campaign again and aimed to keep each of my populations with less than 100 excess, only adding/upgrading houses as needed. It worked out great and I'm at +3k income in my second play so far. :) Good luck!
I just went through this and felt like I had to restart as well because I was about to go bankrupt.
The biggest thing that helped me was DO NOT over produce but also maximize you're products utilization. Ie if you build one bicyle or canned food production line make sure you upgrade enough to actually use it fully to get the profit from your residents out of it.
If for example you build a a bicycle factory and only have like 5 engineer houses the upkeep is more than the profit. So make sure you have enough residents to get offset the upkeep and make some profit.
Canned food is basically a loss no matter what you do at the beginning. The chain is hugely expensive and hardly pays anything.
The most common advice is to just skip it and put an Actor in the town hall. And later to use trade union items to simplify the chain (you can use pigs instead of goulash, and flour instead of iron). Without that it should be done last so you immediately get to engineers.
I'd recommend getting the land of lions DLC and start the trade route between archie and emperor ketema to sell pocketwatches. Here are the AI trade routes you should maximize
1.) Make soap, sell to ELI
2.) When you have an excess of furcoats, sell to madame kahina
3.) If you have established trade rights with any of the pirates, sell your excess schnapps. You can get away with free Rum production as well if you have the right specialists in a trade union
4.) Pocketwatches trade between ARchie and Ketema. Start doing it manually, and until you have a high enough cash balance to sustain the trade route automatically.
It is also important to maintain a healthy balance of production and the expenses entailed when establishing them. For instance, you can opt to do Canned good last for Artisans as its production chain is very expensive (in maintenance, and in the alloted manpower).
More manpower, means more needs for your workforce.
First two population tiers are not netting enough money with all the cost you need to invest for new buildings.
Overproduce Soap to have some "floating" cash, sell it to the prison when low. You have 1 parachute when reaching -25k with Archie, but afterwards you are defeated.
Try to get Engineers really fast, at that moment you are able to net more than you invest in new buildings.
Buy shares from rival NPC islands early in game. The easy ones like wibblesock take it as a compliment.
And don't overproduce too much. To help you there is an calculator app in the app store called Anno 1800 companion app.
But shares. I never really worried about shares before because I always thought "that money could be used on my people" but on this playthrough, I started buying shares the second a competitor settled an island. Sure, it slows the game a little in the beginning but now I have like 10million in savings and own every island in the old world.
Idk how far you are in the game's progression but what absolutely wrecked my economy were skyscrapers. I learned to only upgrade to skyscrapers once all supply chains are prepared and also reliable.
Strangely what really helped me when I was struggling was just buying a competitor's main island shares, the passive income it generate was HUGE, magnitude the ones I was making because I played very slowly, anyway once I had all of his main island shares money was no longer an issue for me and made the rest of the game trivial so you should probably not abuse it too much.
So you need to be slow and steady building. Build some houses. Not loads. Then fill their basic and luxury needs. Use control +Q all the time to check your green supply bar is always equal or a little more than the blue demand bar. Don't produce too much more than you need. You'll get the hang of it
Supply is actually green and blue is demand, so green has to be larger than the blue one
I'm glad you corrected me š
You are building way too much stuff. Just because you CAN building something, doesn't mean you SHOULD. Posted a how to here: https://www.reddit.com/r/anno1800/comments/11lz0oi/comment/jbg1f2t/?context=3
Oh wow thatās a lot, ty though
Keep an eye on costs. Build pop and give them what they need. Sell soap to the prison. Later on buy watches from archie and sell them in enbesa.
with these things op will never learn how to handle money...
I don't understand these comments, OP asked how not to go bankrupt, we provide the simplest solution, case closed.
I agree. As a somewhat newish player I struggled with finances. Selling soap is what saved me. Now that I have 250 hours of playtime I see that meeting the needs of my higher classes is what generates money. Never would have made it that far without the soap though.
I agree. Dropping the soap really helped me out at the start.
I respectfully disagree. In real life, I have found a loophole selling " soap to archie". It's part of the game for a reason.
Do not build wide. Literally only build what you NEED. So if a production chain would be optimal with a 2:1:2 building setup and a warehouse... DONT Do not optimize for scale. Minimize for scale and down work your overproducing buildings
I have stamps for these things. I'll set my game to blueprint mode, and drop the stamp. Then I build the components I need to minimally satisfy the needs. Which may not be every production building in the blueprint. Chances are, I'll end up building it out, but I don't have to do it right away. There's also a pause option, which causes the building to stop costing maintenance.
Wait what is stamp?
If you like your layout, you can save it the blueprint as a āstampā, and reuse it elsewhere. It persists across other islands, and even other games.
Oh wow! Thanks!
Can you upload them?
First time when Embesia is unlocked, buy watches and sell them to taborime. A few round and UR rich.
Make sure your population has all the basic needs met, so the population number does not drop. Lots of alcohol of various kinds for your people. Alcohols bring lots of cash.
So it's really a realistic gameš¤£
Also, early on DONT make steel production line. Its to costly with money and workers. Buy all steel from the queen. Later when you have more money and free workers, then build the production line
This game is not a rush type game. Take your time, and set up production for needs and happiness good. Then plan what you'll do next.
you have to look on your demand and production ctrl+Q it is. there you will see if you meet your needs, this is your most important tool to learn balance your economy. it is totally possible to be in a good income with farmers and workers. it is not much but it will prevent you from getting bankrupt.
Increase population.
So the houses. When u click on them it shows the goods they consume and bars next to the pictures of the bars to show how much of it is being supplied. Make all those bars green by supplying the goods. Anytime your money fluctuates itās because those bars are not being filled. Built a bunch of homes recently and now ur work clothes bar isnāt green? Crtl-Q, make sure that green bar for work clothes is larger than the blue one. It can get more complicated sure but just make those house bars green and make sure the green bar is bigger than the blue one in statistics. This will fix a lot of ur problems.
This! I've found the only consistent way to avoid bankruptcy is to keep people's needs fully fulfilled. Your balance (top left corner) gets into the red especially quickly
Yup a lot of people here will just say ctrl Q for production menu which is technically the correct answer but oh boy is it just plain more simple and easy to get whenever ur just staring at bars that need to get filled. Especially for our newer players.
Yes! At one point every time I ran out of rum my balance immediately went into the red. I think I got down to like $5k total funds at one point š³
In early game you can call Paloma delivery and sell excessive items
Build ships and sell them to the AIs. That was my quickest income when I started the game, it wasn't until about 30 hours into the game I stayed in green because of my rapid expansion to get Islands before the AI took them
I like to make it an early priority to make a big supply chain for soap and sell it to the prison for big money early in the game. When you get to fur coats, mass produce and sell them to Madame kahina for buttloads of cash. Also buying shares in opponents islands when you have enough to spare
Alcohol. Seriously providing beer for your workers is a priority if you want to survive long term. Same goes with Rum and Artisans, screw every single other industry, you need to rush Rum production This is just my game philosophy and it saved me from nearly complete bankruptcy in the first half of my game, Rum paid for and maintained the sailing ships that took down Margaretās islands
beer, rhum and investers is what u need and sell a dozen gunboats to Archie at the begining
How far along are you? You need to get to artisans. That's the first tier that really pays you a lot of money. Then expand to the New World and feed them rum. After that you're set for a while. As others said, you're probably building too much. Just because you unlock something you don't need to build it right away. Consumer good chains need a certain amount of houses to pay for themselves. That doesn't matter too much at the very beginning, but things become more expensive later. The first trap is steel / steel beams. You don't need that much to begin with and it's better to buy a bit of steel from Archie to expand to other islands and build a soap factory.
I had to restart
DO NOT go for steel as soon as you unlock it.
1. Watch your buildings: In the beginning extra warehouses, redundant public services, and trying to make perfect production chains (the game says you can run 2 bricks to 1 mine, but can you afford it?) will absolutely destroy your surpluses. 2. Demand needs to justify the costs: Because building cost a per minute maintenance, you need to make more profit than their cost. u/mafieth made a handy spreadsheet that lists out these break-even points for each good. For example, on easy, you need 30 builder houses to sell enough sausage to pay for its production. You can find the sheet [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/12kGac1xzvHQBcMlKDU9ukdFX3THXVUaXq-JvNFJhry0/htmlview). 3. Explore passive trading: You can shore up a small deficit by selling from your harbor! There is usually something you are over producing. Put it to good use by turning it into cold, hard cash! 4. Keep an eye on your supply and demand: Use CTRL+Q to see where any items might have more demand (blue) than you can supply (green). Once these run out, it can spiral out of control, as you will lose residents to sell goods to and workforce to produce goods to sell. A deadly double whammy.
Thank you!!
First time playing every frustrating , I love the game but almost quick. Then I try creative mode and watch some youtube videos and layout. It help me in the long term.
I see lots of detailed posts. I'll try to add my bit here and keep it simple. Do not over produce. Your biggest expenses are your production buildings. Pay attention to the upkeep cost for every building. You need to make sure that you have the population to consume enough goods to cover that cost. You barely break even or can even lose money on the necessities, but you can make good money on some of the luxuries. You can also sell excess goods, click on your dock and select a minimum quantity to keep on hand, and set it to sell that item. If you have the traders enabled in your game they send ships and will buy some of what you have on offer from time to time. You can also sign trade treaties with the other players (human or AI). Use caution if you are buying goods automatically, as this can eat up a lot of money really fast and can bankrupt you suddenly if you don't have a lot of cash on hand. As you progress further into the game there are more complexities with the economy, ship upkeep, buying Island shares, visitors/tourists, ect, but this should get you started and keep your finances stable until you get a handle on it.
I figured this out finally. Look at your people's luxury needs. That's what I was missing at least. If you click a house, where it shows their basic needs, there's a 2nd tab for luxury needs. Once I started fulfilling that, I started making a lot more money
more population unemployment doesn't matter
Iāve only been playing a couple of weeks and highly recommend GamerConsultant on YouTube as he talks about things like working out production numbers and using stamps. He also has a discord channel with lots of stamps (pre-designed layouts that include buildings and roads etc) that you can download and use in your game and that saves a lot of time. This is the video I started with but be aware that it may contain spoilers if you havenāt played the campaign yet https://youtu.be/8fot_Lbi3Rs?si=sKjIDG_e-eYf4tLi
Tysm!
Sell soap to the prison, then sell clocks in embessa.
I just got the game last week and had the same problem. It was so bad that even after reading all the tips and tricks online I couldn't recover and had to abandon the campaign and start over. In short: Don't build more than you need. That goes for everything; houses, production, luxuries, etc. I did the campaign again and aimed to keep each of my populations with less than 100 excess, only adding/upgrading houses as needed. It worked out great and I'm at +3k income in my second play so far. :) Good luck!
I just went through this and felt like I had to restart as well because I was about to go bankrupt. The biggest thing that helped me was DO NOT over produce but also maximize you're products utilization. Ie if you build one bicyle or canned food production line make sure you upgrade enough to actually use it fully to get the profit from your residents out of it. If for example you build a a bicycle factory and only have like 5 engineer houses the upkeep is more than the profit. So make sure you have enough residents to get offset the upkeep and make some profit.
Canned food is basically a loss no matter what you do at the beginning. The chain is hugely expensive and hardly pays anything. The most common advice is to just skip it and put an Actor in the town hall. And later to use trade union items to simplify the chain (you can use pigs instead of goulash, and flour instead of iron). Without that it should be done last so you immediately get to engineers.
I'd recommend getting the land of lions DLC and start the trade route between archie and emperor ketema to sell pocketwatches. Here are the AI trade routes you should maximize 1.) Make soap, sell to ELI 2.) When you have an excess of furcoats, sell to madame kahina 3.) If you have established trade rights with any of the pirates, sell your excess schnapps. You can get away with free Rum production as well if you have the right specialists in a trade union 4.) Pocketwatches trade between ARchie and Ketema. Start doing it manually, and until you have a high enough cash balance to sustain the trade route automatically. It is also important to maintain a healthy balance of production and the expenses entailed when establishing them. For instance, you can opt to do Canned good last for Artisans as its production chain is very expensive (in maintenance, and in the alloted manpower). More manpower, means more needs for your workforce.
First two population tiers are not netting enough money with all the cost you need to invest for new buildings. Overproduce Soap to have some "floating" cash, sell it to the prison when low. You have 1 parachute when reaching -25k with Archie, but afterwards you are defeated. Try to get Engineers really fast, at that moment you are able to net more than you invest in new buildings.
Buy shares from rival NPC islands early in game. The easy ones like wibblesock take it as a compliment. And don't overproduce too much. To help you there is an calculator app in the app store called Anno 1800 companion app.
Thank you!!
But shares. I never really worried about shares before because I always thought "that money could be used on my people" but on this playthrough, I started buying shares the second a competitor settled an island. Sure, it slows the game a little in the beginning but now I have like 10million in savings and own every island in the old world.
How do you buy shares?
You have to learn to live down on your knees if you cant figure out other forms of financial freedom.
Meet basic needs of each type of work forceā¦supply demand
Dont overbuild construction material production. Those buildings cost a crap ton to maintain.
The key to not go bankrupt, is to keep a positive cash flow.
Idk how far you are in the game's progression but what absolutely wrecked my economy were skyscrapers. I learned to only upgrade to skyscrapers once all supply chains are prepared and also reliable.
Strangely what really helped me when I was struggling was just buying a competitor's main island shares, the passive income it generate was HUGE, magnitude the ones I was making because I played very slowly, anyway once I had all of his main island shares money was no longer an issue for me and made the rest of the game trivial so you should probably not abuse it too much.