Anno 1503 How To Make Money

Newbie guide to easy money
(Written by Hakea, revised for publishing by Wargamerit)

Economic management is a central part of 1503 and it isn�t as simple as some players would like.
I actually love that aspect of the game and find it an enjoyable and rewarding challenge but understandably it bores and enrages some players too.

For the 'attention challenged', here's the short version. The longer one follows in the next parts.

Learn to wait and watch .
It takes much longer than you first expect for the effects to flow through, so don't build 4 farms when 2 would have worked if you had just waited.
Build plenty of houses.
Your own people are your best and easiest customers.
Use an efficient layout, with 30 �50 houses serviced by each tavern, stall, etc (cluster houses round a shops and services centre).
Don't build things just because you can.
E.g. Salt mines will almost certainly lose money for you unless you already have 1000 inhabitants or more to sell it to.

Part 1

Your first experience should go something like this: open the continuous game at the basic citizen level.

Running at a loss already, and we haven�t so much as eaten an apple yet!
There must be some lazy swine of a storeman in that warehouse who we�re paying to sit on his bum doing nothing.
Never mind, we�ve got some supplies that we can build with and some food to sell.

So: first priority - customers:

build 10 or 12 houses and put a few roads in
look and see if that did anything (nope, just used up some wood)
build a food stall (yes, that helped a bit, but doesn�t look like making us rich)
add a hunter (we need to get more food coming in and the hides will be useful too)
build a forester (in the woods of course. We need to rebuild the woodpile)
build a sheep farm and a nearby weavers hut (build a new marketplace if you need new land opened up and clear the land for the sheep - pickaxe symbol)
build a tannery to make leather and a stall to sell the cloth and leather
stop, wait and watch (the most important part of the exercise. But look at that debt!)
check that everything is within the required practical range of the relevant buildings (i.e. householders can reach the stalls, and that carters have roads to pick up goods, etc...)
look at each building to see what it tells you.
Watch the figures, but wait until they almost stop changing
this should tell you that the weaver would be more efficient with 2 sheep farms and that the tannery could handle another hunter.
You should also conclude that you could build more houses.
You might also find that you�ve built something in the wrong place.
And add another Forester.
Build another 15 houses to make 27.
Use some of the wood still in the ship (nothing magic about 27, it�s just a handy figure for now)

Now stop and look again.

What do you see?

Probably a howling debt still, and not much clue where to go next.
So go and get a coffee or something and leave the game running, or take your scout for a walk down the mountains.

You come back, prepared for the worst, but we�re making a profit which should rise to around 70 gold per minute: not a fortune, but not too bad for a brand new landlord.
The above can be done in 20 minutes, from arrival to profit.

Why did it work?

Because we were patient, and because we looked to see the effects of what we did.

Is there a catch?

Not really.
We should already be seeing our wood pile starting to recover, but if we plan to do more quick building soon we should add another forester.
Maybe even right from the start if we are not the patient type.
We are still slowly accumulating leather, cloth and food, which tells us we are still at or below optimum population numbers.

Part 2

So what next?

We could explore a bit and let the bank total build up again.
Or get the road gang out and start making tracks towards the salt.
Or go into the bootlegging business and supply them with some rotgut spirits.

The salt looks a long way off and therefore expensive in building markets to get there, so for now let�s go for the booze.
If you put down 3 small farms growing potatoes, plus a tavern, that will keep them happy.
You can either put them all down at once or go into debt again for a short while until the word gets round and you�ve started making money from the tavern.

Let�s leave the town there for a while as the next step is to put down a chapel, and that will unleash an almighty rush to settler level, and will soak up some of your tools, plus over 100 tons of wood (if you have it).

Now is the time to step back and have a long hard look at your town, which almost certainly looks a bit of a mess, and probably has a few spots that don�t work as well as you�d like.
Maybe some carters seem to have too far to walk, foresters are in bad spots, or it just takes forever for everyone to discover you�ve got new goods on sale.

But, now you know that you can make it work, it would be a good time to consider either deleting it and working out a more efficient town layout (if you really hate it), or just demolishing bits and reshaping.
Basically, variations on the theme of a service centre surrounded by houses works OK if you leave room for later needs in the middle.

Basic layout

If you had used something like this plan, you could actually put 25 houses in the middle and at least that many again around the outside.
So with good planning, 50+ houses can be supported by one simple service centre and make a steady profit at pioneer level.

But if what you did build (with 27 houses) works OK now it will work right up to 1000+ merchants, so long as you can keep the goods flowing from outside town.
And you can always develop another better looking townsite/suburb further up the road when you want to.

As soon as you have a house or two at settler level you can either use the option to deny building materials (if you�re still short of wood) or just let �em rip and wait for the frenzy to end.

Either way, you now have access to a whole new set of goodies to build - and a whole new opportunity to run up a howling great debt again.
But you also have a stack more customers to sell to (which means adding a few more of some of those basics you just built).

You will almost certainly go into debt again for a while (unless you are ultra-cautious and very patient) but now you know the style that works so you don�t need a step by step guide from now on. Just build steadily - always looking, checking and consolidating as you go, and soon the cash will be rolling in by the thousands.

My tip would be to risk the debt for a while and build a quarry and brickworks followed by an iron ore mine, smelter, plus the all import toolsmith (before you run out of tools).
That list will soak up 25 tools or so.
Then you�re most of the way to the salt anyway...

Good luck.

You can see the original post by Hakea at Anno 1503 official discussion board here.

Back to hints and tips page