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Part 2: Gold becomes Wood becomes Gold!
We'd just started to build the new houses when Cadmus came to me with the bad news. Five tonnes of wood that we were keeping in the bottom of the Santa Maria's hold had become warped on the journey here. Apparently her hull hadn't been tarred quite as well as we'd hoped or it hadn't cooled enough but, either way, she'd taken on enough water to waste five tonnes of wood. With the housing construction projects underway it would take days before we had enough free time to find someone that knew how to be a woodsman, so I decided that it'd be for the best if we, just this once, went back to Lord Northburgh, and offered to buy ten tonnes of wood from him.
In Anno 1404 there are a couple of ways to trade with other players. The most direct way requires that you select the ship you want to be your trader and send them off to the other players town. Pull them up next to the other players warehouse and start loading in goods. This requires a lot of micromanagement though and I find that it's fairly easy to get mixed up with what ship is where and who's doing what later on in the game when you're dealing with large numbers of boats on trade routes.
The second way to trade is to set up Trade Routes. In Anno 1404 this is very simple and very powerful. It's the little star button on the bottom right toolbar.
When you click the button the Ships and Trading routes menu opens. It might look a little daunting at first but it's very simple once you get the hang of it. The big map in the middle of the screen shows the world as far as you're aware of it. The gray boat shaped thing is the Santa Maria. The gray house shaped thing is our settlement, Wolfs Haven. The tan shaped thing on the little island just north east of ours is Kingsport. The little tan shaped thing is actually a picture of Lord Northburgh.
By clicking 'New Trade Route' you're able to say what warehouses you want to be involved with the trade route. Since we only have one and we only know of one other warehouse our options are a little limited at the moment.
The first stop for our trade route should be Kingsport where the trader will pick up 10 Tonnes of Wood. Then the second stop should be Wolf's Haven where it'll offload 40 tonnes of wood. I know those are two different numbers but 40 also serves as the limit to the amount of wood the ship can carry so you're always sure it's not hauling around some stuff by accident.
Once we've said what to pickup from where you can then add a ship. The game will generate the fastest route it can come up with for the ship to get there but you can tool around with it if you want to send ships around certain hazards.
The third way to trade is to do it passivly from your warehouse. We're not going to be using this method for a while, because it's mostly good for when you want to sell your own stuff. Think of it as direct trading only you're selling instead of buying.
With the Santa Maria dispatched to gather supplies from King's Port I was finally able to start to take stock of where we were. The warehouse manager detailed our current situation. Twenty tonnes of wood, thirty tonnes of tools and nine... no, eight tonnes of fish. People were starting to move in to town which meant we needed to start producing food and drink for them. Can you imagine? Food riots taking place in a town with only sixty people? It's a good thing that we have such good waters surrounding Wolf's Haven.
We laid the fisherman's hut down next to the warehouse. I'm fairly sure this is going to be the main docks on our island, at least until we expand to other territories. Speaking of expanding, we're starting to see a profit come in from taxation on the island! It's small right now but it's starting to happen. Some people are desperate enough to come out here and live! I mean-
Okay, look, let's just build some more houses and see if we can't bring some more people in. It takes wood to build houses though. By the time we'd finished with the fisherman's hut the Santa Maria was on the horizon. We off loaded its cargo and set about throwing up some more houses. Or at least, we were going to do that...
"Alright mush?"
"Mush?"
"Aye. You know. Look, here's the thing. Northburgh is fucking scalping us. We can produce wood for half the price that he's charging for it if we build some Lumberjack's Huts."
"Well, I was planning on getting that done at one po-"
"Nah, you should do it now. The sooner you stop being reliant on everyone else the sooner you can give me a pay increase."
So that's what we did.
A Lumberjack's Hut is the first real resource gathering building in the game that you'll want to build. It allows you to start making your own wood which is the most vital construction material that you can have in the early part of the game. It also costs a surprisingly large amount to buy from another player considering how abundant it is.
When you place a Lumberjack's Huts it'll show a circle around it. This circle is the area that the hut will work. This means you want for there to be as few other things in that circle as possible and as many trees as you can get in there. Running roads through the areas that Lumberjack's Huts operate in cuts down on the amount of trees that can be worked but you need to hook it up to your trade network so the wood can be collected. Try to keep routes to and from the huts as clean and as strait as you can so as to avoid any needless removal of trees.
Basically: the red tiles in that screen shot will not be worked. Everything else will be worked. This means that this Lumberjack's Hut will have operate at close to one hundred percent efficiency.
Here is a screenshot from another game of mine that shows several Lumberjack's Huts close to each other. This is the most optimal way of gathering wood as a resource as I've been able to find in Anno 1404.
Very little wasted space, very little overlap and everything's connected to it's own Market Building. If you like being hung up on getting the most out of a small amount of space as you can Anno is the game for you! Please note: It is entirely possible to play (and enjoy!) this game without forcing yourself to become an OCD weirdo.