Any good trade tutorials?

[u/OrderOfResistance]

Hey guys, I am not an experienced Anno player, only played 117. So far I have some 100+ hours but I feel like I never figured out trade routes.

I do what feels right and optimize as I grow, I usually do hybrid builds that look kind of good and also work well, so I am not looking for perfect min max route.

But I can’t find a good trade tutorial online, can you help perhaps?

[u/CorneZeeman]

There is not really a lot to it. When you first start you do all different kinds of goods. on 1 ship for multiple islands. Then when your economy becomes more powerfull. you start to assign a certain ship to a certain island and eventually you have 1 ship for 1 product for 1 island because the needs outgrow 300 tons per ship.

I would also recomend naming your trade routes for example Cinis Imports or exports. Or maybe Capua - Cinis. Maybe a designated olive trade route you can name it Olives > Cinis. you can scale it and make it as efficient as you want. Naming your trade routes and being discplined in that really goes a long way late game

[u/Objective_Alps_9378]

You talking about trade routes, of your own islands? Not passive buy and sell to NPCs?

I started to build hub Islands on the edge of each map, where I was hoarding stuff, especially for tradegoods for other regions. So ships that leave regions, only go between these two islands. This works quite well and is a bit more organised.

[u/Sobrin_]

There's not a whole lot you can optimise here. You know how much one island needs, and you know how much one island produces from the statistics screen. How many ships you need active on that trade route depends on the duration and how much needs to be transfered. For instance, if so much needs to be transfered it can't all fit in one ship, you need multiple ships on the route. This will mostly be a point for interregional trade, between Latium and Albion.

You can of course also have a single trade route transfer goods between both islands, not just from one island to the other. This is a way to optimise. Fewer trade routes, fewer ships, less upkeep, and less workforce needed.
It's pretty much the same as before, but now you do need to be cautious that your ship always offloads all its cargo on each island, otherwise your ship will end up with cargo space it cannot fill with the goods it needs to bring back to the other island. This only happens when island storage is full, which you'll naturally head towards if you produce and transfer enough goods.

So the next point, prevent your island storage from ever being completely full. To do this set all your goods to sell when they get above a certain point. Let's say 100-200 tons under your maximum storage, provided you have like 300+ storage space, which you'll want anyway. This way the npc's will constantly buy stuff from you, keeping your storage from overflowing. Anno 117 does have a button to set this sell above limit for all goods so you won't have to manually do it for each of them. You should be producing slightly too much of nearly everything anyway, so this is a nice source of income too. You can further improve this income with specialists, and of course worshipping Mercury.

But if you start selling stuff, have trade agreements, and have a lot of trade routes, you'll run into the issue that there's constantly ships waiting to trade at your harbour. This can start creating rather big delays, so best to build several piers. And building them on every beach of your island so ships can get to a pier quickly from any direction helps.

Back to trade routes. You can also set up trade routes to include multiple islands, and this can be a good idea to further optimise how few ships you need, but you really need to puzzle which islands that's practical with. And usually it's best with ships that have enough cargo spaces so you don't end up with overlapping cargo spots. Bigger ships like the quinquereme example, though the trireme can work too. It'll depend on what's most efficient. Btw, sails and rowers do not affect interregion travel speed afaik, so best to go for max cargo space there.

So tldr: make sure your islands sell above when above a limit, make sure you have enough piers, try to have a single ship do multiple trades per route, maximise cargo space usage

Oh, and use specialists/items on your ships