Ownsya
Warlord
- Joined
- Sep 25, 2018
- Messages
- 215
It's been a few years since last I played it so my memory is a bit fuzzy. Now that you mention it, I think you do actually "upgrade" citizens to the upper class but in the version I played I think you had control over which residences to upgrade and so you had control over the number of citizens in each class. But either way, in the end Anno is all about logistics, efficiency, and finding common denominators. It is quite formulaic. You find out with time that there is a specific ratio between all the various things in the game that is "ideal", in that it leads to 0 waste. The most satisfying part for me was achieving these ideal ratios.I wish it told you that somewhere in the game. I always assumed I wanted to "upgrade" all of my citizens always, which might explain why my economy would stall in weird ways.
For example, and I'll just make up some numbers here, a bakery produces 5 bread per hour and each bread requires 1 flour, so the bakery needs 5 flour per hour. Any more flour ends up in excess going to storage which eventually fills up leading to waste. Any less flour and your bakery will idle at times or not work at full capacity. To get 5 flour you have mills that maybe produce 2 flour per hour. So two mills get you 4 flour per hour (shortage), but 3 mills get you 6 (excess). So the ideal ratio requires 5 as the 'common denominator'. If you have 5 mills you get 10 flour per hour which can supply exactly 2 bakeries working at full capacity. The ideal ratio in this case is 5 mills : 2 bakeries. Then the bakeries require wheat to produce the flour, so you need farms, and you find the number of farms you need to supply the mills. If it isn't a nice 1:1 ratio you might end up having to alter the entire supply chain's ratios to achieve max efficiency. And so so on for each type of supply chain until you understand the exact ratios needed for a complete supply chain from raw materials to intermediary to final products.
This kind of supply chain management ends up making its way into the social class system because for every "noble" household their needs require products that are created by lower class citizens, whose prerequisite products are also manufactured by a lower class, etc all the way down to the laborers who farm, fish, and mine. So you end up with another perfect ratio of population per class.
I'm geeking out over this and slowly tempting myself to get back into that game haha, it's quite an addictive process and of course the wiki should already have all the perfect ratios figured out so you can better plan things from the start. When I was playing the mobile version the wiki for it was still new and I contributed a little bit with some guides and designs. Then comes the issue of trading and deciding how much goods should cost. The global market which was made up of sales from other players' games did not always have reasonable or sound pricing and we had a big debate with economics calculations over how much things should cost at minimum to at least break even. It was all very fun and interesting for me