Anno 1800 – How To Make Money In The Early Game

In this guide we will show you how to make money in Anno 1800’s early game, and keep your city growing into the mid game.

Anno 1800, the new city-builder game from Ubisoft demands attention to detail, good planning, and quick reactions. Before you can get to all that, you need to earn money! The game differs slightly from others in the genre in exactly how this money is generated in the early game.

How To Make Money In Anno 1800

The most important asset you have for making money in Anno 1800’s early game is actually your populace. Unlike other games, the people who live in your city don’t really cost you money. Instead you need to meet their needs, make them happy, and in turn, they pay taxes.

The better you are at meeting their needs, and the happier they are, the more taxes you will gather. This is, by and large, how you keep the money coming in.

When you start, you want to build houses for farmers. After a while, you will be able to upgrade them to houses for workers. The important part is to always ensure you are meeting peoples needs and producing the things that make them happy.

Farmers are reasonably simple to keep happy, needing just three basic things. Workers are a little more complicated; then Artisans are even more complicated. It is important to remember that the farms, factories, and fields you need to make all these things take up space, so plan your city carefully.

As you can see in the picture above, Farmers have two requirements to be happy. They need some Schnapps and a nearby pub. Once these are both met, they will pay the maximum amount of tax. Each type of citizen has different requirements for happiness. As such, make sure you can meet these requirements before making too much space in your city for that type of worker!

If you look in the center of your screen, each group of people will have their own symbol, with a number inside it. What you want to do is keep that number as a positive, when it drops to a negative it means you have a worker shortage. This is bad, as it affects worker happiness, and means they don’t pay as many taxes. It also impacts businesses, meaning they pay less taxes too.

You should also ensure you can meet peoples needs before building too much accommodation for them. If you have lots of unhappy citizens waiting around for you to meet their needs, it will negatively impact how much money you make.

The real trick is to keep the incoming taxes nice and healthy, always exceeding your costs. It takes a little time to get used to, and there is nothing wrong with starting a new game if a city starts to go badly.

One final point, as you upgrade accommodation from one type to the next, you will need to replace the tier you upgraded. If you turn ten houses from farmers homes to builders homes, you need to make more farmers homes, or you will have a worker shortage on your hands!

You will also want to learn how create Trade Routes! Even in the early game, simple trade routes are very important for earning income, and diplomacy.