you have new construction options

The old Anno obsession doesn't seem to be abating.

Even though I did my best to abstain, I still played for several hours over the weekend. Several hours that could have been put to better use, but that's my life, I guess.

I'm this close to finishing the quest (you can't see but I held my thumb and index finger really close together then). I've got just one more chapter to do. I didn't start it yet, because it turns out it's some timed missions and I didn't want to get trapped into playing it for that long.

Instead I tried one of the scenarios. This was an opportunity to try out some fo the theories I've been developing about the placement of things.

One thing I've discovered is it's easy to get trapped into getting carried away with your industries and neglect enlarging your population. The problem with this is that you rapidly run out of cash.

The basic idea of Anno is that you produce goods that your population needs. Some of these, like basic food and drink they can take raw (so fish and spices they take as-is), but others you have to process.

However, things ramp up in complexity. So your population starts as peasants, with only pretty basic needs, but they then become citizens, with slightly more complex needs. Some of these needs require you to do processing.

So they need clothes, like linen garments. Well, you can't grow linen garments, but you can grow hemp, which a weaver can weave into linen garments.

But one of the tricky things about it is that you can't manufacture hemp until you've got some citizens in your population that need it. This means you can't pre-build: the need arises before the means of fulfilling it.

To add further complication, there's two types of population in the game: the occident (i.e. what you start with - the West) and the orient (the Middle East). Eventually you end up with settlements of both of these across your islands. Islands are clearly delineated too: green occident ones and desert orient ones.

But here's the thing: some of the goods are inter-linked. The easiest example of this is spices. You can only grow spices on orient islands, but oriental people don't have spices as one of their needs, occidental people do, so you have to grow it in the orient and ship it to your occidental population.

However, there are things the orient doesn't have. For example, you need 'tools' to build almost everything, but tools are made from iron, which is only found on occidental islands.

Add into that fertilities - you can only grow certain things on certain islands - and the fact that you can only get advanced oriental buildings by 'buying' higher diplomatic ranks and you can see how complex things can get very quickly.

Which is where I come unstuck - I get so carried away with the industrial stuff, I forget to keep building my population properly and my accounts go into the negative (red). Now in some ways that doesn't matter - the game doesn't end if you run out of cash - but it does mean you can't build new stuff... like new houses to increase your income :/.

Oh - forgot to mention yesterday that the bread pudding was something of a success. Certainly it was very edible, although somewhat ironically, since the recipe was essentially custard + bread, it could have done with some custard to accompany it - instead, I used the left-over double cream, which was good, but some custard would have been better, I think.