Anno Online Game Tip TRADE

The first step in the process for trade is to achieve a population of 250 Merchants on Newport.

You will need to build a new pier on Newport on the beachfront adjacent to the harbourmaster. Always build those piers tight to the harbourmaster since piers are not movable after placement. Following this procedure will let you build 5 base piers on Newport with the deletion of the naval shipyard which you would build on another island or two or more.

You must then cap the pier with the trade storehouse which then provides you with one trade slot. Unlike transport where ships will line up for available slots, trade requires one slot for each separate transaction.

You will need at least one trade ship to buy goods in trade. Selling goods requires no ship for that process since the buyer fulfils that part of the transaction.

Trade works in several ways in the game. As a bare minimum you will need it to trade for oriental goods such as spices. Generally, you will always buy them from Northburgh but occasionally other players’ pricing is lower than offered by him especially at the high end of the range. As an example, I have seen lows of 187 and a high of 426 for spices and prices change every 40 minutes.

Many players also use a trade slot as a supplemental warehouse of sorts and “hide” materials in that slot at a very high price. Personally, I do not favour this action since it has a hidden cost called the opportunity cost which is difficult to measure since it depends on what you would do with the coin that is available by selling those extra goods for coin.

So selling goods is my preferred strategy and you need to overproduce certain materials to have a surplus to sell so you need to buff production buildings often and/or add more production chains than calculator in ultrafine.de suggests.

How long it takes for a sale to finish is totally dependent on the capacity of the buyer's ship and how much of the total offer they decided to trade for, so the actual time is not that easy to figure out. Just note that each shipload will take a little over 40 minutes for each return trip and obviously a 40 capacity ship will take much longer than a 190 capacity ship to pick up an order of say 400 units. Payment is made for each shipload pickup.

So that part of trade is not for everyone since it is unpredictable just like the real world stock and mutual fund markets.

To enter into a trade or place an offer, you must access that feature in the harbourmaster office on an island that also has piers capped with trade storehouses. Clicking on the harbourmaster will provide a menu called select landing that provides the trade slots. An available slot is noted by the brown house. Clicking on that house will start the procedure of buying or selling.

You should always access buy first to determine what the current pricing is for the material you are trying to buy or sell. You will be presented with a listing of that island’s warehouse inventory and you would select the material icon that you want to view current trade pricing and offers.

If you were buying, you would just continue on and make the purchase providing you have an available trade ship. You can buy part or all of the offer providing you have the coin to do so. Larger than shipload buys will just cycle until the order is complete. If the order overloads the warehouse limit, it will just sit on your pier until there is warehouse space. The trade slot stays locked but the trade ship is released upon return to your island.

To determine how good or bad a trade offer price is, use ultrafine.de production costs as a benchmark which is useful for non-buffed costing. If you do a lot of buffing, you must consider that cost into the overall price of your material and that can be difficult to actually calculate if you buff in spurts and change the buffing type since they all have different costs associated with building them.

Obviously, if you are going to get serious about trade, you want to be buying low and selling higher to make profits. I choose to trade heavily since you can generate coin faster than with just regular cash flow but that requires a heavy investment in pier space and to some extent trade ships. You would never need as many trade ships as you have trade slots.

A cash flow of 1.5K will generate in the neighbourhood of 1.5M coin overnight while smart trading can double or triple that number if you know how to sell properly.  You can also improve your cash flow by purchasing materials that are trading below cost and turn off those production chains for a period of time until you need more production to feed your population. Or you could also resell those at a later date when and if pricing rises. Weekends are often a better time to buy than sell since players who only play then have excess stock and often sell well below cost.

And you should check your offers periodically since there are players that will make a partial trade and leave 1 unit in your slot so it ties up that storehouse until you manually delete that offer. Some people seem to think this is a clever tactic for some silly reason. I guess they think it provides them with some sort of an advantage in a game that has no overall winner. Perhaps they are just future lawyers or politicians in training.