Caveat Regarding Production Stamps

[Bruce]

People are going to want my head on a pike, but after many hours of finding custom stamps, redesigning them a bit, collecting them in the stamps folder for best viewing in the game, and finally using them, I ended up throwing most of them out!

Below is the final segment of the notes that I took on Stamps. I will not bore you with the other technical stuff that most players know already, but I thought I would share the following impressions on production stamps in particular.

The problem with production stamps is two-fold:

1) They lock you into pre-fabricated layouts which may not suit the terrain, your available space, or your development plans.

2) They introduce buildings and businesses that are not necessary yet but will cost money to erect and maintain. Also, they need a certain number of population tier which may not be available yet.

The time-saving aspect of stamps is illusory. More time is spent rearranging their components and fixing the economic problems that they can suddenly cause than the time they save for building.

Keep only stamps for initial town layouts and ornamental things like amusement parks. These can be true time-savers.

The other supposed advantage of production stamps is that you could pre-plan such improvements as silos and tractor barns (including the extra farm fields that tractors allow) and that you could plan to have just the right ratio of producing and supplying buildings to maximize efficiency. Take this into account in two ways:

1) Leave space for silos, tractor barns, and additional fields (50% more fields than default with tractors).

2) Leave space for additional buildings nearby, be they producing or supplying, in order to achieve the desired efficiency in the future.

[Wuik]

Hello,
Anno 1800 was not the first one which have this system of "layout saves" or "stamps"...
Industries of Titans had this sytem since a more long time....
So they have more and less the sames troubles ^^
for exemple : I
n IoT ,your are able to "save" yours different interiors of spacesships...and put on it some guns only possible to have after a research in a random tree...
And after in another game , the research for this guns could be able to "fall" at the end of this game ...
So impossible to make your space ship before ...
I hope to be enought clear ^^
english was not my native langae...

[Bruce]

I read you clear, Wuik, and thank you for supporting my point about many of these custom production stamps including buildings and industries that are premature, causing stock backups and economic imbalances.

And some of them, frankly . . . how to say this as a caution without insulting the custom designers? I can't, I guess, so my apologies to those people who have good intents.

But, a trade union surrounded by dozens of production buildings so that an item in the TU will affect them all? Even if you could provide the supplies needed by those buildings, can you imagine the mountains of output? I stayed away from those stamps but I still wonder how they could ever be used in the game.

Folks out there, go to annostamps.com and load your beauties! It's just that I wish there were more of the castle and abbey layouts types of stamps, the amusement and municipal parks. This pre-fab maximizing and perfecting of productivity is . . . I'm sorry . . . nonsense.

[Bruce]

Here is a further example. The island has plenty of sausage already, and it is overrun with pigs! (Thanks to the silos that I installed.)

Now the problem is, these dirty islanders want soap. (Yes, they have been outdoing the pigs in the bad aroma category.)

Okay, no problem. Except, I think back to that scientifically managed production stamp that I had which maximized soap production.

Now, the kindly soul who designed that stamp thought it was a good idea to include two pig farms with one rendering works and one soap factory. The reason is, pig farms produce 1 ton of pigs per minute while the rendering works and factory do their thing at the rate of 2 tons per minute. Hence, two pig farms to maximize efficiency.

Which it would, IF EVERYTHING ELSE WERE EQUAL. But, obviously, most of time that is not the case. To use that production stamp would be wrong, wrong, wrong . . . possibly leading to a porcine takeover of the island. Instead, I will add only the rendering works and factory which will take up the pig surplus nicely.

Why am I harping on the subject of production stamps? Because I spent way too much time on them, searching, sorting, and setting them up, only to find that in the game, they were counter-productive! They led to me restarting a sandbox when I realized what they were doing; it seemed easier to begin all over again.

If this helps some others to avoid that situation, it is my purpose.