Your flagship is sailing to the Vizier, and as soon as it reaches him turn in the scroll and buy the 10 tools he has for sale. You earned 50 honor through the 90-peasant-mark, so buy the 50-honor scroll from Northburg and head for the Vizier. As soon as you hit 90 peasants build 1x Chapel, and put your peasant's tax level to Euphorious to make them ascend. As soon as you hit 60 peasants build 1x SMB + 1x Cider farm
Load all remaining resources from your ship into your warehouse, and sail back to Northburg. Put the peasant's tax level on Happy (Light Green), so they will move in and still maximize your revenues. The fisherman will only support 24 houses, and because you have to watch your resources this is fine for now.
1x Small Market Building (SMB) + 6x Lumberjack's hut Example layout (+mirror) Sail to the occidental island and settle there with your Small warehouse. Buy all wood and tools from Northburg (-2200g) Immediately sell your 10 starting fish to Northburg Remember where these islands are, and where the Vizier and the Venetian are. Look for the biggest Oriental island with Spices, Dates and preferably Clay and a lot of green areas. Find the biggest Occidental island with Hemp and Cider, and preferably more than 1 iron source. It is a must to explore the map beforehand: To achieve this you need to have NO delay in getting your resource production up and running, and quickly get a very positive balance in order to make some gold. It attempts to minimize the time waiting for gold or resources. This opening should keep your balance in the green for 99% of the time. If you start with more gold, you can obviously expand a lot quicker and not everything might apply. This opening is based on the Imperator scenario, where you start with a flagship with 40 tools, 40 wood, 10 fish, and 10,000 gold. If you fail to do this the arsons and riots they instigate will cripple your economy completely. Build bases of operation to cover your entire settlement, and always respond to enemy henchmen alerts by finding them and clicking on them. Use some of the tips from 1404 Wikia: General Scenario and Hard AI first 15 minutes, but be aware: not everything applies to the gameplay in Venice, and there are some half truths / suboptimal things in there. Use the production calculator to figure out how many houses you can build/upgrade. So don't bother harassing the AI early on. The AI is able to call in an auxiliary fleet from the get-go. If the AI does not know you, he is less likely to bother you. This also means finding as little uninhabited islands as possible, since the AI could settle there later. Try to avoid 'finding' the other AI players' settlements. If you settle more, you have a big chance of taking an island the AI wants, which will result in very early war and harassment. Only settle one Oriental and one Occidental island in the early stages of the game. This resulted in an AI player attacking my ships and warehouses as soon as he hit Patrician (required for warships), and also settling on these islands. In my first attempts I immediately captured a lot of the islands.
ANNO 1404 VENICE HOW DO I INCREASE STORAGE ORIENT HOW TO
There were a few other topics on how to beat them (date-trick, etc) but these tricks seem to have been fixed in Venice. In this scenario there are 3 hard AI players who build very fast, and are very aggressive. Hopefully it sparks a discussion on more efficient ways to do the early game, and some tips on how to actually beat the AI and finish the hardest scenarios. I have not finished the scenario yet, but I got to the noblemen stage using this opening, so I thought I'd share it. I sat down and very methodically worked out the first stages of the game, to be as efficient as possible. After failing several times in the early stages of the Imperator scenario I got frustrated.