u/All_hail_bug_god

Plague/outbreak started, which disabled all my soup kitchens...It's late at night, I'm (as always) running the game at full speed, as well as putting down dozens of new housing.

Soup runs out.

Before I know what's happening, my workforce has dropped to -600. Fish no longer comes in, dropping it further. Clothes and hats are out as well. In a...strange design choice (which I can't be sure is the same in anno 1800 as I've never had this problem in that game), buildings just stop producing entirely below a certain worker threshold.

Say I have 10 fisheries each requiring 10 people, requiring 100 workforce. It seems like if I get to like, 40 workforce, every fishery completely stops? This is confusing because if the 40 workforce simply consolidated, I would get 4 fish per minute instead of zero and the population would slowly recover as demand is met.

I have these resources set to always be passively buying, certain population-maintaining consumer goods are set to always be buying and never sold for this reason.

What is the fix for this, shy of "Just don't run out"? Emergency shipment of base goods from a different island? Pause production on every building except one of each pop-boosting production chain and hope it'll fix itself? Destroy most of the buildings to free up maintenance workforce?

Stuff like this is pretty annoying and makes me want to just turn off these incidents in the settings. It's extremely annoying to penalize isolated production areas by having the various emergency services cost workforce. I either put the several dozen negative-effect buildings together and try to outweigh their negatives with expensive service buildings or split them apart to reduce strain. Am I meant to just put a full-size police force + firefighters + hospital around every production chain to stop my dozen soup kitchens from falling to plague and killing the production for 20 minutes or however long it takes to repair?

Hello r/Anno! I played a bit at launch and decided to come back when Cinis was released. I've hit Equites and am struggling. Coming from anno1800, I've understood there's a bit of a change in city layouts with the addition of City Watch buildings.

I've kind of been using a 2x3 city block layout, merging blocks and such when it comes to marketplaces and placing the grammaticus, etc.

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong? My Happiness, Health, and Fire Safety are only in the positives right after a great event (riot, plague, and great fire). Elsewise, they are in the negative-thousands. After just dealing with a riot, I thought that periodically incorporating towers into my layout would be good, but each takes a lot of workforce...which requires more residences, and more service buildings, etc.

Are these disasters just inevitable? Is there a best-practices you like to use?

I feel really unsure about how to properly build with all these different buildings affecting eachother, and I end up just copy/pasting big blocks of a city without being really sure how to plan.