Expeditions

World Map-0 — A view of the world map, dotted with golden pins, seen to the north and south of the region, signifying the availability of expeditions.

Expeditions are an integral part of Anno 1800's gameplay and are unlocked by reaching the Artisans population tier. The first of these leads to the crucial discovery of New World and more become available afterwards. The majority of expeditions are meant to acquire useful items - such as exotic animals for zoos, artifacts for museums and various specialists.

Expeditions are launched by sending one of your ships on an unseen journey to distant lands. Expeditions are dangerous and to ensure the ship survives, a careful selection of additional goods and specialists of your own should be brought aboard to grant the expedition a certain amount of skill. The danger involved comes in the form of events.

When an event crops up, the player will be informed by a text-adventure menu and will need to make a choice on how the expedition should proceed. Events require certain skills to be overcome and rations to maintain morale. When successful, events are positively resolved, might even yield rewards of their own, and the expedition is free to continue towards the destination. Failure on the other hand, can lead to the loss of morale, a ship's cargo and items, and can sometimes even lead to the loss of the entire ship and the expedition with it.

Types of expeditions

Current Expedition Menu — The expedition menu, showing the expedition type, rewards and the recommended skills that the expedition should possess.

Each expedition is associated with a different award type:

Discovery expedition – Unlocks a new region
Archeological expedition – Artifacts for museums
Zoological expedition – Animals for zoos
Rescue missions – Specialists
Pirate hunt – Various rewards

The difficulty of an expedition is designated by the amount of skulls - more skulls mean higher difficulty. Harder expeditions last longer, have more events but also carry greater rewards.

One skull - easy expedition - uncommon and rare items
Two skulls - medium expedition - rare and epic items
Three skulls - hard expedition - epic and legendary items

Preparation, Skills and Event Choice

When the expedition encounters an event, players are given a choice on how to surmount it. These choices are usually associated with a specific skill. Skills are granted to the expedition by sending along specific types of cargo and passengers.

As an example: A violent storm may challenge your expedition. You are then given a choice between using faith to weather the storm, or using navigation to sail through it. Both faith and navigation are skills.

At the start of the expedition, the captain will hand you his best estimation of the most important skills required to overcome the majority of the expedition's challenges. Aside from extra rations, which are always recommended on long journeys, the categories of skills are as follows:

ExpChoice2-0 — In this example, an **event** offers the player a **choice** between using the expedition's faith or navigation **skills** to overcome it. In this example, Bosun specialist and ship's base skill both add additional chance to beat the challenge through navigation.

Crafting
Diplomacy
Faith
Force
Hunting
Medicine
Navigation
Naval Power

To supply the expedition with these skills, nearly all items and goods come with a skill rating. Brought along, these give your expedition a bonus percent chance to overcome challenges. Skill bonuses are additive and with proper preparation and some luck, most events should offer at least one choice that plays on the expedition's pool of talents.

An example: a distiller specialist, who would usually be slotted into your trade union to enhance liquor production, will give a +10 bonus to the diplomacy skill when put onto your expedition's ship. Wood and weapons, used mostly in construction and ship building, give bonuses to crafting and naval power when sent along. The sword displayed in your museum or the bear in your zoo, might give bonus to force.

Some Specialists and Items might even bring (hidden) special traits to the expedition, like zoologists awarding a higher chance of finding rare animals as a reward on zoological expeditions, hypnotists providing a 100% chance of diplomacy success, or certain cargo unlocking completely new choices. It is worth Experimenting.

Since all ships have a finite amount of cargo space, bigger ships and careful planning of what is loaded on board, is important for expeditions. For a complete list of what common goods can do for your expedition when taken along as supplies, see the table below in the Expedition Supplies section of this page. For a comprehensive list of what items and specialists can bring to an expedition, refer to the items page and its links to various subpages.

Morale and Supplies

During expeditions, morale serves as your ship's hitpoints and ranges from 0 morale to 100. The amount of starting morale can be raised by giving the crew a quality ship and loading it with additional passengers and cargo. The harder the expedition, the more goods and items are needed to raise morale by the same value as in case of an easier expedition.

Failing an event when the expedition is underway might lead to extra morale losses, but even when successfully overcome there is a standard -10 moral decrease after all events, likely because of the crew's homesickness. Upon reaching 0 morale, the expedition fails and the ship - including everything on board - is lost.

To mitigate the standard morale loss, the player is given a choice at the end of every event. These choices are:

Choice 2 — After every event, the player decides how to deal with the normal loss of morale, or if it's better to return the ship home and abandon the mission.

Provide Extra Rations and Continue (At the cost of extra rations, decreases morale drop)
Continue (-10 morale)
Return Home (Ship returns safely with everything that was on board at the time of the decision to return home)

While all goods add to the ship's pool of supplies, only supplies that are labeled as extra rations in the Expedition Supplies table further down this page, can be used to mitigate the loss of morale. Extra rations can bring incidental bonuses to your expedition's skills to meet challenges, but they all share the unique trait of being edible (or in the case of cigars, at least consumable). After all, while both work clothes and schnapps are listed as "Medicine Goods" and award medicine skill to your expedition, your crew can only drink one of these and only schnapps is also considered an extra ration.

When loading additional supplies and passengers, the extra morale awarded is flatly proportionate to the amount of base morale and skills they add to the expedition. Where supplies are concerned, these statistics can be seen in the Expedition Supplies table below. Only extra rations have a base morale value, but when they also possess a skill bonus alongside it, additional morale is awarded (double the value of the skill bonus). This makes extra rations with bonus skills particularly useful.

Expedition Supplies

Extra Rations

Extra Rations Goods	Base Morale	Skill Bonus per 50t	Combined Morale per 50t
Beef	0	+10 Force	10
Beer	20	+10 Diplomacy	40
Bread	10	+5 Faith	20
Canned Food	40	-	40
Champagne	20	+30 Diplomacy	80
Chocolate	50	-	50
Cigars	10	+15 Diplomacy	40
Corn	15	-	15
Fish	15	-	15
Flour	0	+5 Hunting	5
Fried Plantains	10	-	10
Goulash	25	-	25
Grain	5	-	5
Grapes	10	-	10
Pigs	15	-	15
Plantains	10	-	10
Potatoes	10	+5 Medicine	20
Red Peppers	10	-	10
Rum	30	+15 Medicine	60
Sausages	20	-	20
Schnapps	15	+20 Medicine	55
Sugar	0	+5 Medicine	5
Tortillas	15	-	15