Working conditions

In Anno 1800 you can decide how hard your population is working. You can change the working conditions of your population in every production building (except for Fuel Stations and Oil/Gas Power Plants), thus increasing or decreasing productivity of the production buildings, from a minimum of ±1% up to a maximum of ±50%, also affecting the happiness of your people. Working conditions mechanic is disabled in The Arctic, where population always works under the same regular conditions.

The working conditions menu shows all active working conditions modifications which have been set for all production buildings of the same workforce type on the island. Hovering over a specific type of production allows you to get more information about amount of the affected workforce and happiness change for each type of production. Conditions can be adjusted separately for each workforce tier, each type of production and for each island. Please note that you can't change working conditions in individual production buildings - change of conditions is applied to all buildings of that type on the island.

Modifying working conditions has a direct result on happiness of the affected tier: strict working conditions make people unhappy, while lax working conditions make them happier. Apart from that, working conditions affect incident chances proportionally - strict conditions increase the chances of fires, explosions, riots and illness, while lax conditions decrease those chances.

Productivity can be increased for example in order to compensate the lack of workforce/factories, or simply to get more output out of the same amount of workforce and buildings. On the contrary, productivity may be decreased in order to make population happier and reduce chances of incidents.

In the bottom-left corner of the production building menu there is a working conditions button, which lets you access the working conditions menu of the selected building. When working conditions are altered, the change to production is indicated by an arrow at the top of the menu among other productivity modifiers.

Working conditions menu of farmers workforce. Farmers are employed only in grain farms on the island, hovering over grain in that menu generates a tooltip which informs about affected workforce amount, and productivity and happiness changes.

Farmer residence menu showing farmers being affected by -20 happiness change originated from strict working conditions applied to production buildings where farmers work

Happiness change

Rounding in the user interface.

The overall impact of working conditions on the happiness of a specific tier is a result of amounts of affected workforce, percentage of change of productivity and total workforce generated or employed on the island. Two Town Hall items allow to partially reduce the impact on happiness. The following formula allows to calculate the happiness change: ${\text{Overall happiness change}}={\frac {-4\cdot (P_{1}\cdot w_{1}+P_{2}\cdot w_{2}+...+P_{n}\cdot w_{n})}{5\cdot W}}\cdot (1+I)$

• $P_n$ is the percentage change of productivity in n-th type of production
• $w_{n}$ is the workforce affected by changing conditions of n-th production type
• $W$ is the overall workforce generated on the island (if there is a surplus of local workforce) or workforce employed on the island (if there is a deficit of local workforce)
• $I$ is the eventual "impact of working conditions" reduction from Town Hall items

Accurate values are used for any calculations in the game, but keep in mind that the interface shows only rounded values.

If 100% of available workforce is used and all types of production are boosted by +50%, the final change in happiness for that specific tier will be -40. On the contrary, if all types of production have working conditions changed to -50% the final change in happiness will be +40. Those are the maximum values of happiness that can be obtained by modifying working conditions.

Items

Here are the two Town Hall items which allow a partial reduction of the impact of working conditions on happiness. Notice that the reduction is applied both for negative and positive happiness alterations.

Arch-Archbishop Archibald Epic
His sermons on a life of moderation are sometimes very convincing indeed.
Equipped in Town Hall Affects Residences	Effects Bonus Supply Residences with the Church need fulfilled, are provided with Schnapps, Pub, Beer Impact of working conditions: -35%	Expedition Bonus Faith:+40 Force: +20 Trait: Hypnotist

Pope Lucius I, "The Rejuvenator" Legendary
The Pope has redefined the position of the church, so it may safely navigate the confusion of the modern age.
Equipped in Town Hall Affects Residences	Effects Impact of working conditions: -50% Happiness: +10 Bonus Supply Residences with the Church need fulfilled, are provided with Rum	Expedition Bonus Diplomacy: +30 Faith:+50 Trait: Hypnotist