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Honor is a form of currency in Anno 1404. It is spent on upgrades (Attainments) and items that cannot be purchased any other way.

Honor is used to gain Prestige. Prestige can only be gained by spending Honor or scrolls from Northburgh. These scrolls can be taken to the Vizier who will progress your rank up the Prestige track. Prestige is used to build more advanced Oriental Structures. Oriental Structures are unique from Occidental ones in that they both have a population threshold and a Prestige rank, essentially requiring the player to have gained some Honor before being able to build all Oriental Structures.

Honor[]

There are various ways to aquire honor.[1]

  • Complete quests.
  • Demand honor in exchange for gold coins from Lord Richard Northburgh or Grand Vizier Al Zahir through the diplomacy screen. (See Buying Honor, below.)
  • Level up and expand your cities. This gives set amounts of honor for each level, for example, a Metropolis will always give 850 honor.
  • Sell goods to Lord Richard Northburgh or Grand Vizier Al Zahir at their warehouse. If you select their building to start trading, there is a thin bar below their portrait. Hover the mouse over it and a tool tip shows how much trading is needed for an honor boost (buy or sell). Both the amount of trade required and the amount of honor earned grow through use. There's no cooldown; you can blow through several levels in one big sale. For more details see Sales and Honor, below.
  • Build a Tournament arena and let the crowds roar. See Buying Honor, below.
  • Trade back items that cost honor for half of their value. In this respect, you can consider, e.g., Ibn al Hakim's Academy of Wisdom, Cuno von Rembold's Excavation Site, or anyone else who provides Items or quests a source of Honor - for items you don't want to keep. So try to link up to them... there's no harm if you fail a quest, and you may get a real nice Item.
  • Complete monuments such as the Historic warehouses (500 honor), Imperial cathedral, or Sultan's mosque (1000 honor each).
  • Supply bread to Benedicta (Place of Pilgrimage neutral site).

You can use honor for:

Buying Honor[]

As seen above, there are many ways to acquire honor. Many are hard to quantify, but two can be readily compared:

Demanding Honor through diplomacy is fairly straightforward; you buy honor with money. Lord Northburgh and Grand Vizier Al Zahir are identical in this respect (but separate; you can demand from them both at the same time). To Demand Honor, activate Diplomacy (F7), click on their portraits, and then click on the hand dropping money.

On the surface, it looks like you get the same amount of honor per gold for all three choices, but because the small gift is capped at 75% success, it is not as good a deal. Also, the large gift recovers faster. All in all, the larger the gift you can buy, the better.

The amount of honor you can buy depends on the highest class of Occidental population that you have:

  • With Nobles, the large Generous gift gets you 300 Honor,
  • With Patricians, you get 150 Honor,
  • With Citizens, 80 Honor,
  • If you only have Peasants, you only get 40 with the large Generous gift.

The medium-sized Appropriate gift gets you half the Honor shown above for the large Generous gift for each population class, and the small Modest gift gets you a fourth (rounded down). Thus, if you make a small Modest honor demand when Patricians are your highest class, you will get 37 honor (150/4, rounded down).

The price for the large Generous gift is all of your current balance, with a maximum of 12,500 gold and a minimum of 5,000 gold. (If you have less than 5,000, you can't buy it.) The medium and small gifts are one-half and one-fourth of what the Generous gift would currently cost you, respectively (so you can never buy any of them if you have less than 1,250, the minimum divided by 4).

Once your economy is thriving - you have Nobles and plenty of money (>12,500) - this is what Demanding Honor looks like:

Donation Gold Honor Max. Chance Effective Max. Honor Cooldown [2] Gold / Honor Max. Honor / Minute [2]
Modest 3,125 75 75% 56.25 30 minutes 55.56 1.88
Appropriate 6,250 150 100% 150 30 minutes 41.67 5.00
Generous 12,500 300 100% 300 24 minutes 41.67 12.50

In theory, you could time your demands so they fall right before a big sale or right after you spend a lot of money so that you take advantage of the sliding scale. But due to the fact that you don't get the full 300 Honor until you have Nobles, and you (hopefully) have nowhere near as few as 5,000 (or even 12,500) gold then, players often just wait until they have Nobles and plenty of money, and then buy the Generous gift as close to every 24 minutes as they can.

A note to newbies: Don't Demand Honor unless and until 12,500 gold is petty change to you (well over 100,000 gold, and plenty rolling in), so you don't burn through your starting cash and hit some hard times. Build your economy first. Once you're rich, Honor is much easier to get.

Tournaments are another way to "buy" honor, but there are some hidden costs. Each arena takes 45 minutes to recover (regardless of tournament size) at regular game speed. The Honor shown here is for islands with 5,300 population; islands with no population only get a third of this value (see Tournament arena for more details):

Size Gold Weapons Provisions Maintenance Total Gold* Honor Total Gold / Honor Honor / Minute
Provincial 2,000 0 0 900 2,900 150 19.33 3.33
Grand 4,000 15 0 900 5,680 300 18.93 6.67
Spectacular 10,000 30 10** 900 14,140 600 23.57 13.33
*Total Gold is the stated cost plus maintenance (20 gold/minute times 45 minutes) plus the cost of additional goods, relative to active selling to NPCs (weapons sell for 52 gold/ton and provisions for 168 gold/ton).

The small tournament costs a little more per honor relative to the medium tournament, due to the hefty maintenance charge relative to the tournament cost. The large tournament costs the most of all per honor, due to the expensive provisions - but also earns honor the fastest.

In summary, don't Demand Honor or hold Tournaments early in a game, unless you know exactly what you're doing. If you're a veteran player, you'll know when to risk your money when you have little. Otherwise, wait until these venues are easy, then use them to the hilt. They are both about the same (12.50 or 13.33 Honor per minute) when you are flourishing and can easily afford to use them maximally.

Sales and Honor[]

Each time you sell to or buy from Northburg or Al Zahir, you approach milestones where honor is granted. The milestones can be readily seen by hovering your cursor directly under their portrait on their info pane. Sales and honor granted are:


Sale #

Honor
Northburg Al Zahir
Gold Gold/Honor Gold Gold/Honor
1 10 1,800 180.0 1,600 160.0
2 15 900 60.0 800 53.3
3 25 1,800 72.0 1,600 64.0
4 40 2,700 67.5 2,400 60.0
5 65 4,500 69.2 4,000 61.5
6 105 7,200 68.6 6,400 61.0
7 170 11,700 68.8 10,400 61.2
8 275 18,900 68.7 16,800 61.1
9 445 30,600 68.8 27,200 61.1
10+ 445 49,500 111.2 44,000 98.9
Cumulative 1,595 129,600 115,200

From ten sales on, you always get 445 honor for the milestones shown.

At every milestone, Northburg charges a little more than Al Zahir; the vizier gives a 12.5% honor bonus per gold, at every point. So, once you have enough ships to spare to go farther to Al Zahir, you will reap a little more honor for what you sell.

These sales milestones only apply to active sales, where you go to their harbor and buy or sell. You do not get "honor credit" for passive trading (where their ships buy or sell at your warehouses), nor when you demand honor.

Although passive trading earns 2.5 times as much gold per ton as active sales, you might consider actively selling goods if you want honor more than gold. Still, demanding honor and tournaments are cheaper ways to buy honor, per se, if you have large populations (see above).

In the Venice expansion, passive trading (via the boats the three AI traders send out) counts towards these levels.

Note: Active sales to NPCs like Willem van der Mark do not earn Honor. Instead, you get +4 Reputation at each sales milestone, with the milestones being exactly as they are for Al Zahir, above (+4 Reputation at first active trading worth 1600 gold, another +4 at next 800 gold, etc., eventually plateauing at +4 Reputation for every 44,000 in active trading).

Notes[]

  1. forums-de.ubi.com
  2. 2.0 2.1 Times are for the chance of success to recover to 100% (or 75% for Modest) at regular game speed; slow speed takes 4.21 times as long, for this and everything else in the game. In theory, the large Demanding-Honor donation takes 24 minutes to recover to 100%, the medium one 30 minutes, and the small one 40 minutes - but the small one simply stops at 30 minutes and 75%. Also note that, while you can, e.g., donate a generous gift at 12 minutes (50% success), because it only succeeds half the time, on average you have simply effectively doubled the cost of the honor, for the same amount of time (24 minutes). Clearly, this is only useful when desparate to, e.g., call an auxiliary fleet. Also: The "Maximum Honor per Minute" column assumes you are Demanding Honor the instant the Cooldown time is up.
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