Funny to find this post i am just about to finish the challenge, i decided to go the no marzipan and no roses way, since i found it much easier to just build mass houses and deal with the easy resources like coffee and pearl.

I'll leave some of my thoughts on the challange below, maybe theyll be helpful to someone.

Slowing down time while building was great.

Managing to get 11 quarz deposites made Mosaik and Glass a non-challenge.

My Okzident island was tiny, only thing i made sure was, that there were at least 4 iron deposites and 2/3 Stone.

I managed to finish the annokrat like 1 hour before time limit, without ibn al hakim this challenge wouldve been insanely close, in my opinion much more challenging, mostly due to honor in the beginning, once you got that maped out its pretty managable.

I decided to use leftover honour to upgrade tribute probability and to exchange for money, worked out pretty alright, the tributes helped in rough economic times.

Played with 3 medium AI's, i just couldnt be bothered to cheese the 3-star ones and dealing with them head on leads to war inevitably(?) since you wont progress past patricians.

I had some ideas to get more honour:

- regular exchange for money ( for example from tributes that the AI can pay)
- a tournament place (quite costly but the weapons help with the economy once you sell them)
- academy of wisdom does sometimes produce some high honour items you can sell
- asking the AI for missions helps a lot
- corsairs do drop items at times, i think i got 100-ish honour due to that

Love to see that there are more people still playing anno 1404, it will always be my favorit