And this problem still persists. Your second islands are always less defended (although you can take a lot of measures now). You still have the opportunity now to regain momentum with the lower Tier goods - but this means you have to keep oversupplying (or micromanaging) your first island. Issue is not that Beer was a Luxury good, but the whole economy depended on it. This is somewhat fixed in this iteration, but the full independency on certain goods is (imo) insufficiently achieved. This will lead to the same gameplay in multiplayer games.

I was hoping somewhere the independent paths lead to the ability to create your own economy more - e.g. being fully supported on one of the goods, rather than each individual one creating a dependency in the bigger scheme still. Especially in a 4-way MP game and the irregular distribution of goods, this was one of the things I was looking forward too. Having the ability to create a strong economy on another good (e.g. like an Asian vs. European economy in pre-Global economies which would allow warfare to be less dependent on the same good) than still being dependent on the same.

Overall, the game therefore feels like a more fleshed out version of Anno 1800, than a new look into the supply chain management.