So I'm playing Anno 1404 for the first time and loving it, but I was wondering a few things. Such as is there a tutorial or is it just the campaign?

Any new beginner tips for someone whose never played an Anno game?

The campaign is a slowly-unfolding tutorial, yes.

I'm only a beginner to 1404 myself, but the basic progression of gameplay is that you build houses to increase your population as much as possible. Hitting milestones unlocks new buildings and new civilization levels - social classes who demand certain resources to remain happy. You generate those resources by building plants and connecting them to a warehouse via roads, which sends out carts to collect your fresh goods.

Your colony starts off as Peasants who only require Food, Drink, Community, and Faith. Food and Drink can be satisfied by fishing huts and cider farms, Community by connecting Peasant houses to a Marketplace, and Faith by living inside the glowing area of a nearby Chapel. You'll need lumberjack's huts to provide your own supply of Wood for building, as well as money, which is generated by the taxes you charge your people.

Pretty soon you'll unlock the Citizen class, and your Peasants will start ascending classes if you keep them happy and reduce their taxes to DARK GREEN for a short period. Their houses will change appearance one-by-one to reflect this. Citizens now require Spices in their Food, Amusement from a nearby Tavern, and also Clothing, which is satisfied by Linen shirts.

Linen is your first intro to production chains, where the resources produced by one building are "picked up" by another building, to create its own resource. You'll realise that each weaver's hut you build needs 2 hemp plantations to keep it running at maximum efficiency. Balancing your production chains is literally the key to being successful in this game, so don't be afraid to google the ratios.

Spices, on the other hand, must be obtained by trading with Oriental islands, and that opens up a whole new aspect of gameplay that you can discover for yourself :)

My tip is to adjust tax levels according to what you want. For example, if you've promoted all possible peasants to citizens, set it to the middle (yellow? orange?) since they can't promote anyway. You'll get more money with no drawback at all. You will just need to remember to put it back to green once you build more housing and have more available promotions.

Also, at some point you will have beggars come and you will have to choose if you want to build special housing for them or not. If you do, they will count as total population allowing you more promotions.

I must have played Anno 1404 over 400-450 hours by now (I've been playing it since they removed the DRM in the retail version and nowadays I play it from time to time - it is such a relaxing game) but I'm not sure I can give any tips for a beginner; I always strived for making beautiful towns and I don't think I ever focused on efficiency. What I can tell you is that, as a4plz said before me, the campaign is the tutorial.

I think it's fairly easy to just start a sandbox game and figure everything by yourself. Of course that means that you may need to start building a city multiple times (or just rearrange your current city by demolishing buildings not needed, in order to make room for building newer ones) so you can make an efficient city (esp. when wealthy citizens start having the need for luxuries) but all will come naturally as in-game time passes.

Also, very nice are the various scenarios although I think you may need to play at least some time in campaign/ sandbox so you learn how the mechanics work.

Having said that, the best tip I can share with you is to take your time, observe every little detail (zoom in to see the beautiful buildings up close, see what people do every day etc) and don't disable the music - the soundtrack is wonderful! :)

I have noticed that making sure there isn't any issues with the carts shipping goods from production to warehouses is a pivotal move as otherwise you may end in up a lot of waiting for goods and while that isn't harmful to the gameplay (at least based upon what I've played), it's still annoying. If there's a long way between production and warehouse, use more expensive roads that become available later.

Another tip is to make sure you are actually making a profit of gold (as if you end up with very little gold, building anything will start to take a long time). Remember to check if there's any production that isn't working for some reason and then you can cut maintainence cost by 50% disabling it and ASAP build as many tax paying people houses.

Other than that, I actually try to play more like Vythonaut. This is a relaxing game and trying not to get caught up in efficiency creates almost a meditative experience.

Of course, it's hard to stay meditative for long when Northburg suddenly bellows ONE OF YOUR PLANTS HAS STOPPED PRODUCING GOODS every few minutes.

That's one of the best parts of Anno though. You can literally spend hours attending to the small details of your colony without falling behind on much, and combat is almost nonexistent unless you initiate it for your own conquest. You'll spend a lot more time re-arranging buildings to make the best use of your islands than you will building fleets of warships to harass your neighbours.