Add to that the beautiful work done with environmental detailing and weather effects. From the architectural style of the time down to the ships and other vehicles, Anno 1800 looks spectacular. There’s an undeniable charm to that time in human history, and developer Blue Byte has done a tremendous job translating it to Anno 1800. It doesn’t take long before your mean uncle starts harassing you for the money he spent in the funeral, so you and your sister decide to buy a plot of land far away and start your own company in order to get that cash and make a living for yourselves in the 1800s, the dawn of the industrial age. You step into the shoes of a heir long gone just returning home when you’re summoned by your sister, who’s calling you back after your father suddenly passes away under mysterious circumstances. These specific problems are addressed in Anno 1800 ’s excellent story mode, which works double shift as both the bulk of the single player content in the game and as its cleverly hidden tutorial, somewhat easing you into the MANY aspects that come into play simultaneously within the game. A smart production line begins with careful structural placement. All in all, it’s exciting to think that there’s a game like this around in this day and age, a stark contrast to all the one-click-to-play mobile sims of there. The inner workings of Anno are like an antique clock’s, which can work to its favor since it keeps players on their toes at all times, but it’s also quite intimidating to newcomers not keen on the fact of just how minute some of the details can get. Every single aspect about the game seems to be steeped with little details to tweak, like keeping track of your imports and exports in real-time, allowing you to stop sending out some items in order to benefit your internal spendure, and later distributing it to your citizens as needed, or the opposite, or even cutting down on their income in order to up the profits, plummeting their satisfaction values in the process. That’s only one layer of the brick of a cake that Anno 1800 is. Biting more than you can chew at the outset is a surefire way to sink your economy, and if your base isn’t firm, you’ll have one hell of a time moving ahead in the game. Having too much of either will tip things and collapse the entire system, and that is directly related to the houses you built at the beginning, if there are enough of them to support the workforce you’re stocking up to. 1800 splits the workforce between farmers and workers, and that balance is paramount in order to keep your production line flowing. But before even having to worry about all those problems, you first have to have enough people in your city that are capable of handling the job. In Anno, you have to think about how far that spot is from town, whether or not you can get your resources to the production structures you own, or if that can reach your port in order to ship it out. It’s not only a matter of building a sawmill or dragging lumberjacks to the trees next to town. Imagine wanting to produce a certain type of resource, like wood.
#Free strategy games like anno how to
Sure, the same concepts are there, that is, thinking about which structures to construct at first, where to focus your production, and how to best exploit the areas around your settlement, but where the more recent Civs streamline the process by easing the burden and only have you make, say, one structure type a title and have its inner workings sorted out automatically, Anno 1800 puts you in control of every single step of the process. Compared to a Civilization, Anno is much more involved. If you come into it like me, with little to no experience with the previous entries in the franchise, it’s quite natural to feel slightly overwhelmed from the very get go, and it’s not surprising. Similarly to its predecessors, Anno 1800 is a game about the many layers of maintaining a civilization, not only focusing on just building vast cities or taking over territory, but the entire process of keeping your community alive, by having you set up trade routes, worker and farmer balancing, as well as defending your riches from the clutches of pirates and rival companies.Īnno 1800 is a beast of a game. Having come into it with a slight experience playing strategy/city building games like Sid Meier’s Civilization V and SimCity, I quickly realized I was way out of my league when stepping into the complex web of tasks and responsibilities that Blue Byte’s seventh Anno title is built upon.
Trying to start a review for Anno 1800 is a daunting task.