I feel like larger trade networks being more vulnerable to attack is a rich dynamic that was sacrificed in 2205.įinally, the campaign. You’d have to keep your fleet built up using income and maybe resources, one in each region. Periodically, your income from a route would get cut in half and you’d need to send your fleet in to rout the enemies. So what I would have done with combat is kept it in separate maps, but make it possible for there to be an attack on each of your individual cross-region trade routes. But I think the bad part of that was the “without you realizing it” part. I do appreciate that enemies couldn’t just totally eviscerate your delicate trade channels without you realizing it. But boats shooting boats somehow just doesn’t capture even the excitement of those scenarios. It felt like those campaign missions in Warcraft or Starcraft where you got a set a units that had to survive to the end. I could tell there was advancement in there, but I hardly cared. I never did figure out what determined the make-up of my fleet. It’s utterly superfluous and just not very much fun. (The game found a different way to do this in the arctic, where factories produce heat that was interesting, but it was still just two categories: buildings that need heat and buildings that produce them.)Ĭombat was a failed experiment. Yeah, the old way could be fiddly, but it made placement matter. Now all the resources mush together instantly as soon as you make them and show up in your facilities.
I love looking at my islands and seeing my cider fields over here and my mining over there and, oh, there’s my emergency random cider field squeezed in over there because I had nowhere else. I guess this is because you can produce anything anywhere (no island fertilities) and there’s no road transportation, so proximity doesn’t matter. There’s less of a sense of everything having its place. This is what warehouses or market buildings used to do: You needed to keep spreading warehouse-by-warehouse across an island to totally conquer it and to get to all its goodies. But you need finer grain advancement than that. I advance through the three main stages of the game. In general, a feeling of short-term advancement is lacking. Earning your way into space or unlocking energy transfers is a super-cool advancement! Don’t just slap a few more panels on that… thing… to show it. It should be the test of your resource generation engine and its upgrades should feel super cool.
Instead of “Toss 50 magnetite in here to upgrade” it should have required courses and courses of your main resources to construct–superalloys and circuits and deuterium and whatnot. I want to know where the heart of my settlement is… Where is the heart of my settlement?) The launchpad things should have worked like the big constructions in the earlier games, such as the Imperial Cathedral. (In fact, your warehouses aren’t at all your warehouses anymore, they’re glorified beachheads for each island and nothing else, really. But it’s also like your warehouse sometimes. Launchpad? Space elevator tether? Main hub thing in the ocean? Its upgrades are the major stepping stones through the campaign. Like the… I don’t even know what it’s called, it’s that unintuitive. There are a lot of things in the game that just aren’t very intuitive, less intuitive than the standard Anno model. And the core resource chain gameplay is basically still fun, even if it’s been streamlined a bit too much in this one. And of course the visuals are flabbergasting. I like that it puts economic optimization WAY at the forefront instead of having it fight with racing for territory vs. Sounds like something I would do.įirst some good stuff: The three regions (looking forward to trying Tundra), their different rules, and their interdependencies are wonderful. And their experiments are mostly modest failures. By which I mean, they found all the parts that I have always personally felt were not really that fun and they experimented with them. I feel like if someone put me in charge of this series, I could have made this game. Anno 1404 remains the pinnacle of the series. A real departure for the series, which on one hand is maybe long overdue since the gameplay model has been soooooo stagnant for so many iterations on the other hand, I don’t think it’s entirely successful. Well, I finally snagged this in the Steam Sale.