Anno 1800 production-chain-all

The game had a free weekend that just ended. A few hours in, I had these impressions:

The campaign is more interesting than most city builders, not as much of a glorified tutorial but a really polished and interesting story with legitimate city building objectives
The early production chains are small and well organized but I did quit in exhaustion once I got to Windows and did some poking around at trying to build that one. Since its only 3rd tier out of who knows how many, I think the game will be as complicated as Anno games tend to be (well I've only played 1 other, Anno 2070)
The art for buildings, characters, and the sea are just great
The price ($59.99 US) is rough, but I went for it. Thats just me, I rarely buy AAA games anymore, especially not at launch.

Actual release date is April 16, 2019

I found 2 great videos showing off some features of the game by Katherine of Sky

First, just a look at some of the amazing detail they've put into the game.

Next, a nice guide to some of the early game decisions you can make to get off to a good start.

Played for a few hours so far. Game sure is pretty. And time passed by fast!
Having a hard time not losing money, so guess I'll look start looking at that intro video.

The trading screen (which they show off in the video too) is quite important to change early on, and a bit annoying. It is set to buy or sell goods up/down to a limit, so you might end up buying expensive goods without wanting to. And no way to disable buying all goods it seems, need to be set individually for each good, which feels like a bit of a UI oversight.

I can't avoid measuring up all production chain games to my favorites; Settlers 2 and Pharaoh. I really like when goods and people are very physical in the game, moving from A to B. The game does have that, but maybe to a lesser extend than those games.
Also the game seems to have a real campaign, like Pharaoh had, and not merely a glorified sandbox mode, which is nice. Even if the story and presentation of the campaign might be trash, I like having short term goals to move toward.

The magic warehouses do take a way a little of the physical-ness of transport management, but I think I like that change. I think the most important tip I got out of the video was to build a 2nd small warehouse instead of upgrading to the medium warehouse.

Small Warehouse : $20 maintenance - 2 loading docks
Medium Warehouse : $50 maintenance - 3 loading docks

So 2 smalls is cheaper and more effective than one medium

Anno games are all-in for me, day one... I had it pre-ordered and get access today! Hopefully I'll have a chance to play later tonight.

I just discovered they announced the Season Pass yesterday...

Anno Season Pass Info

IMAGE(https://static-wordpress.akamaized.net/anno-union.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/15174845/AnnoUnionSeasonPasst1.png)

Take my money!

Have you guys figured out how to get an overlay of warehouse influence radii?

Other than tiny things like this, Anno 1800 is a return to form after ill-advised trips to the future. It's nice to be back!

Looks like you have to look at the range problem from the producer, not the warehouse. So click on a fishery or whatever and the roads turn green. If the warehouse is in that range, it can reach it. Im guessing they do it this way due to roads with different speeds?

Oh a tip if you participated in the beta last week and purchased the game this week. You can copy your beta files into the folder you intend to install the real game to and save yourself about half the download (23GB total, sheesh, stop making textures so high rez people!)

Who would have thought Anno 1800 is literally the Dark Souls of city builders. By which I mean, you cant freaking pause (well, you can, but not really).
Slightly annoying, albeit sadistically fun the first few times, that the game keeps running while you are in some kind of roleplaying mini-game, or setting up a trade route, while in the background a voice calmly announces that your city is burning and your fleet is lost.

Did the previous Anno games lack pausing too?

So much is happening all at the same time in this game. And I love it. But that pause sure could be useful.

Yikes, I'd report that as a bug. The game really shouldn't run the simulation as it holds you down and forces you to listen to the worst writing ever written for any video game in any generation, voiced by the Small Midwestern Town Council's Auxiliary Drama Club members.

The cutscenes continuing to run definitely feels like a bug.

The not pausing... I never really had a problem with it with the previous games. Unless you're playing at a very high difficulty(where you have penalties for rebuilding, moving, low resources, etc.) or multiplayer, I never really felt like there's much time pressure to do anything exactly right. 1800 also added the ability to move buildings, which makes me feel even less inclined to need a pause. Since you couldn't do that in previous games, misclicks could be incredibly annoying when you're trying to setup optimal chain setups.

The main thing to keep in mind is that unlike most city builders, Anno doesn't really have a death spiral, because the game tends to move towards an equilibrium based on your colony production efficiency at all times. You might overbuild, but if you do, you can just turn off the top level chains until you're back in the black.

There's a lot going on in the game, but it's still fairly slow paced. I haven't dug into the UI that much, so I'm not sure how much info it has about your resource levels(which is typically fairly opaque, though 2070 and 2205 did have a lot of into with regards to it), but managing that is one of the core skills in the game.

You can move buildings? :O

Yeah, the game is not very punishing, which I actually like - especially in the campaign it seems like you can take all the time you want. A game like Banished could completely fall apart for you, with no way to save it, when it had first started.
Still, when your entire fleet gets destroyed by pirates while you are making some nonsensical decisions on an expedition, that is kinda stupid.

Would also be nice to be able to build up the infrastructure on a newly settled island while pausing. That takes a little while, and there is really no chance that nothing important happens in the meantime.
But the chaos seems intentional, and it probably does make the game more interesting.

I would love a lot more information in the game. I really cant figure out why I am sometimes earning lots and lots of money, and at other times are in negative income, without having changed anything. Maybe it is based on houses running out of certain goods sometimes, but some clear graphs of where you income came from over time would help I think. Likewise with graphs over the production of each good.

Click and drag on a built building. I build houses in big batches, and it's saved my ass a bunch of times.

Shadout wrote:

I would love a lot more information in the game. I really cant figure out why I am sometimes earning lots and lots of money, and at other times are in negative income, without having changed anything. Maybe it is based on houses running out of certain goods sometimes, but some clear graphs of where you income came from over time would help I think. Likewise with graphs over the production of each good.

Echoing this. I seem to swing wildly between huge deficits and huge gains and even hovering over the income and money displays isnt showing clear info on why. I only discovered that, for instance, you get more money from some citizens when you have Beer (like +2$ per person (per beer?)) which can be pretty huge. But when you hover over the income it just says 'Farmers giving you bunches of money, but your maintenance is insane'

I think things like quest rewards, trades, ship sales etc are also getting wrapped into that counter without being represented on the mouse-over drop-down, so it LOOKS like your economy is crashing (Yay its +1000! Oh sh*t its -20 now WHAT HAPPENED!) when its just 'swallowing' a big sale or trade (I think!)

I think I'd prefer to change that counter to track money over a larger period of time, or to only update every 10-60 seconds so it would be less panic inducing. Maybe that would fail to alert you to big problems, maybe not but I dont think the way it currently works... works.

Shadout wrote:

Did the previous Anno games lack pausing too?

So much is happening all at the same time in this game. And I love it. But that pause sure could be useful.

Yes, they did and it was a major reason why I kept burning out on them. One reason I like sim games is that I don't feel like I am constantly pressured to be doing something. And Anno breaks that cardinal rule for me. I get stressed really, really easily and that is just no bueno.

Expeditions are confusing. I ended one after several events popping up with no clear conclusion, but I came back with 3 awesome new items. Were they what I was looking for? I have no idea.

On the Anno subreddit, guy posted a note his girlfriend left for him after he played 12 hours.

IMAGE(https://i.redd.it/472ppvc7sws21.jpg)

From experience, after 10 hours the game tells you to go see your family. The game is trying its best.

Its exhausting. It requires your attention to 10 things every second of your play time. Im starting to think it's training for high pressure situations. You learn how to triage incoming information in order to determine what you should be working on.

I must not be good at it, because a huge swath of my original city is now diseased while I set up tobacco, chocolate, and gold mining in the new world.

I wish I knew this had a free weekend! I have been interested in trying it but I haven't played another Anno game and the price is too steep to take a flyer for me.

Is there some way to setup Steam or another site to notify you of games with free weekends?

Is there really no decent way to see where sudden influx of money comes from. I have twice in a short time gained 600k now, which is a lot, but no idea where from. Only thing that keeps me afloat, since I have a -3000 income which seems unaffected by pretty much anything I do right now.

600k?! Wow. Without your interaction... so not a quest, not selling a fleet. No trade I've seen can account for so much money but Im still selling some pretty low level stuff. Do you have any high end goods set to sell?

Another thought I have is maybe a festival provided a massive tax boost, but that still doesn't seem likely unless you have a huuuuuuge population. (in which case you wouldnt have -3000 normally, I bet)

LeapingGnome wrote:

I wish I knew this had a free weekend! I have been interested in trying it but I haven't played another Anno game and the price is too steep to take a flyer for me.

Is there some way to setup Steam or another site to notify you of games with free weekends?

Anno 1404's $15 for the full version on Steam right now.

Overall, the games haven't really changed dramatically enough to say that this one's THE one to get. If you're seriously interested, 1404's a good option.

polypusher wrote:

600k?! Wow. Without your interaction... so not a quest, not selling a fleet. No trade I've seen can account for so much money but Im still selling some pretty low level stuff. Do you have any high end goods set to sell?

Another thought I have is maybe a festival provided a massive tax boost, but that still doesn't seem likely unless you have a huuuuuuge population. (in which case you wouldnt have -3000 normally, I bet)

yeah, no idea, havent happened again since. It was not from selling ships nor quests, and I cant see how any goods could bring in that much. Only thing I sell that bring any meaningful income is gold at 2000 per shipment.
First time it happened nearly at the same time that an expedition event (about attacking and looting a harbor, so I thought it might be it, even if the amount was still silly high), but second time there wasn't anything occurring at the same time.

Oh, I figured it out. It is the other factions buying shares from my islands. Hey, free money... but now I wonder if you can prevent that.

Tsk, I caved and bought this, my first Anno game. (Not my first Blue Byte game though - I played the Settlers games). It's still downloading but I have no idea what I'm doing. On to youtube I guess.

The campaign is a reasonable guide, also the video in the 2nd post

What the hell is this installation? Install to Epic App, then install again to Uplay? Is it on my hard drive twice?

DudleySmith wrote:

What the hell is this installation? Install to Epic App, then install again to Uplay? Is it on my hard drive twice?

Been this way for a while.. in the past you purchased it on Steam..installed Steam.. then it launched uPlay so you had to install that as well.

I think the only way around it right now is to simply buy it from uPlay in the first place.

It's only installed once, though.

Maths, Female Doggoes!

IMAGE(https://i.redd.it/daul1ji004t21.jpg)