Anno 1404 AD. Dawn of Discovery.

[Avenger]

Best game to come out this year... so far. This and SIms3.

[Glycerine]

I've been playing for the past couple weeks and am thoroughly hooked. I just wrapped up a continuous game where I managed to finish the Imperial Cathedral:



I've since started the Master Builder scenario. With what I picked up during my first game, this time around I should be much quicker and more efficient. Absolutely the best city-building game I've played in years, and the first game in quite awhile that's had me playing for over four hours straight.

[Chaz]

Just got this off GoGamer's sale, and really started it tonight (I did the first campaign mission last night).

Holy crap, I forgot how much I like city builders.

I started at around 8pm, and when I glanced at the clock again, it was half past 10. Had no idea. One of my favorite parts of city builders is watching an empty field develop into a living city, and this is the first game since the Impressions city builders that's really given me that feeling. The graphics are crazy pretty, and I spent a while at first tooling around the ocean watching whales and swordfish.

The manual is definitely lacking, but I really never looked at it until several hours in, and then figured out what I wanted from tool tips. The thing that took me longest to figure out was the difference between Markets and Small Warehouses (one is for clustering houses around, the other is for building stuff and collecting goods. The other thing that took a while to wrap my head around was how important tools were. In the first two and a half missions, you can't build tools, and managing them can be tricky. Eventually they teach you to build them, and man, it takes four different buildings to do it. In the fourth mission, I got tools up and running as soon as I could, and it's been smooth sailing. I'm liking the missions (especially when you have to save the town in the third mission), and find myself kind of interested in the story even.

I also really like the amount of control you have over trade routes. You can automate the hell out of things, which is great. The downside of the Impressions games was that if one small thing got out of balance over time, the cascade effect was massive and fast. If you walked away at the wrong time, you'd come back to see your city had emptied out while you were gone. This seems (so far) much more stable.

My only regret so far is that I started the campaign on easy, and I think I can definitely bump it up to medium. I'm hoping that I can restart it from a particular mission, but haven't looked yet. I think I want to hold off on doing the sandbox game because I like having the mission structure for now.

Can't believe I waited so long on this. Also can't believe I didn't pick up on the Anno series until now.

[Butterknife]

This game really is a lot of fun. I played it for about 20 hours over the past week, which for me is a very large portion of time and only possible because my wife and kids were out of town. The game looks really great, but more importantly it is a lot of fun to play. You decide "OK, I need to upgrade to the next level of city, I'm going to need to make beer". So you find an island that makes beer, and you plop down the grain farm and the herb monastery, and you set up a trade route, and halfway through that a pirate ship starts attacking one of your merchant ships! So off you go to try to get away, but it is too late and even though your warship gets there in time to kill the pirate, the pirate kills your merchant ship! So now you need 2 ships, one for your new beer route and 1 to take over the old spice route you had, so you assign your exploration ship to the route temporarily so that you can keep the spice flowing, but sure enough a quest appears to rescue some people and so you have to make the tough decision -- rescue the people and get 3000 gold and 40 mosaics (useful for your nomad city) or keep the spice coming. You try to build a new merchant ship but you don't have quite enough rope. You finally get it built and assign it to the beer route, and suddenly your people are upgrading! Hooray! Money starts to flow in ... but what is this? All the new people need more cider! Now where in the world are you going to put another cider farm?

Next thing you know 5 hours have gone by and you are ready for bed. Excellent game.

[Chaz]

I was trying to figure this out last night, but couldn't. Let's say I'm trying to fulfill a linen request. How do I shut off the linen supply to my city so I can stockpile enough to fulfill the request without my citizens buying all of it? I wound up tossing it onto an idle ship (during the first four missions on easy, I haven't really needed to set up regular trade routes so much) to keep it away from them, but they implied there was a way to do this within the interface.

[Butterknife]

I was trying to figure this out last night, but couldn't. Let's say I'm trying to fulfill a linen request. How do I shut off the linen supply to my city so I can stockpile enough to fulfill the request without my citizens buying all of it? I wound up tossing it onto an idle ship (during the first four missions on easy, I haven't really needed to set up regular trade routes so much) to keep it away from them, but they implied there was a way to do this within the interface.

The easiest way to do this is to click on a house. Then, click on the wheel where the linen is displayed as a need for the house. That should shut off the release of linen to the people of that class. Don't forget to turn it back on later!

If you ever need to get raw materials for a quest (such as hemp) the easiest way is probably to shut off production from things that use it (shut off the rope and cloth production buildings by clicking the little wheel in the center of the HUD that displays when you click on the building).

[Chaz]

Thanks. I knew about shutting down individual production buildings, but shutting off usage and keeping refining going was throwing me.

Tonight I'm going to muck with fields and their proximity to the refining buildings to try and minimize the number of roads I have snaking around.

[Kelric]

I'm glad I looked into this thread. I adore city builders but haven't been able to really get into one in years. While I'm not willing to pay $50 for it at the moment, I will keep an eye on the price for a while. Makes me wish Blue Byte had done a better job with the last few Settlers entries (which got horrible reviews and I've never tried).

[Chaz]

Check GoGamer. They've got the import version for $25 right now. The only strangeness I've seen (and it might be in the US version) is one or two took tips still in German, and there's a cardinal whose name is sometimes spelled with the US spelling, and sometimes with the German spelling (kardinal).

[Chaz]

Damn game just made another three hours go by on the fourth campaign scenario.

I think one of my favorite parts so far is juggling two different societies (European and Arab) with different needs, buildings, and yet a number of interdependencies. For example, the Arabs have a heavy need for wood and tools for most of their buildings, which only the Europeans can provide. The Europeans need Arab goods in order to advance to the higher society levels (providing higher population density, more taxes, and more building options).

Then you have the extra fun of having to balance production islands with residential islands. None of the islands by themselves are really big enough to hold what you need, plus they won't have all the resources you'll need either. What you end up needing to do is set up a web of automated trade routes between islands, shuttling goods back and forth in order to fulfill all the various needs and keep your population growing. It's an excellent juggling act, yet there hasn't (so far) been any real intense time pressure, so you're free to sit back and figure it out at your own pace.

You know what I don't miss about the Impressions games? Managing labor. In their games, you needed to constantly be aware of where your workers were coming from, and keep some low-level housing within range of all buildings. In this, the work force isn't modeled, so you're free to cluster all residential on some islands, and can have other islands entirely devoted to production. You do lose one level of depth, but you also lose a number of headaches. Given the amount of resource management you have to do in this, I'm glad to give up worker management too.

So if I get tired of 1404 (or play it out), is 1701 worth checking out, or are they similar enough (or the improvements to 1404 significant enough) that I shouldn't bother?

[Butterknife]

So if I get tired of 1404 (or play it out), is 1701 worth checking out, or are they similar enough (or the improvements to 1404 significant enough) that I shouldn't bother?

I wouldn't bother. The games are pretty similar, and 1701 is a step backwards naturally (older, uglier, fewer resource chains, no orient). 1404 is a better game. Once you are done playing 1404 I would move on to something new.

[Dave Allen]

It's at the GOG (summer sale) for $3.79.
Best $3.79 I've ever spent - really enjoying this...

[Paingod]

It is an excellent game. Hard to think of a better game play value per dollar than $3.80 for this one. I wasn't expecting a thread revival, but had posted this in PC Gaming Randomness a few days back:

Playing Anno 1404 off and on, I was doing a custom endless scenario with a couple AI opponents. I kept running into a problem with one of them being hyper-aggressive - which in itself is fine, I have him on "Hard" - but coupled with his aggression, he's getting fleets of warships and is constantly ahead of me on the curve.

I refine, tweak, and push my strategy. Now I can hit milestones before him and expand before him - but for the life of me I can't figure out how he's affording 5 warships and 3 trade vessels before I even have one of each. His cities aren't massively larger. He's not harvesting more than I am. Then a little light bulb goes off in my head.

I checked online and was reminded that the AI for a lot (maybe all?) of the Anno games is allowed to cheat. Free resources, free ships, added money, etc. In short, I'll never get ahead of him. Sure, I can beat him in the LONG haul because I'm smarter, but it's not really fun. I don't play Anno games for the combat, but rather the city-building mechanics. Combat is a distant secondary. I like a little competition for resources to keep things interesting, but including a cheating aggressive AI that constantly wages war on me wasn't fun.

So I'm back to medium AI across the board.