Having played it then I have fond memories, but I don't know how it would feel going back after 1800. You can start either as treehuggers or heavy industrialists, there are also a third faction - nerds :), and eventually you get to manage all three of them, no matter what you started with, the islands have ecobalance that you have to care about or not so much, depending on the starting faction, the climate on the island visually reflects its ecobalance, there's some metagame where you get certain rewards by progressing with each of the factions and there were even world events - the game had to be always online, to use your Ark, where you could put stuff from one game and carry it over into another.Īnd all the best classic Anno gameplay, on par or even better than 1404. If you like SciFi stuff, the atmosphere is absolutely enchanting. You play just on one map, or sector, as this is now known, but technically there are already beginnings of multisector concept, as there are also underwater plateaus, so you dive down and build underwater on the same map. There are unique parties such as mercenary force to eliminate you (basically another pirates), a travelling merchant or expanding AI player who leaves his islands almost entirely unbuilded so you can settle them and co-exist You can use ships to destroy harbors and shoreside buildings, aircraft units for land warfare and submarines for underwater warfare You build several research facilities to research items, upgrades and superprojects, kind of like Research Institute
Yes, disasters! There are several types of them and some are very nastyĭiplomacy works in different way: you actually spend influence points on something, plus you can ask various parties for exclusive offers and abilities Ecobalance affects production in some way, reputation, population happiness and determines a chance of disaster Electricity is now a number, not tile area, so you need to balance production and population with energy output (kind of like in old RTS). Instead of workforce mechanic you have electricity and ecobalance. Unlike Anno 1800 you can only add one (maybe two?) additional fertility with item, or cannot add any at all Some fertilities are exclusive to specific factions and some are universal. You can play for 3 factions at the same time, choosing two of them (one starting faction and Techs who are mandatory for further progression) or mixing all, or maybe having islands exclusive for specific faction Your supply need to be stable enough, otherwise high tier population will start downgrading houses
T4 house will consume T1 goods so you need to constantly update entire production as you expand and build/upgrade houses You have no statistics screen (or maybe it's different than one in 1800 or maybe less informative) so you need to check warehouse overview more often (also due to no information about production timings and output) Once again I would advise to watch some gameplay/walkthrough videos on Youtube.