Anyone here played Civilisation? A show of hands if you please!
Ah, I see a few of you have! In that case, you may have had the thought “If only I could decide the layout of my capital city in detail including all the roads and special buildings…”
Well this is pretty much what Anno 1404 is. It’s kind of like a cross between the Civilisation series, SimCity and Command and Conquer. So every town starts off with a marketplace and you build peasant houses around it. These are you cash resource, in the form of taxes. Make sure you keep to the demands of your town people as their advancement to citizens and patricians means you’ll earn more gold from them.
Other resources need to be gathered and these range from stone, to quartz and wheat (for beer!). Not every island has these resources so you may need to set up shipping routes between harbours to meet supply and demand.
Ok, but is the world building side any good
This depends entirely on your own desire to create perfect balance in a game. If you’re into Civilisation or SimCity (especially SimCity) then you should absolutely love this side of the game.
Anno 1404 is quite mathematical in some respects!
Some of the resource balancing can get a bit tricky. On more than one occasion I was happily building everything I needed only to find that my reserve of gold coins had completely dried up!
Luckily there are two ways you can earn cash. Town people are the first and main source, however you can do trade runs to nearby allies to sell your resources, such as tools and ropes, for a good price! These can be set up to run all the time, and they’re almost always happy to buy from you. That’s even if they’ve bought more wood than you can shake a stick at. Um, as it were! But if you want to keep a stable economy in this game, I’ve got one major tip:
Keep building houses!
Then you should be ok. Of course this is all fine until your former allies decide that you shouldn’t be the only ones with all that iron you’ve got. And since you’re not giving it away for free, they’ll decide to “liberate” it.
Which is also fine because by now you have a fleet of huge warships and city walls to defend your patch. Hopefully.
The combat in Anno 1404 is basic and therefore very little tactics to speak of. But it works well enough, the main strategy is simply: Have more units than the enemy. And luckily for people like me, that’s their usual method for real time combat stuff anyhow! The ship battles are quite enjoyable to watch and sinking enemy ships is always satisfying!
Talking of cannons and gunpowder, lets talk about plot. Ok, that's obviously a tenuous link. But anyone British will understand where I'm going with this when I tell you that the name of the cardinal’s henchman “Guy Forcas”. I’m not sure why but I’ve always thought that giving new fictional characters similar names to historic figures takes away their individuality and type-casts them immediately. Obviously this is intentional here but it also makes the story a little predictable.
So the story of Anno 1404 is kind of a mix between Robin Hood, The 4 musketeers and the gunpowder plot story.
The characters involved are not particularly unique. Grima Worm-tounge from Lord of the Rings and Guy Forcas are painfully obvious to me, the cardinal is like the emperor from Star Wars, and it goes on.
However, as usual no actual spoilers here but I will say that the story feels like nothing more than one very long tutorial that prepares you for the sandbox like “continuous game”. I had plenty of time with this mode due to misreading it as “continue game” and wondering for a good 3 hours what had happened to all the woodworks I’d built.
"Continuous game" is far more like Civilisation and allows you to expand and build at your own pace, keeping up good relations with your neighbours and basically trying to take over the world any which way you choose.
Lets talk about some of the bits I didn’t like about the Anno 1404, starting with my biggest problem: The loading times.
It’s a slow game anyway, there’s a fast forward button that I am eternally grateful I found, but even so the game moves to a walking pace at best. But when you mix that in with some of the slowest loading times I’ve ever come across it can really grind on your nerves.
The saving times are just as bad, and it has an auto-save that I’m sure is useful, but it can really interrupt the already slow pace of the game. I’ve no idea why both loading and saving are so slow, but I really think it’s something that should be updated. And soon!
Sometimes the micro-management can be a bit much and there doesn’t feel like any calm moments. The story especially can feel a bit off balance here, since nearly every building is required to make any real progress in the game, having those restricted to start with feels almost suffocating.
Especially when you’ve accidentally played Sandbox mode for a few hours before!
The music is pretty good. It’s not uniquely special, nor is it going to win any awards (well, not from me) but there were moments when I felt uplifted because of it. It’s always a plus for games like this not to have an annoying or easily repetitive soundtrack, and the different music for different civilisations works well.
So, this is a game for people who can be patient. Rewards are not instant, you have to work for them and I know this isn’t everyone’s idea of fun!
Saying that, the designing of a city in Anno 1404 can be enjoyable in itself, they look impressive and in some ways quite realistic. If you like managing resources more than real time combat then this is probably a game you should get.
Score: 80 out of 100
Final words: Who doesn’t like building epic cities from the 15th century?
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