Anno 1800

I’ve really enjoyed discovering the Anno series. I started with Anno 2070, loved it, played the hell out of it, and was then roundly disappointed by Anno 2205. Sometime later I bought a copy of 1404 and played through that as well. I see why 1404 tends to get a lot of love from fans -- it pioneered most of what really works in the later games, and in some dimensions 2070 was a “step backwards” relative to 1404. That said, in my own opinion, Anno 2070’s pluses outweigh its minuses, and it stands as my own favorite entry in the series.

I’ve now gotten my hands on a copy of Anno 1800, and it’s an interesting game to review. That’s because it simultaneously introduces a bunch of real improvements over the titles that went before it, while at the same time managing to be less fun to play. And there’s a host of bigger and smaller causes behind this apparent paradox.

First, let’s talk about Anno 1800’s improvements. The most obvious one is the engine. Anno 1800 looks amazing, and features seamless switching between two different game maps. Compared to 2205, this is an impressive quality of life improvement. Whoever was behind the engineering here deserves enthusiastic congratulations.

Then there’s the rethinking of core gameplay elements. Earlier Annos constrained your building choices using distance circles -- fields had to be within a certain distance of their farm, city improvements only applied to inhabitants within a certain distance, and thus much of the game ended up being a sort of tetris puzzle of trying to optimize the placement of rectangular shapes inside overlapping circular zones of influence. There were fun gameplay patterns there -- but Anno 1800 has boldly moved away from them. A few buildings still work on the old circular constraint logic, but city improvements use a new, generally more forgiving mechanic based on the distance traveled via your road system, while farms do away with the distance constraints and rectangular templates entirely, replacing them with a much more flexible mini-system built around the idea of filling in connected regions.

Taken together, these changes make Anno feel markedly less fiddly, while retaining enough of the old building blocks to still make planning cities fun and rewarding. It’s a real improvement on the core gameplay loop, so props to whomever designed that as well. Add to that some other quality of life improvements, like the ability to place “blueprints” on the map for buildings you’re planning on, but can’t yet afford, and a convenient building-relocation ability, and you can see why many people are saying that Anno 1800 is the best game in the series.

The building staffing system is clever as well. Older versions of Anno enforced seemingly arbitrary ratios between the different citizen types; which always felt a bit artificial. But the idea that your island needs some population of farmers as long as it has grain fields that need farming just makes logical sense, and the gameplay implications of the staffing system are elegant and compelling.

Ok. So now we have a game that is in many ways the best title in the series. Why is it also one of the least satisfying to play?

The first big issue is that the designers have decided to go “deep” rather than “broad” in terms of the different population types and their associated supply chains. Anno 1404 had 2 population types, Anno 2070 had 3, 2205 had 4, and 1800 has... 2 again. However, while there are fewer population types in Anno 1800, keeping them satisfied requires quite a bit more management -- that’s because the designers have decided to give each population type two different resource sets, one that satisfies their “needs” and another that makes them “happy”. In theory, I think there’s supposed to be an interesting strategic choice implied by this system, whereby you can choose to skip over some of the supply chains that create “happiness”, developing your island more quickly at the price of civil discontent. In practice, it’s not a terribly interesting choice. The “happiness” resources are often easier to get than the needs resources, and the economic benefits of getting them tend to be quite compelling, so it rarely makes sense to skip a resource.

More than that though, advancing to the next population level is one of the most rewarding moments in an Anno game. By doubling the number of resources needed to achieve those landmark moments, the designers have also doubled the amount of time players need to invest to feel the same thrill of accomplishment. The endorphin release per minute in Anno 1800 is about half what it was in 1404 or 2070. Annos are, by nature, slow and cerebral games. But Anno 1800 doubles down on that, and compared to its predecessors, playing it feels like a slog.

The biggest issue with 1800, however, is the changes to the military mechanics. Anno has always been an awkward marriage of gameplay elements -- at heart, it’s a city building game, but one that takes place in an RTS world. Getting the real time combat elements to play well in concert with the much slower paced, more deliberate city planning elements is a daunting game design challenge. And I think there always will be some awkwardness there. But, the fact that Anno tries, and at least partially succeeds, in injecting the urgency and drama of a real time war game into its city builder core is a big part of what makes the series special. 2070 and 1404 both managed the awkward RTS/city builder combination relatively well. 2205, meanwhile, experimented with the idea of moving much of the RTS combat into combat-only maps, an experiment that failed miserably -- creating highly repetitive gameplay that felt like a chore to play through. 1800 thankfully moves away from 2205’s tactical minigames, but the design team tried another bold change in place of it. Rather than modeling slow, complex island takeovers involving armies or air units, Anno 1800 has changed the rules so that if you can take and hold an island’s harbor, you’re able to take control of it instantly, though at the price of wiping out all the existing buildings.

This certainly streamlines the game. Ships have always been what Anno does best, and removing armies and air units entirely is a choice that makes a lot of sense on paper. The problem is that by restricting conflicts to harbors, the designers have made it possible for players to win the game by conquest while using nothing but early-game units. This isn’t so much a balance problem as it is an inevitable consequence of removing any kind of land combat. The player needs early game military ships to be able to defend his trade routes and spar with the AIs, but if military ships are all it takes to win the game, then he can just build a big pile of them and win without bothering to climb particularly high up the population development ladder.

The strength of harbor guns and slow speed of military ships are already balanced hard to discourage this -- but the incentive to win with a ship rush is so strong that it doesn’t really matter. The balancing efforts aren’t enough to stop the strategy from being very strong -- they just end up making it slow and tedious to implement.

But one smart balance consideration that the designers have made here is to make selling early game warships hugely profitable. What this means is that if you set yourself up to spam ships, you’re actually also setting yourself up to have a quite significant bonus income stream. And because fully conquering the map is slow and tedious, it’s often fun to switch to selling your war ships once you’ve carved out a comfortable empire for yourself. In effect, rather than nerfing ships harder, the designers have decided to offer some very compelling rewards to players who are willing to demilitarize. In practice, I think this approach to Anno 1800s military balance problem works surprisingly well. It’s a little awkward, but the combination of the “carrot” offered by high ship sale prices, together with the “stick” of very slow ship build and motion times, tends to push me away from fully conquering the map until I’ve gotten fairly deep into tier 4 developments.

I think it might be possible to push the balance to a place where ship rushing felt less like the obviously optimal strategy -- you could, for example, give harbors on sufficiently high-pop islands some kind of weapon that would rip through wooden hulls, something that effectively required iron warships to counter. That’s a bit of an obvious design kludge, but I think something along these lines might also be worth trying. A change like this would also let you decrease the sell prices of warships a bit, where the current economics reward investments in ship building to an almost ridiculous degree.

Finally, there’s the matter of atmosphere and replay value. Anno 2070 was a world you could lose yourself in -- the competing philosophies and parallel tech trees of the two main factions were fun to see play out in different scenarios, and the deep campaign and host of challenge maps meant the game was good for hundreds of hours of gameplay before it started to feel stale. 1404, similarly, had a strong campaign, compelling characters, and a host of different scenarios, in addition to the core sandbox mode. Anno 1800, meanwhile, has a world that feels relatively threadbare. Nominally there is a campaign, but it’s really just a glorified tutorial with an underwhelming story. There are no scenarios, so once you’ve played through a sandbox game on “hard”, you’ve pretty much seen all there is to see.

The “new world” populations are also particularly uninspired in comparison to the secondary populations in the other recent Annos. Managing water in the orient, or heat in the arctic, or even radiation on the moon, were all fairly interesting twists that helped keep the development of your secondary settlements feeling fresh. There’s really nothing interesting about 1800’s new world colonies though -- they’re bland and forgettable, and that feels like a missed opportunity.

Overall, I feel like Anno is headed in a good direction. They clearly have some very competent engineers and designers working on the series, and it sounds like they’ve made tons of money with this latest title; so another sequel looks all but guaranteed. But Anno 1800 also feels like an intermediate step along the way to something better. Hopefully, the designers will recognize and fix the low points of the current gameplay, and just keep those pieces that are working well. Another masterpiece from Blue Byte certainly seems possible; but Anno 1800 isn’t it.