Anno 1800: 5 Years Later - A Retrospective Look!

on August 11th 2017 the world was introduced to the first trailer for ano 1800 and we all jumped for Joy at what we saw or at least I know I did uh to quote one of the earliest Dev blogs so with ano 1800 the series not only returns to its historical Roots but also delivers the full ano package on day one including many of the features that longtime fans missed in ano 20205 such as sandbox mode physical Goods classic ano multiplayer randomly generated Maps trade routes and a military fully integrated into the main game third party AI an in-depth diplomacy and trading system will allow you to engage characters as allies enemies or Partners while competing over different islands and trade routes together on one big map so it was an exciting announcement for sure and no one not even Ubisoft Minds at the time still blue bite had any idea of the International success that ano 1800 would have so today I really want to take a look back at the development the release and updates to the game since the game came out in April of 2019 we're going to look at some of the highs and lows and everything in between that made this game such a gem in the gaming community so sit back grab a cup of hibiscus tea as we take a look back at ano 1800 the early Dev blogs for ano 1800 are actually really fascinating to read there was a lot of early development features and mechanics that were either not completely implemented at all changed from the original Vision or in some cases kind of outright false advertising I I'll explain the last one a little bit later on so put away the pitchforks and stop furiously typing a comment to me but did you know for example that the early vision for ano did not include the need to go to the new world to set up new production chains that your old world population needs to advance so according to the multisession gameplay blog players are going to be able to stay in one session entirely and never have the need to go to another season for other Goods that they didn't want to the players who prefer the my home is my castle approach would be able to trade for goods that they needed wait a second this kind of sounds like docklands doesn't it huh interesting how that works out they also planned on limiting the multiplayer experience to a single large session of two to four players you know for the 20 of you guys out there that actually do multiplayer I'm kidding sort of The Art of War blog detailed how you going to be able to essentially vassalize opponent's Islands you'd be able to conquer an enemy Island to have them pay you in the form of taxes and even Goods this of course evolved into the system we have now of owning all the shares on an island but AI will just buy the shares back and you have to buy them back from the AI back and forth and back and forth and and you could still possibly be at war with the island itself honestly I think the original idea sound it a little more interesting and I honestly would have liked to have seen something like that instead of the share system we have now which I'm not a fan of and I think it would have been a lot different and maybe a little more interesting but we'll talk about shares a little bit later one blog that I reference often usually as a point of criticism is the one called construction AI this was the blog detailing how AI opponents you would be play against are programmed to play or were supposed to be programmed to play the AI was supposed to largely play by the same rules as the player and would have to manage resources generate taxes to fund a fleet and more production buildings fulfill needs and really everything that we as the player have to think about as well now unfortunately this is where the developers just kind of tossed in the towel and never mention to this again we know from both experience and from players who tore AP the data packs the game is coded in to learn their secrets that the AI just cheats it doesn't care about taxes influence population resource management or anything else it is simply scripted to build X and Y and pump out more ships than is truly possible given their current level of progression and this is really my first big critique and where I think some of that false advertising comes in the developers before release were very very vocal about changes to plans on features for the game or things the community was asking about such as land combat but this is one thing even if you think it is minor that was something they basically just swept under the rug and never made any correction on for me this is kind of like a compounding issue it shows that they really couldn't program the AI they wanted they put the cart before the horse basically when they wrote that blog that in turn tells me that their systems for no 1800 were likely too complex to begin with for the AI to properly function and yes this game is both easy and complex at the same time for a lot of players uh so it's really unfortunate that this is something that they couldn't achieve most people play against AI opponents in their game and as someone who has been around for a long time I see many newer and inexperienced players trying to base their current progression against the AI which is impossible the AI cheats you can't or well you shouldn't shame on you be cheating like the AI does it would have been great to have ai that actually played the same game you did and you could actually do things like blockade them or something I know some people claim to have blockaded but we know from The Game's coding that the AI will eventually just give itself whatever it needs to advance so it takes away player agency and that is always a loss for us as the player But ultimately even with some of the heads scratching development decisions and almost two years of waiting ano 1800 finally did release to us in April 2019 and we all got ready to hop hop into the game and start building our first cities the core of any ano game is the production buildings and production chains this basic premise has been around since 1998 with the original ano 1602 and hasn't changed in concept much at all over the years you have a series of raw resources that get either directly turned into end products or get turned into intermediate products that are combined with other things to be turned into those end products these goods are either used as construction material for building ships or other buildings used as consumer goods or even luxury goods that can raise happiness and give more money an1 1800 is no exception and gave us a huge variety of old favorites such as Fisheries which by the way fun fact Fisheries almost didn't make it into the game and the first food for Farmers was actually sausages a test group in development was like Hey where's the fish we we got where's the fish we always have fish ano always starts with fish don't know why but it does so they gave us our fish back thanks to that uh test group but you also get more advanced and complicated chains later on such as Steam carriages and steam motors sewing machines and so on I always felt the variety and progression of production chains was really well done actually starting with basic things like fish and wool clothing for your farmers and then progressing to more advanced Goods such as Bakery and then on to canned food rum spectacles and so on the visual and mechanical progress of your city through the phases of the Industrial Revolution was really spoton 1800 also expanded on features in previous games in the series by utilizing mechanics such as electricity as a requirement for more advanced factories and it allowed it to boost older Productions to give us more flexibility in how we produce our Goods however they did leave behind some mechanics that I thought it would have been great to carry on do you remember how factories in ano 2205 worked you had a main Factory building and you could expand the production output of it by placing down modules one Factory with multiple Wings to create a larger Factory instead of having to build just the same Factory over and over again it would increase the workforce Yes actually Workforce was a thing in 20205 as well but allowed you to not have to build the same Factory all the time it also gave you some freedom in design you could lay out the different wings of those factories in any way you wanted to fit in with the city and come up with some really neat looking industrial areas for your futuristic cities in 20205 I really like that aspect of it and I was really disappointed to not see it be brought back over overall though I think most people would agree that the production chains that were introduced with 1800's launch were well implemented and interesting though the return to the original ano gameplay with actual trade routes and ships was also very welcome but at the same time 1800 at launch was a bit of a nightmare to manage we did not have the STA statistic screen which basically everyone lives by now at launch oh the humanity it did not come out until December of 2019 with patch 6.0 so we had to wait a very very long time to get that statistic screen so we could actually see and manage all of our islands and all of our Productions together and everything for those first 8 months or so we had to use the homemade third-party calculators that may or may not have been entirely accurate to try to keep everything in order trust me it was really a dark time of the game trying to manage everything we were just in the dark on how everything worked together 1800 was a monstrosity of the game with so many varying factors that could affect your production and consumption taxes happiness and so on trying to keep track of it all was a massive headache people were legitimately using stopwatches to time ships delivering Goods but then forgetting things like cargo slowdown wind direction placement appears backup peers everything like that so the stopwatch thing sometimes didn't even work and things were a mess so no wonder they didn't follow through on the AI playing like the player the CPUs would have been eaten up by the AI trying to manage everything and trying to take up all those calculations speaking of CPU munching that is a small little segue into something else they changed with 1800 multi-session gameplay was introduced in 20205 with the numerous regions that you would load and unload in and out of you would build on a region and then you would go back out to the main map and then you could choose another region but you actually load it into it the region you exited was saved as a snapshot of what was going on when you left Frozen in time basically 1800 changed this to active regions regardless of which region you were focused on but I know why they did it the return to traditional trade routes and physical ships necessitated it along with things like realtime tax Reven revenues the game needed to be able to track realtime ship Journeys and everything that could affect them it also forces the player to keep an eye on each region simultaneously so they don't run out of goods because of poor planning or something the problem with that all of that is very CPU intensive it's pretty well known that the longer you play the bigger your population the slower the game gets the game is trying to calculate all of the production chains Warehouse depositing City incidents ships sailing around literally everything in multiple regions all at once it's pretty massive and it really eats into your computing power now while I'm sure the next ano will still have this real-time multi- session feature I do hope they find a better way to allocate the resources and how things are managed on the back end 1800 does get kind of laggy in the super late game with a few million people and since we're mentioning people let's talk real quick about the residence of our little ano Empire I have to say I really think the hit the nail the head with all the characters in the game from the citizens in our cities to the quirky and absolutely lovable sir archal Blake Ubisoft did a really great job of bringing the world to life later additions to the game such as Emperor ktima and even everyone's favorite Donny and his obsession with his Tower continued this trend of awesome character personalities well except maybe Lady Jane faithful something about her voice lines and it just makes my skin crawl I can't stand her I'm always happy to be done with her quest line and get her removed from my eard drums I also love the look of the buildings for each residential tier you really get that sense of advancement going from a small village of farmer Huts to a grand city of Parisian style homes all crammed together in shining white and green roof Glory with smoke from factories billowing over the tops of the houses and harbors busy with Ships coming going they really captured the look and feel of the late 1800s so let's move on from all the gushing over what I love and onto an area of the game I feel was a little more flat and actually kind of overdone and that's items and Specialists now now don't yell at me I think items and Specialists are terrific and I've loved them since they were introduced back in 1404 in their first iteration 2070 and 20205 had their own interesting versions of this feature and 1800 reinvented the wheel again however in doing so I think they went wild for no reason there are well over 1,000 items and specialists in the game over a thousand now how many are really useful I would say maybe less than 200 or so the vast majority of items are rather worthless that you might use for all of 10 minutes or really not even use at all I know what they were trying to go for item progression but this really wasn't necessary sure you might use that Tanner specialist on your fur dealer for a 10% boost in production but what is 10% not really a lot you could increase working conditions and take a minus one happiness penalty and save that trade Union slot for something more useful like the costume designer or Master Craftsman Frank plus some other better items there's just such there is such a thing as too much of something and we have way too many useless items just think about it though how often do you use common and uncommon items overall I know I barely do small exceptions like the Baker in the early game so I don't need a windmill maybe but eventually I have so much Workforce and income that I don't care and he gets tossed out it adds unnecessary bloat and we can play the game just as well with all of those extra items and it won't change the outcome they also went crazy with too much extra production I know I'm going to get dragged for this one but Bruno iron bright should never have existed in his current form Advanced weapons and steam motors from a sewing machine Factory I mean come on now I know this is a game and a fictional universe but at least be reasonable with it extra products from a specialist should have been relegated to only giving plus one of whatever that particular Factory is producing every X Cycles or even give back resources used in Productions say the sewing machine for say that sewing machine factory for example plus one steel every 10 Cycles or something it would give you the idea that better processes were imp imped meaning less wasted materials in construction not hey I got some leftover steel from the sewing machines so I built a bunch of Gatling guns seriously so while I think the items of Specialists were a great feature to bring back I feel it wasn't done in a way that really made sense in a lot of ways and opened up to the game to a lot of really cheesy tactics later on now items for the cultural buildings your zoos and museums and then the Botanical Garden DLC I think those are actually fine I can see usefulness for just about every single set that there is now the nonset items I don't understand the point of why would I take up space in a zoo or Museum or spend the influence for an item that's going to give me maybe 20 attractiveness why would I do that so I don't really understand the point of the oneoff nonset items I I think they could have been not included I don't think they were that useful at all I rarely ever use non items you know cultural buildings cost influence to place so I want to use that influence for items that are going to give me something back and that being part of a set that's going to give me some bonus so while I think all of these set items were really well done and I really like them all the nonset items again kind of goes back to what's the point of them we would have been fine without it didn't need that stuff it's just extra stuff now an 1800 was also the first game where they introduced the idea with like trade unions and town halls and stuff in previous games you actually had the items they would affect the entire Island that they were slotted into the trading post for so this was the first time we actually got local effects for items instead of them being islandwide I'm on the fence about this I like I like the idea of what it did it allowed people to create their own little pockets of Industry built around a Trade union or their own pockets of housing built around a town hall and they could specialize those Pockets instead of specializing the entire Island I think it was a really cool system I actually love it I could not see myself playing without that kind of system again so I do hope the next game in the series still includes this my only little complaint about it was a bit of oversight in the development of the system which brought us what we all call clipping now clipping if you're not familiar with it is having a building that has even numbers of tiles on each side being able to be affected by two trade unions overlapping and the edge of each trade Union radius touches in the center point of the building this allows the building to be affected by two trade unions and you can stack multiple items so one building can be affected by up to six or eight items depending on if you have the seat of power DLC and you're using the policy in the Department of Labor to give four SL to your trade unions instead of the regular three now clipping we know was a happy accident they did not mean for clipping to occur but by the time it was discovered and really made its way around the community they decided not to fix it because it's not really hurting anything but it also kind of broke the game clipping is really the only reason that you see those super efficient min max players with like 20 million population if it was not for clipping they would not be able to have those kind of population numbers now one argument I see from that Community is well we have to have clipping or we can't have these populations and I think that's a cyclical argument if you never had clipping to begin with then you might be able to have a Max of maybe 10 million population and you would never think twice about it like oh well there's the max based on game mechanics well now your theoretical Max in your head is like 21 million or whatever it is now but it's only possible because of a gamebreaking glitch that allowed you to do that so technically by what should have been the standard game mechanics the 20 million population Was Out Of Reach anyways you're only able to do that because you are using a broken system now yeah it's kind of a whatever but at the same time I really wish that they would have fixed stuff like that um there was a there was actually a bug a long time ago where you could put Max resident increase items in a town hall and have it on a resident and using that Max resident item you could push this was before lifestyle needs by the way let me say that real quick this was before lifestyle needs was introduced uh with Empire of the skies because with the lifestyle needs you can push it past the regular Max limit but anyways the max resident items would allow you to push your houses past their normal maximum pretty quickly so if you put a Max resident item on a farmer house and you meet the requirements for getting those Max residents then you could upgrade the farmer house or whatever house without fulfilling all the needs I did this trick quite a few times in different series of mine where I would use those items that way I didn't have to supply various needs to my people I would just get them up over the maximum number and upgrade them well they fixed that they they said that that was unintended gameplay and I I do remember a statement from the developers when it was fixed that they don't want broken mechanics like that that bypass gameplay or allow you to get around regular gameplay so I understood why they fixed it but at the same time it's like okay you're going to fix that but you're not going to fix clipping which technically completely breaks the game and allows for very unintended gameplay like that with the clipping so you know it's one of those things where they they said this was broken it must must be fixed but this is broken and we're not going to fix it you know it's kind of one of those and I don't understand it so really with items and specialist I felt like the system was decent but I think I do think they went too far with it uh now we do know from a statement from the developers and stuff A couple of years ago that they are really looking at the items and specialist and how it was received and we can see that in the latest DLCs and everything we've gotten where Specialists aren't super overpowered anymore and a lot of times they might actually come with a negative on there they might not be as perfect as you would want them to be they have some really good positives but they might have a small negative attached to it as well so it seems like over the years they have kind of refined how they want specialist to be and I hope that that kind of ref idea of how to handle them carries on into future games so you know I actually kind of want to move real quick over to combat combat was not a big focus of ano 1800 I feel obviously they took out land combat U from the the combat and Military Dev blogs that we had we know that land combat was you know they they toyed around with the idea on their end and kind of played around with the idea of land combat but they decided ultimately to shift away from land to combat and focus only on the naval combat they completely had their reasoning for it and I agree with their reasoning for it uh you know trying to make the game and the buildings and everything else work and with the scope and scale of how ano 1800 is compared to the previous games it just made a lot more sense not to have to deal with uh you know land combat stuff and units and everything else I totally agree with their reasoning for it uh but overall the combat is kind of bland to me I'm not really a fan of it it's very rock paper scissors uh until you throw in the items and then items kind of make it go all over the place and I was just never a fan of the combat in any ano game when I play a city Builder or a resource management game that's what I want to do I want to focus on that if I want to go play a combat game I'll go play Starcraft again or Age of Empire or something I just really didn't enjoy it in this game part of that is because of how the AI you know cheats and everything you know you you can't really compete hardly with the AI sometimes when it comes to the number of ships so you just have to get better ships with better items on them uh because the AI is just going to have you know fleets and fleets of battle Cruisers flying around and their harbors and stuff are completely stacked with about 5 million cannons and everything it's just silly and I never really liked it or cared about it the ship designs were pretty cool um I didn't really like the battle Cruisers and the monitors uh I don't know they just didn't really fit um I'm a sale guy myself I love sailing ships the battle cruiser it was it was too it was too futuristic looking to me it just it just didn't work for me you know I I don't know I know some people love the battles and they love the battleships and the you know the monitors they love combat that's fine if you do I'm not I'm not saying that you shouldn't um but I just really feel like the combat was really took a backseat in this game and they just kind of threw a few things at it and let it be the only combat related updates we ever saw for the game was in Empire disguise when they added the combat airships the flak cannons the flak monitors uh the blue flame the the flame monitors and stuff like that and the flame Towers that's the only combat updates we've ever seen for ano 1800 was all of that in Empire of the skies and it's kind of a it it was stuff that sered the flame the flamethrower the flamethrower stuff was honestly one of those that it was like why did they even add this this was not necessary whatsoever it was just something that someone was like Hey this would be cool and threw it in so the combat stuff definitely gets a d a D minus for me on the grading scale it it was not that great um I I feel like it could have been a little more interesting possibly and maybe I would have been more into it but I I just really wasn't just I just really wasn't big into the combat so while I'm on a little bit of a slightly negative train here let me just go ahead and get this one out of the way too uh something else that I think Ubisoft Minds sort of dropped the ball on although it wasn't you know as impactful overall on the game itself and that's the updates and fixes to the game now most games get regular hot fixes and patches pushed out to introduce new features and fix bugs in the games Ubisoft didn't really do this with ano now we would get a major patch for a DLC release relase and then maybe one more hot fix or minor update patch 1 to 3 months after the DLC released and then nothing else would come out until the next DLC this would leave a lot of bugs broken code and stuff like that in the game for quite a long time and it just create a lot of issues for players even then patches were notorious for fixing bugs but creating a lot of new ones sometimes and even somehow bringing back old bugs that had already been fixed but then they reintroduced them I don't understand how that happens but it did quite a few times it was obvious to a lot of us that the patch Q&A was really lacking and ano did struggle with keeping the game patched up and working sometimes uh but overall though it was a stable and playable game you know mostly it it had its problems but it was stable and playable for the most part one of the biggest issues that they actually never resolved and still to this day is a problem is the direct X12 crashing now for those of you who are not aware of this direct X12 in ano 1800 is really unstable and it is one of the biggest culprits for crashes in the game the only suggestion that has ever been given by the developers is switch back to directx11 that's basically it they never figured out how to fix the problem and they really just kind of gave up on it they washed their hands of the direct X12 problem and just said hey if it doesn't work go to 11 and that's it they never tried to figure out what was causing it there were some bugs and issues with the game that players reported and gave really clear examples to them they were met with we don't have that issue on our end and ignored uh and that's really you know it's kind of disheartening as a player who's trying to help report bugs and everything to the developers to be hit with the we don't have this issue must be something on your end thanks for telling us and that's it you don't ever hear anything else about it and and some bugs yeah are just not even acknowledged at all a prime example of this being the train AI glitching out sometimes and not delivering oil to power plants and it breaks down the entire power plant system the devs won't make any comments on it even though myself and many others have shown the issue to them and sent them you know save files and everything else showing the problem and it's just literally ignored so while there have been a lot of really awesome quality of life updates to the game over four years there have been so so many definitely far more positives than negatives on this but obviously the positives are something that you know we're good about you know it's all fine the statistics screen when it came in the co-op update the Night and Day stuff all of that was really awesome quality of life stuff really cool new features added to the game we were really happy about it but knowing that there's a fairly large plethora of issues that are still existing in the game that probably won't ever get fixed is just kind of a it's kind of a downer you know there's things like uh quests where you might need to escort a ship or deliver items to a ship and the ship doesn't exist uh you'll see like a little gray Square on the quest log sometimes where normally it would have a a picture of like a ship or something right there a little icon of a ship sometimes it's just a gray square and it's and it means the quest has bugged out it won't work you have to abandon it there's no way to get that fixed um there is currently a bug in the game uh for those of you who have Empire of the Skies or New World Rising where Archie and Isabelle will no longer sell boxy and aluminum profiles once you hit the endgame stage of the game that is 1,000 investors and 25,000 global population they'll stop selling that stuff so they're still quite a few things like that that have never been addressed and unfortunately as of January 5th of this year we were basically told it will never get fixed what I mean by that is there is or was a Trello board that was used to track bugs for the game and you know we would have known issues issues being worked on blah blah blah blah blah well all of the bugs that were listed under investigation have all been moved to will not address and that is it they have basically wiped their hands of bug fixing on ano 1800 aside from only critical or gamebreaking bugs that is stated on the Trello board the only things that they will update now for ano 1800 are things they consider critical or gamebreaking and currently on the trailer the trailer board is still up even though it said it would be down as of like January 31st 2024 it's still there but they have moved all bugs to will not address so basically everything that is happening with the game as of today that is not working they're not going to address they'll only address something new that might crop up but I don't see it happening so yeah I I just don't really look for any more real Buck fixes to come to an 1800 anymore only minor updates to account for the new cosmetic DLCs coming this year and that's going to be it so it's uh it's kind of sad that there are quite a few uh big bugs and stuff in the game that the developers are not going to address anymore and some of them have been around for several years without ever being addressed and you know that that's um I I I do have to give that a thumbs down to the developers on that one I I wish they would have spent some more time trying to fix bugs and you know do better quality uh quality control on bug patches and everything else like that so we didn't have a lot of the problems that we did all right so let's move away from all of that sort of negativity stuff right there and everything else and let's talk it just about the game in general you know I've talked about my thoughts on the big game mechanics and features of the game you know the patches and how the game was patched over the years and and how well it did with that so let's just talk about the game and its longevity uh kind of point of view I mean obviously the game held its own with 12 dlc's over 4 years of content updates the last figure we were given in 2023 pointed to about 3 million copies sold which is really good for an N game although it obviously is a huge Far Cry from most other citybuilding type games uh 3 million copies is in the big scheme of it all a very small and what most companies consider underperforming although Ubisoft Minds obviously was very happy to sold 3 million copies of the game uh because they've never sold that many before so it did really well for what it was I I think a big part of the reason it did so well was a return to the standard ano formula coming off of 20205 which did very very poorly uh things like randomized maps and the sandbox mode that was missing from 20205 and it's been a staple of the game for 20 years having that back brought back in a lot of veteran players and the better marketing that ano 1800 was given helped bring in a lot of new players I mean that being said though I think they did a weird kind of pivot in a way uh by creating a semi static gameplay Loop when they introduced keep trani in Sunken Treasures you go from a game that has two regions that are somewhat randomized with different map types and a various selection of islands that could be filled in on the layout of the maps and and everything so you always had you know okay I'm starting on this island so this starting island is different from the last starting Island I have and I've got to think about this and that and all these other things you have to think about to where now here's a a new region with a fixed layout of islands and a new continental island with three times the building space of a standard large island yes it's a builder's wet dream with all that space But the space is the same every time you play no matter how many times you play the game crown falls is always the same it removed a lot of the variety and replaces it with this static Island you will pretty much always build your biggest city on unless you're a min max player and then you put all of your industry there so you know whatever I mean sure you can build your city in a different way every single time but it's always going to have the same elevations and the same borders to it it starts cutting into replayability for me personally and going by a lot of comments I had on a video I did called do you have crownfall syndrome it seems I'm not alone in that random maps are the bread and butter of an ano game and having a region that is the de facto best region to build in for a big city with a static never changing Island takes away from that creativity and that Randomness that I always loved now mean what if we take crown falls out of the equation here does the game have a great replayability with plenty of Randomness uh kind of the different map types once you play them all enough are predictable CU you know the exact layout of the islands are going to be you know that if you're playing a Corners map you're going to have your four starting islands in the center of the map and all four players are going to start on that if you're playing with other people or other AI around that it's going to be a selection of medium and small islands with four more large islands on the outskirts the Pirates are going to be in one of two corners and then the other three neutral AI are going to be scattered around somewhere taking up the space of a small island and that's basically going to be it if you're playing the island Ark map you know that the Pirates are always going to be down in the lower leftand corner and all of the islands are going to be in a crescent moon shape on the other side of the map with the four starting Islands going in a crescent moon shape starting from the north going to the South so you know you always know how the maps are going to look for the most part with the layout it's just going to be what islands the map generates for you based on your seed the islands themselves have been handcrafted by the developers so it's not procedural and you know what the islands are going to look like eventually you play enough you know what all the islands look like and you know which ones you want to go for then the gameplay Loop kind of becomes a factor in this how many times can you build the same stuff until you're board ano doesn't have like random events or anything that might make you change strategies halfway through your game play once you have a stable economy hit investors you've got stuff built you've basically won the game all you're doing from there is seeing how far you can stretch it all until you get bored and that is the number one reason people stop and restart boredom you can only play so far until you're bored with that particular playthrough and you start over to do it all over again with maybe a few changes here and there but there is nothing wrong with that restarting any game is usually the most fun before you're completely over powered and you have everything and nothing is a challenge anymore you have to build everything back up and that could be a satisfying and exciting little Adventure again can it hold your interest indefinitely sure some people it can and to those people I say more power to you I I'm glad that it does for me though not so much I do get bored eventually and look for something else to draw my attention I need something new and exciting I do wish ano had those random events that could happen or something that would cause me to have to change up strategies mid game maybe droughts happen and all my crops fail in a region for a certain amount of time and I need to figure out how to manage and deal with it I would love to have seen a more in-depth economy on the world stage where prices for goods could change like the market did in 20205 if you think back to 20205 as you and other players now of course it was online so players affected the market of goods as you sold and bought stuff from the world market market prices for stuff would fluctuate if someone was selling a massive massive amount of like you know luxury food or something the price for luxury food to be sold off would drop drastically to where now it's a net negative trying to sell that stuff and produce it you're not going to make enough back it was a dynamic market system and even though ano 1800 is not online always like that where other players are you know are affecting your game they could have had a randomized algorithm that would randomly assign different prices and fluctuations and stuff like a stock market almost uh and then also be directly affected by whatever you're selling I mean it would honestly change up things like the pocket watch trade to ktima that is a solid easy trade that you can do buying pocket watches from Archie selling them to ktima those prices never change and you're always going to make a ton of money off of it now imagine if you had a dynamic system where the more pocket watches you bought the higher the price would go because you're constantly buying those and the more you sell them the lower the price would go so it would change that amount and stuff and kind of keep it fluctuating you actually have to change up what you're buying and selling over time to make up for a dynamic market and I think that would have been kind of interesting it was always really interesting in 20205 watching what was you know really really valuable right now and I might you know sell off a big stock of that to bring in a big chunk of money or I see that the stock price for you know something has dropped so I might hoard a bit of that I might I might keep a bunch of that on hand and watch for that price to go back up and then sell it all off I know that doesn't interest a lot of people but you know stuff like that kind of makes it a little more interesting at times and you know honestly I also miss disasters uh those added so much interesting Randomness to the game uh volcano erupting or or a tornado coming through tidal wave or something just some sort of random event that you have no control over that you have to deal with so I I do wish there was some more random events going on in the game to kind of keep me on my toes and everything and so the gamepl doesn't just become a series of okay copy paste the same layouts over and over again and just keep filling in space because that's all I have left to do I mean so I really would give ano a passable grade on repay ability uh and it really comes down to the player some people can repeat the Motions in a game like this and never get tired but I know many people who need more reactive gameplay and sometimes unpredictable gameplay to keep them going now of course there is one thing that did keep many people going and that was the mini content updates and new mechanics introduced in season passes now I'm not going to go into huge detail here about the various DLCs for an100 I recently did a tier list ranking for each of the 12 DLC updates for the game that I think it really just covers all of my thoughts on them what I do want to talk about though is how the dlc's were implemented on top of the existing gameplay this was a bit of a hit and miss to me some DLC paired nicely with the existing gameplay mechanics and gave us creative new ways to play the game a good example of that would be bright Harvest it felt natural to the progression of the game and it gave us new ways of managing our farms and it really became a fan favorite DLC but then we had things like docklands which on the surface was a really cool idea but it was basically a built-in cheat because of overpowered specialist that could be used to essentially ignore 99% of the game and just import everything by making Advanced weapons from a bicycle Factory now obviously you don't have to use docklands that way I know many people just use docklands for storage and that's fine but the fact that they implemented this new mechanic into the game the way they did kind of was a downside to me because I don't think they thought it through unlike games like Stellaris for example where they have a custodian team that actively works on updating the game to take into account new ideas on mechanics uh how DLC content is going to interact with the base game and ensure that there's no crazy uh crazy interactions or anything like that and that the DLC content does not obsolete base game features and it keeps it refreshing and interesting ano just slap DLC on top of everything in each other have the research institute great now you can just ignore all the mechanics to get Specialists like attractiveness on islands with a public Mooring Expeditions and so on legendary Specialists became a printable currency and no longer gamechanging items that you might scream a little too loud when you finally got one or was that just me again I don't want to go into a full discussion on all this so be sure to check out that tier list video below uh most people did agree though that ano 1800 started getting a little bloated around season 3 by that point we had six regions to juggle many tiers of populations and I honestly think we had more resources to manage than every other ano game put together it it was just becoming a mountain of stuff is is is the best word I can describe it it just became more stuff I really wasn't super happy about a season 4 but at least it was okay minus Empire disguise which was in is still hot garbage in my opinion uh I was just very glad when they announced the end of content development and that they were you know moving on to a new project all in all I think ano 1800 really was a good game it has its faults and yes I might have sound like a Negative Nancy quite a bit in this video and everything but sometimes the things we love most are the things that we are the most critical about I love ano 1800 I love the ano series obviously ano 1800 is what propelled my channel uh where we're at today close to 40,000 subscribers so the game itself has been great for me uh for both a Content creation standpoint and just as a great game to play now obviously I don't play that much anymore I I've played it to death I've got several thousand hours in the game and there's just not a whole lot left that I want to do with the game I do play it sometimes just for you guys and everything but I have moved on to other games but there's still so many new people finding the game to this day and falling in love with it I get several hundred new subscribers every day I get at least 20 or 30 new people on my Discord every day coming in asking questions wanting to learn about the game and everything and it's and it's still fun to teach people about this game and to teach people how to play ano 1800 it really was the Pinnacle of 20 some odd years of development and ideas and mechanics all coming together and a great package now unfortunately it was not a perfect package because you know like I said there were things I didn't really like about it with the DLCs and some of the patches and bugs and stuff like that but every game has its problems I can't really give an example of a perfect game that has has no issues whatsoever but overall I think an 1800 did a really good job of reaching out to the masses and presenting itself as a fun engaging game to play and I still recommend it to people looking for citybuilding games to this day and I would still recommend it to someone who is looking for a city Builder to play and looking for a resource management type game to play it is it is a perfect melding of those two genres that city-builder and that Resource Management so if you made it this far thank you so much for listening to my ramblings and stuff about an 1800 and my thoughts on the game now that we're about a year past the announcement that development was over and everything else so I hope you enjoyed this video and everything if you did let me know Down Below in the comments your thoughts on it all and I look forward to seeing you in my next video Until Then guys take [Music] care

Channel: Taka

Views: 10,831

Keywords: anno 1800, anno 1800 gameplay, anno 1800 review, anno 1800 game, anno 1800 worth a buy, anno 1800 worth it, anno 1800 worth a buy 2023, anno 1800 dlc worth it, anno 1800 base game worth it, anno 1800 retrospective, anno 1800 takarazuka, anno 1800 taka

Id: Wd9Eiawlbz8

Length: 48min 0sec (2880 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 19 2024