Series: Anno Series

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Anno 1800 is one of my favourite perennial games. It’s the ultimate toy — an open-ended delight where I can build beautiful cities, set up intricate production chains, and pamper my residents with coffee, chocolate, cars, and champagne from the four corners of the earth.

Anno 1800’s scenarios are a different experience. They are games — self-contained, win-lose experiences with defined rules. So far, there are two:

• Eden Burning, released for free in December 2021.
• Seasons of Silver, just released (April 2022) as part of the Season 4 DLC.

Eden Burning is a unique take on the city-builder that charges players with rebuilding an island ravaged by a fire cult, while preserving the local environment. The trick is playing slowly and conservatively: rotating fishing grounds to avoid overfishing, building gradually to avoid degrading the soil, water, and air beyond their capacity to recover, and replanting trees along the way. (The scenario’s writing is also surprisingly dark, especially for an Anno game. The occupying cultists were not good or kind people.) In the end, I won on my first try, island intact.

Seasons of Silver is the opposite — a race against time. Playing an exiled nobleman, now the challenge is to build a city in the barren wilderness, mine silver, and process it to meet increasingly punishing deadlines from the king. The mines and processing plants need workers. The workers need food. The crops need irrigation, as the land lurches between drought and monsoon. All this infrastructure needs vast quantities of timber & bricks — fast! My first attempt fell flat on its face. Oh well, at least now I know what’s coming up.

This scenario deserves special mention for its background music and voice acting — the main character sarcastically reading out the mission briefing is hilarious.

For Anno 1800 owners, I highly recommend the scenarios. They’re short — much shorter than the main game — well-designed, and challenging. Eden Burning is free, so why not try it out?

After playing the Anno 117 demo, I feel confident enough to buy the full game the day it comes out. It feels like an Anno game, in its mechanics and its charm, with some tweaks and innovations on top. And with 350+ hours in Anno 1800, that’s exactly what I wanted to see.

The core game mechanics are easy to summarise and will be familiar to anyone who’s played Anno 1800. Arrive at a deserted island. Set up a production chain for timber. Start building houses. Set up production chains to feed and clothe the residents. Upgrade the houses to tier 2. Set up new, more complicated production chains to meet the tier 2 residents’ demands, and so on.

The challenge, and the fun, are in the details. New goods might require building cities on new islands to produce; some buildings require specific terrain, such as forest, coastline, or marshes; and more buildings require more workers, who in turn require more goods, which require more buildings to produce.

One area where I do see a lot of complaining online is the interface. I agree that it’s harder to find information — although some of this is almost certainly because 117 is new whereas I have plenty of experience in 1800. For example, in the following screenshot, just how many people is this house giving me, versus the maximum if I provided all necessary goods? In 1800 it would have been obvious, in 117 it’s less so — I can only see the current number.

The demo offers a choice of two regions. Latium is warm and sunny, while the real stand-out is Albion, the game’s version of Roman Britain — a setting I don’t think I’ve seen before in a city-builder. Both are beautiful, but if I had to give the nod to one, it would be Albion, with its cool misty palette, its marshlands — complete with little wooden walkways to connect buildings — and its choice of two upgrade paths for its residents, Celtic or Romanised Celtic (with the latter wanting imported goods from Latium fairly early on, at Tier 2).

The NPCs are the charming, engaging, and often quirky sorts I expect from an Anno game. Some are more serious than others. On the one hand, there are a softly-spoken retired veteran tilling his fields, and the daughter of a Serican (Chinese) silk merchant; on the other hand, there’s a parody of the buff athlete archetype who could have stepped out of Asterix. Special shout-out to the NPCs in Albion, such as the Boudica-inspired tribal queen, the friendly tribal chief, and a legionary commander far from home, who contribute to that region’s unique flavour.

Overall, the demo did its job, which was to let me see whether I would enjoy the game. Based on this, I’m confident that I will. Roll on the release date in November!

Further reading

The dev blogs offer a wealth of information on specific gameplay mechanics.