In both 1404 and 2070 you’d reach the point where money was coming in faster than you could spend it, so it’s not surprising that’s present here too. I think at that point you either need to go for the pure visual aspect of city building (1404 had a bunch of manorial palace decorations that had no practical purposes but significant upkeep) or finish your monuments and start the next map.
They have a sale right now. Picked up 2205 for $10.
I can see how some people would not like the simplified layout system, but I myself don’t miss crane capacity and waiting for carts at all.
But I would say it’s superior to 2070 based on nothing but the icons being different colors than all neon blue.
Who is they?
Edit: Answered my own question. Steam.
I just found 2205 too simplistic - there’s no trade between islands (everything is just map-wide), and commodity production chains are 100% static - placement only determines how many “logistics” you need. It’s more of a puzzle game than a strategy game, as you focus more on which resources you need to switch out as you tech-up (ie. water is difficult to manage early, and easy later on).
Even the combat aspect kinda blows compared to regular Anno - on normal difficulty combat is completely restricted to actual missions, but on any other difficulty your maps are constantly being “invaded” by Kane from Command & Conquer, which just provides a tedious mop-up mission for your set collection of combat ships, as they aren’t difficult.
Anno 1800 can occasionally be a chore to manage because of all of the moving parts and lack of certainty regarding production, but I felt 2205 went too far in the other direction, and almost felt like an Anno version of Civilization Revolutions, or something.
The big thing 2205 has over 1800 is how easy it is to tell if you’re running surpluses or deficits.
1800 goes by that decidingly unhelpful “change averaged out over one minute” figure which includes all trades and transfers. You have no idea if you’re actually running a surplus or if you just got the good dumped off at the port, same with deficits and goods getting shipped off. Why would they include those? I can’t think of any situation where that would be useful to know. It would be so easy for them to make it so that only production and population consumption is a factor for the little green or red arrow to show up.
100% agree, and I was complaining about this exact thing earlier in this thread, haha. 2205 made planning out supply lines a million times easier.
If you send off a few expeditions in 1800, and use champagne for your rations in each one say, your storehouse will suddenly say you’re running a large deficit - even though you’re not. So all you can do is frequently look at those arrows any time you create or upgrade houses, to see if you’ve upset the balance - though if you’ve only just slightly upset it, there’s a good chance the arrow for those goods will still just point sideways.
For those of you using the Anno 1800 release as an excuse to play older Anno games, all the DLC for the older games is on sale this week on Steam. I picked up the 2205 season pass for 6 CDN, which is a steal for how much more Anno goodness that gets me.
Is it on sale at Uplay for that cheap?
Pick your poison , it all ends up on Uplay. ;)
Hmmm…so there’s additional content coming with a new anarchist NPC. He runs his island as anarcho-Rapture. He won’t accept tourists and is capped at engineers since parasite investors are banned. His island will have a special look with propaganda structures everywhere. He will offer you propaganda newspaper articles that won’t cost influence but will make him more powerful. You will receive quests from refugees fleeing his totalitarian state that will give you bonuses, but will piss him off that he’ll eventually use agents to spread mayhem on your island. Sounds a lot like the beggars mechanic from 1404.
Is it actually worth it to bother with investors if you’re not going for a World’s Fair victory? It seems like all the extra infrastructure for them costs way more than what they give you.
And how worth it are luxuries exactly? Once you get to engineers it doesn’t seem worth it to bother with any of the ones requiring production chains.
Investors are absolutely worth it, because they generate tons of money, AND additional Influence points too. The World Fair is also worth building no matter how you’re playing, as the exhibits generate epic Trade Union bonuses, as well as legendary quality museum exhibits for you. I’ve basically got exhibits running non-stop at the fair, because I’m trying to get all of the museum sets filled out, and using the fair is far less annoying than running a hundred expeditions and crossing your fingers.
How much more money does an investor residence generate over an engineer?
Cash isn’t an object at that point though. Workforce and space is. Once you upgrade population to investors, they get removed from the work pool.
Has anyone else had trouble with oil tankers working right? There’s no option to manually load them. It has to be down through a route and the route AI doesn’t seem to work most of the time.
I don’t know the exact figure, but Investors generate a lot more cash. My cash flow exploded when I started upgrading to Investors - I’m currently making about $144k a minute, and up to $106 million cash-on-hand.
I’ve had no issue with physical space to expand. Even my primary island isn’t completely taken up yet - mostly because I’ve persistently moved things around to maximize every inch of space.
If you get up to the tier 3 reward for spending influence on expansion, you get an extra 200 of every type of worker, and that bonus stacks if you’ve got commuter hubs linking your different islands, all with their own +200 bonus. Plus you can buy an awesome book for the Town Hall from one of the AI people, that gives you +15% workforce from all houses inside the radius. I’ve got the book in literally every single one of my town halls (I have five on my main island), and it has added hundreds of free workers for me to use.
Also, keep in mind as you upgrade workers, you can actually dismantle some of your production for stuff like sausages and schnapps, because higher-tier workers literally don’t even use it. That’ll return more workers for you to upgrade.
Honestly, the only problem I’m even grappling with to any extent now, is trying to keep a steady supply of unprocessed gold coming in. And even then, it’s only a “problem” in that it’s the one commodity I’m not overflowing with at all times. I’ve got an entire trade route (with three cargo ships), that goes around to every single competitor island trying to buy it, just in case they have it “in stock”, haha.
I forgot to mention - there’s also an awesome bonus you can get from the World’s Fair for the Trade Union building, that causes all production buildings inside it’s radius to use 50% less workers, and I believe it increases production by like 40% too.
Cluster all of your production buildings that require the most workers around that Trade Union, and you can get hundreds, if not thousands of “free” workers back.
… like I said, the World Fair is totally worth building, haha.
Any of the 2205 DLC worth it?
I enjoyed Tundra the most of the 3 dlcs.
Anything that makes it better than the rest?
Are the rest blah enough to not bother with the season pass that includes Tundra?
I’m enjoying all three. Orbit brings some truly transformative tech research to the game which might actually make things too easy, for example you can research a tech that means luxury food is made from rice and wine, so no more need for those honking great cattle farms or soy farms when that tech is active.
Frontiers I am really enjoying also, the challenge to get up to 100,000 executives on the archipelago map is a good one, and apparently there is a new race at the end of it which I haven’t even got to yet, so I don’t know where it goes from there.
And the Tundra brings a whole new set of supply chains, and the end resources you can build can then be applied in other maps to boost production by a great deal. The recent sale on the season pass was well worth the money.
Reminds me of the best specialist I found in 1800: an epic chef who replaced goulash with pigs for canneries. So you replaced cattle with pigs, and totally dropped the need for both peppers and artisanal kitchens.