Nice, thanks!
How many games did you play with the new stuff? Did you include the Arctic and/or Trelawney? (Seems like Crown Falls would be the natural place for a palace?)
So I fired this up again with the season 2 pass ($15 after the Epic discount, not bad) and of course I’m loving it again.
The Bright Harvest stuff seems pretty minor so far–silos for animal farms and tractors for plant farms. The supply chain bit for the tractors is neat, and I think it will make a pretty big difference in the new world, where there’s plenty of oil (typically) and I always end up cramming fields into every last corner of those weirdly shaped islands.
Haven’t done anything with the palace yet because I can’t quite afford it. :)
My new game has (almost) everything enabled–all the DLCs but not the campaign. Holy moly this game has become large.
I failed to settle an island with saltpeter, so I’m about to buy a small one from Von Malching. We’ll see if he goes to war with me afterwords. I’m stocking up on ships of the line, but without saltpeter I don’t have any battlecruisers.
I also just read on the wiki that the silos and tractors also give one extra product every three cycles, which I didn’t see any in-game text for, but if so it means that the tractors are effectively a 4x multiplier (a 200% productivity increase means you do 3 cycles in the time of 1, and would therefore get 4 units out of it).
Haha he’s gonna be so pissed. I had a love/hate relationship with this game until they finally patched in so many critical things, like easy to see goods levels in the marketplace, and the amazing set of data tools you can bring up with ctrl-T. That has been a literal game-changer. Now all the stuff going on is manageable and not frustrating and I just have a love/love relationship with the game. I wish they could have nailed this stuff (plus balance) right out of the gate. But at least we’re here now and it’s amazing. Land of Lions is going to be so cool.
I think you’re reading that right. What’s so critical about this is if you’re playing a competitive game. The New World is make or break, so if you get stuck with just a 2 islands, with can make up the loss of those critical shortages with the trade unions and Bright Harvest. It really expands the game into something much more fun. (in case you didn’t know, the AI you play against determines how fast they colonize. The first 4 ask for permission before colonizing anything new, the next 4 move at a medium clip, and if you neglect claiming new lands too long there won’t be much left. And the final experts are murderous.
The war with the fat cat industrialist went more or less as planned. I put a huge fleet right in the harbor of his Cape Trelawney island that would have blocked off Crown Falls’ access to the new world (i.e. right in the trade route). When our non-aggression pact ran down (and I refused to pay him for another one) he predictably declared war and it therefore started with a huge bang. (Fortunately said pact allowed me to build up two and a half battlecruisers off the saltpeter I swiped from him.)
The downside was that he has a bunch of places in the New World that basically cut off all my trade routes. I had planned to just run around the NW with a fleet of frigates and pirate his shipping, but I failed to see that I my own routes would be similarly extinguished, but by islands instead. Since his cease fire offers (demands, really) came before I finished conquering his Trelawney island, I turned them down and settled in for a siege.
In the Old World I’d built up a fleet of ten or so ships of the line, and I sent them after one of his northern islands. I successfully wiped out the defenses on one side of the island but before I could wheel around to the other side, his fleet came in from the flank, and although I won that battle, I had lost half my ships, so the rest limped back home and I abandoned that effort. That was my major defeat for the war.
When I realized I was in it for the long haul (well, medium haul, really) I peeled off a couple ships of the line from both the old world and Trelawney and built up a conquest force in the NW. When my two battlecruisers (each with the commander that reduces defense gun damage by 80%, don’t know how I happened to get two of them) arrived to lead the attack I took the island that was cutting off most of the NW trade routes. He then sued for peace (and paid me this time) so I accepted, and I’ll similarly position my fleet at the other NW island I want from him to be ready for round 2.
Now I need to reconfigure all my routes since a ton of my merchants were sunk. Probably time to upgrade from clippers to cargo liners, but I really do prefer clippers for aesthetic reasons.
Oh, what’s that? Is it the statistics screen? (I always get there from a warehouse, heh.)
Yeah, I can’t wait, though I’m not sure the game really needs another map, heh.
I think this is where my cheap-ass wait-for-a-discount nature really helped me. :-)
That’s a really good point, but I guess I haven’t really played a competitive game! Do you?
Yeah, when the 1-stars would ask for permission I thought that was a bit too easy, so I play with 2-stars now. Usually George (so I have a friend) and the Anarchist if I feel like it (I like the flavor, usually), and then I rotate the third. But I should probably switch it up. I am too chicken to try the 3-stars. Have you played against them?
Do any of the DLC add anything to the campaign?
Also, this video, while long, describes features and differences from prior Annos in pretty good detail. I’m just watching it piecemeal since it is around an hour. It covers through the first season pass.
Pretty sure all the DLC content is available in the campaign. I can confirm Sunken Treasures and Golden Harvest both work, but I switched over to endless mode before I got far enough to see the Arctic or the palace in the campaign.
Thanks
I haven’t played it since all this got patched in. I’ve got a staycation coming up as my employers are forcing us to use up some of our vacation time. Reckon I’ll jump back into 1800 for a few days of that holiday.
The “campaign” is a set of missions and a (somewhat?) hard-coded island layout. The DLCs have no bearing on it. They do add their own campaigns (in their own regions). You can play with or without them as you please. I like the way they have it set up.
Are the DLC campaigns a way to introduce the features of the DLC, kinda like the campaign is for the main game?
Yes, definitely. But there’s no way to turn them off other than disabling the DLC entirely (AFAICT).
I played to the engineer level of the campaign, and as far as I can see it’s identical to free play, but with a specific set of islands and additional quests to guide you through the game. I don’t think you’d experience the DLC any differently in the campaign vs free play.
edit: not sure if this is what you were asking, but I don’t think the DLC have any campaigns of their own, just quest chains that guide you through the content. You start the DLC the same way in the campaign and free mode.
Well, there’s always mods. Namely [Gameplay] Easy Seed search allows you to go to the new lands without running the expedition.
In my opinion, the “campaign” is really just a quest chain, and I think the DLC quest chains are similar to the campaign quest chain, but a bit shorter. YMMV.
Personally, I think the expedition to open up a new map is fine (and feels thematically appropriate) but the quest chains once you get there are a bit repetitive. Again, YMMV.
Yup. The whole reason I avoid the campaign in these game generally is because I don’t like being lead by the nose through the content. I like it even less the third time.
But in Anno 1800, you have to avenge your fathers death!
Funnily enough I did play that one, because there were enough new mechanics I had hoped it might provide some insight into them. To be honest, it didn’t really, it just amounted to some canned missions and badly-acted cinematics. Not that it matters, the real game in Anno is always the custom game mode, which is why it’s so peculiar that they released a product called Anno 2205 that contains no real game at all. ;)
Regardless ,the real game in Anno 1800 is wonderful, but I’d recommend that new players just start a game with easy settings and poke at it to learn it, rather than wasting time with the campaign. Hell, there’s even a helpful advisor you can turn on for a first game that’s certainly no worse than the campaign guidance, probably better.
Agreed. I was just trying to clarify that there’s no DLC campaign separate from the base game campaign or free mode.
I liked the characters and cutscenes in the campaign well enough, but I quickly grew tired of all the quests. There’s enough to do and track in this game without the extra follow and fight tasks.
Thanks for the responses everyone. They are helpful.