Good to know. When I’m home again I’ll give it a try.
The legs on this game…
Love how the skyscrapers break up the ‘sameness’ of fully developed cities. It’s now City Skylines with gameplay!
FYI - the game is free to play till Sept 6th on Ubisoft Connect and Epic.
Whenever a new DLC comes out I always think “man, I gotta play this!” … and then I get distracted and don’t ever follow through. Too many games!!
Ha, I’m glad refunds are easily managed. I went and bought this before I realized it was part of the Season 3 Pass that I already own. They really should have a ‘you already own this’ check on games/DLC you purchase.
This drives me nuts. It seems almost impossible to tell from the store what you have already purchased.
Ubisoft is having a bit of a sale right now. If I were to spend about $15 on DLC, what should I spend it on? Consider that I don’t play this for the challenge, I just like to see the little people doing stuff and building nice buildings.
Probably the season 1 pass? I think it’s the most bang-for-your-buck in terms of “more stuff to do”. Botanica is basically just a duplicate of zoos or museums, but the other two add two new regions with their corresponding quest lines. (One of the regions being the same “type” as the old world.)
When the last DLC released I went all in on a new game. All DLCs (recently I’ve been disabling Sunken Treasures because I find that when Crown Falls comes in it throws off my momentum) and even the campaign. I put it on 3-star difficulty for the first time with 3-star enemies (but didn’t get the achievement, sadly).
One key thing I learned is that if you don’t go to Enbesa, the AIs will still colonize the islands. I thought this was only true for the New World, but it’s the case for Enbesa, too–I put it off for a long time, and when I got there George and Maggie had split it up between them (Alonso didn’t bother, for some reason). I still got Taborime (scripted) but it was… unfortunate.
With no way to get the higher level resources, I geared for war with Margaret. Replaced my key trade routes with zeppelins (some of them, anyway) and built 10-15 dreadnoughts and kitted them out. (Some of those legendary items are really good.) The war was a mess–lots of trade ships sunk and I even lost an island or two but in the end I took what I needed without issue. I decided not to finish her off out of curiosity–I’ve never successfully made lasting peace with an AI after a war, but maybe this time.
After the war I was in a huge influence debt, of course. Sold off a ton of warships. In the process of reworking my trade routes to incorporate a new possession in the new world I hit a game breaking bug–ships on trade routes would sometimes just go to a fixed point in the ocean and sit there. (Reported also by many others.)
So that’s it for the game for now. I could rework my trade routes to not use the new island, I think, but ugh. Very disappointing.
On the positive side, both the tourism and skyscraper DLCs are fun. I like the idea of greatly increasing density in the “downtown”. (I did get a legendary town hall item that provides 100% coffee, so I put ~all my skyscrapers within its radius and that has been huge in enabling me to actually, you know, provide the goods they need.)
Amusing note: a minute or so after the end of the war I got hit with a newspaper that had a +100% and a +50% riot chance article. (Why they decided to focus on the islands I lost, that I’d long since recovered, instead of any of the numerous ones I had gained, is a mystery to me. Editorial discretion my ass.) I had no influence left to use for propaganda so I had to let them publish. This resulted in some massive riots in my industrial area.
(Hard to see because a bunch of the fist icons are at an oblique angle, but >50% of the industry is striking, including the power plant.)
And here’s a glory shot of all the pollution:
So for rather incorrect reasons, I ended up with a historically accurate severe wave of strikes immediately after the end of a major war.
(I am also amused that the game conflates “riot” and “strike”.)
I thought colonization of Enbesa was supposed to wait as well.
It’s possible it’s a bug! But it definitely happened to me this game.
I think whether they wait for you or not is tied to difficulty options? Could that be it?
I just did a quick google and most of the opinions seem to be that it’s a bug when it does happen. (But other players have seen it happen.)
When Anno 1800 first came out, a scripting bug in the campaign killed all my progress after many hours of play. Just stopped my whole game dead in its tracks. Kaput. No way forward. I was going to have to restart. So I uninstalled, figuring I’d give Ubisoft the time to work out the kinks before I invested any more time in the game.
Seems they haven’t gotten around to working out those kinks yet…
-Tom
Yeah, sadly it’s I’ve of the more buggy games I’ve played recently. Which is a shame because it’s such a great game!
The workaround to my big is just to not use the island I conquered. (If you can even consider that a workaround.) So I decided that the resistance movement in New Portlandia is too entrenched, and went back to my earlier plans. (I like the game enough I’m willing to do this…) Fortunately the insurgents were unable to repeat their success in my new Enbesan holdings.
Another bug I hit is that an early campaign quest cannot be resolved if you play with fog of war disabled. I can kind of understand how maybe the two systems can interact (FoW and this quest’s trigger) but apparently this bug was fixed years ago, and the regression is new. My software engineer self is just shaking his head.
That team is awful at squashing bugs, even many simple ones go on for well over a year. They frustrate the crap out of me. But I still love the game.
Well, I just tried this out for the THIRD time. I knew the campaign was weak, so I went with a sandbox game. And then I remembered being harried endlessly by the pirates, who seemed to always be just stronger than I was, so I turned them off.
And somehow I still don’t like 1800 and I’m not sure why! Something about the pace… and the mental load of juggling two separate regions… (Do the expansions add MORE regions?? Insane.) And, man, do I want to like expeditions, but I can’t figure out how to be successful at them.
Ah, well. I hit a wall on 2070 a couple times, too. Somehow 1404 just nails the sweet spot.
Once you get in the groove it’s great, but it does take some effort to get there. Expeditions become super easy and un-failable once you know what you’re doing. Not sure if you noticed, but every ship type has its own bonus’s. So the 4 slot transport ship has a different set of bonus’s that the frigate. So make sure you’re not duplicating what they already do. In the end you want to cover each type of bonus with people or items and only carry one type of food. For a while you wont be able to do this due to lack of space, so make sure you choose which bonus’s you carry based on the mission.
Pirates: You befriend them asap and then they’re no longer a problem. So basically, pay them off. Later once they’re trade partners you can make massive cash off them. To have the money early on to afford paying them off, you can make bucketloads of soap and/or fur coats and sell them to the traders. Though I’m not sure if that’s changed with all the DLC they released. I have it all, but haven’t played since since the last 2 DLC’s were released.
I agree that there is just a much higher mental load with 1800. I really like Anno 1800 but it doesn’t quite have the chill magic that 1404 had for me.