“That’s my secret, Cap: I always play the campaign.”
Okay, not always, but more often than not. I like the extra focus it brings and the special mechanics and story that are injected into it. I feel a lot less motivated in a sandbox game; it’s just fighting the AI.
I am willing to admit that the games are really built for the sandbox mode. The campaign is indeed a huge, slowly unfurling tutorial. But it’s also an epic story that I’ve enjoyed playing three or four times. Honestly, from what I understand of play patterns with games like this, I bet they get more player hours in the campaign than in sandbox mode, at least with 1700 and 1404. I bet that explains 2205’s design direction. It was mostly a misstep, but I bet it was informed by data along those lines.
I have absolutely no doubt of this. To put it politely, most players prefer structure and plot to freedom and interesting systems. It’s why you regularly see people asking for a campaign in strategy games where such a thing would make no sense, like Civ.
For my part, I almost never find campaigns interesting in strategy games. Rather than being a source of variety or causing me to interact with systems I might generally not engage with, they’re generally checklists of things to click on to move to the next plot point. I don’t really feel like I’m playing the game in those cases, just being asked to press buttons for someone else. In short, there’s a thunderous lack of any interesting decisions in the overwhelming majority of strategy game campaigns.
Oooh, some good disagreement here. Here’s my opinion:
- Putting aside the merits of campaigns in city builders in general, I think the plot and characters of the campaign were quite lacking. (To be fair, I’m going from >5 year old memory now.) The dialogue was (as best I recall) rather ham-fisted and the characters were stock (the evil mastermind, the corrupt politician, the ingenue, I think?). And IMHO it loses major points because the spoken dialogue did not line up with what was printed next to the character portraits, which was a summary of what they said. That just infuriated me, though I’ll accept that may just be a failing of my own. Also, the character portraits were bad 3D, which really stuck out against the otherwise beautiful game.
- Anno 1800’s campaign suffered from much of this, too, but was in general less bad. The big downside to 1800’s campaign was that in the expansions you can’t really turn it off without mods. (Though I think they sort of fixed this with the Africa one with a “Should we skip the story?” option.)
- FWIW, I did enjoy playing the campaigns, so I’m not a “campaigns don’t belong in strategy games” person.
- Multiple regions–maybe. I get all the complaints about having too much to manage when flipping back and forth between old world / new world / arctic / trafalgar / africa / etc, and I feel those. But the flip side is that the occident and the orient felt really weirdly close in 1404, and what’s a game about boats doing that doesn’t have ocean voyages? 2070’s take on it with the undersea part was neat, but I felt it was a little underdeveloped and always felt crowded, kinda like the arctic in 1800.
- Setting fit – I’ll agree on that. I think 1404 with a 1492 (yeah it doesn’t add to 9, whatever) expansion where you get the new world would be great. I don’t think 1800 is necessarily a bad setting, but industrialization (particularly trains) are a bit awkward. I never played 2205 but 2070 was a little weird in that it’s kinda half post-apocalyptic but there’s also fancy future tech.
- I agree that 1404 is beautiful, but hard disagree with the rest. IMHO the 1800 graphics are better because it’s however-many years newer and with a bigger budget, and they hit the art direction out of the park. I love the look of the polluted industrial sections. (I also love the look of industry and slums in real life, fully acknowledging their associated problems, and would not want to live there.) In 1800 I actually wanted to put down the ornaments to decorate the city.
- I also disagree with 2070, IMHO it managed to be too shiny and yet washed out in blue-greens at the same time.
- (I actually looked up screenshots from 1404 and 2070 to make sure my memory is correct, and it basically is, heh.)
- Online systems. Don’t know about 2070 or 2205, but I don’t think I’ve found anything problematic in 1800? Maybe I haven’t paid enough attention? I know it periodically “connects” and “disconnects” but other than cloud saves I don’t know what we’ll lose when Ubi pulls the plug. (Assuming the code is in such a state that it functions without remote servers, maybe that’s a big if.)
- Land invasions in 1404 were terrible. I appreciate they wanted to make it about supply and sieges and territory capture, which fits for a city builder, but it just didn’t work. Combat in 1800 has its own problems (how you quickly run out of influence when you start winning a war, for example); I think it could stand to be rethought but I’m glad they scrapped land battles.
- The “find the dude” missions are always terrible, I wish they’d got rid of them in 1800. They seem to be less bad, maybe just because I played it more and got better at this particular pixel hunt.
- The expeditions in 1404 were underbaked and I think they improved them in 1800… until you’ve done each one fifteen times already and are staring at the sixteenth time you have to decide if your sailors should shoot the bear, put on a disguise, or find the long way around. Ugh, that could use a revisiting.
- I didn’t realize it at the time, but the lack of a labor pool means that 1404 is really missing a fundamental part of a city builder. Like, you can just build as many cider presses as you have room and money for, regardless of the workers needed to run them. (Right? Maybe I’m misremembering.) I know it’s not a huge deal and it’s not a realistic economic simulation or anything, but having something that feeds back from population to production in the other direction makes a city builder feel more complete. I do wish they’d redo it so that as people climbed up the socioeconomic ladder their population decreased, though, because it just seems strange that a house that holds ten farmers can hold forty engineers just as easily, and then they have to make the labor requirements for the higher-tier industry all weird, and the whole population is an inverted pyramid with like 200 farmers supporting thousands of investors.
OK, there’s my wall o’ text, hope y’all enjoy it.
Matt_W
1711
I love that my newbie entry into the series stimulated this thoughtful discussion of the merits of various Annos. I confess I like the structure of campaigns. :)
Yeeeaaah! Unfortunately, I’m going to go and agree with a lot of your counterarguments.
Totally. That’s the case with both games, but I think 1404 is at least clearer and more consistent. (Although that one guy who always talks in innuendo in 1800 is… definitely consistent!)
Also, I like the way the VO complements the text instead of purely mimicking it.
Ah, touché! But a game about boats lets you control your boats, it doesn’t leave them off screen in transit for half their lifetime!
Yeah, this was a cheap shot on my part. Of course 1800 is better looking. But I’d say not by as much as you’d expect!
I think this stuck in my craw from 2070, mainly. Just a bunch of metagame stuff that was obscure and added little, in my opinion.
Yeah, this IS super-weird if you stop and think about it.
Shoot, I think I’m going to fire up 1404 sometime soon…
I don’t think I’ve ever played much of the random skirmish games in any Anno. Why would I? Compared to other transport or city building or strategy games, there simply isn’t the depth to support this. There’s mostly one playthrough, where you make a big city, repeated over and over again. Having X on your island and trading for Y isn’t really much of a difference to having Y on your island and trading for X.
This is why I maintain 2205 was not a misstep - it’s actually the game done in the best way possible.
This is one thing that I really appreciated about 2070. The different factions and the online progression system made repeated plays worthwhile. I’ve still never reached the endgame in Anno 1800*, but I played dozens of shorter games of 2070.
* I did reinstall it the other day to try to finish my game once and for all.
Now that is a blistering hot take! I’d suggest that either (a) you didn’t play on high enough difficulty or (b) you’re just too good and the game is beneath you. ;)
Specifically what I mean (thinking of 1800 here because it’s the most familiar), is (1) setting the money difficulty slider to the top, (2) using smaller islands (Crown Falls kind of defeats the purpose here) and (3) aggressive rivals. (Possibly (4) the influence difficulty slider.) I find that the combination of pressures that those bring vary enough from game to game to keep me interested. They each add a layer of “enjoyable frustration” and the order and timing that they come at you makes for a different game.
OTOH I have to agree that the game does get samey, and if you don’t like the basic formula there’s nothing that’s going to break you out of it. What I’d challenge you on is the other games that do it better–I’ve played through all of Pharoah and most (I think) of Zeus, relatively recently (last five or ten years), and I don’t think there’s any more variety than Anno in the way you describe. My memories of SimCity (2000, 3, and 4) also don’t include vastly different gameplay from city to city. I haven’t played Cities Skylines or A-Train, so maybe those? We could also talk about colony builders (Dwarf Fortress and successors) but IMHO that’s a different genre, where I’d also put something like Against the Storm (which is fantastic and I should fire up again).
This is such an alien statement I don’t even know what to do with it.
The beauty of Anno games is their expansive depth, and the wealth of continuous mode options that you can use to set up any number of different scenarios with wildly different circumstances and victory conditions which in turn require different styles of play and create different puzzles to solve.
This is something the campaign utterly fails to show off, in my opinion, since every scenario is linear with a single correct action at each proscribed step.
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I’ve played through all of Pharoah and most (I think) of Zeus, relatively recently (last five or ten years), and I don’t think there’s any more variety than Anno in the way you describe.
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I agree - which is why the campaign in those games was so critical to adding something more. If they’d just provided and empty map, maybe randomised map, and said ‘have at it!’ would they really have been very popular?
Maybe it’s your note on the aggressive rivals that we differ on. I find the combat in Anno just awful, and typically turn it off asap.
How I would characterize it–and I think I wrote a long-winded essay on this somewhere on Qt3–is that 2205 correctly diagnosed a lot of the weaknesses of the Anno formula for its city-building audience… and then applied mostly the wrong solutions. For example, they should have removed naval combat instead of isolating it and making it optional.
I actually think that it was by leaning further into the campaign gameplay that Zeus failed relative to Pharaoh. The Pharaoh campaign (as I remember it) was basically just introducing the next level up in monument each time with a different set of imports/exports. (I think that’s a bit of an unfair oversimplification, but only slightly: some scenarios did lean more into “you don’t have necessary resource X so you have to scrounge” than others, and of course the military/civilian split.) In Zeus they added a bunch of timers and scripted stuff and it was super frustrating.
I do think Pharaoh would have been worse without a campaign, and I think Anno could benefit from a more scenario-based campaign like that, but the way the Anno devs tend to do campaigns is very story and mission focused, so I don’t know that they could pull it off.
I also agree that the combat in Anno is underwhelming, but IMHO it’s not bad, and provides a necessary pressure if you’re not content to just build beautiful cities (which sometimes I am).
Yeah, I think maybe that could be a good characterisation.
Yeah, roughly. The major things that changed up a mission were the map (water sources, building space) different final objectives (requiring you to lean into different aspects of the city), imports/exports, gold mines (or not), and different food sources (hunting, fishing, farmland-farms, floodplains and imports). The last one is probably the thing that made the biggest difference. For a game of its era and apparent simplicity, that’s quite a lot of variation I think!
The monuments worked because the monuments were awesome!
I love Pharaoh, but I still think there are enough little improvements in Zeus and Emperor to call them slightly superior. Although there’s nothing like the feeling of finishing a pyramid!
The funky thing with Pharaoh’s scenarios is that the great pyramids were built relatively early in Egypt’s history, and to their credit, the Impressions guys were pretty strict about following the historical sequence of things.
Yeah, I remember reading somewhere that having driving a chariot by the pyramids while under construction is about as anachronistic as driving a tank through the Roman Colosseum (2000 years).
Ultimately what got me about Zeus is that the campaign just wasn’t as fun. Several times I looked at the win conditions for the map, realized I didn’t have the necessary resource, and just had to wait for some time-based trigger to add the resource or a trading partner or something. Also, the graphics were too cartoonish and the humor was lame, but I honestly think I could have gotten past that.
No argument here!
I definitely felt that way about Zeus’ art when it was first revealed! It grew on me as I played, and so did the silly take on mythology. I really like Zeus’ campaign. It’s definitely a little forced or arbitrary sometimes, in how it mashes classic heroic myths with the core city-building gameplay. But it also has a lot of color that the other games (including Emperor) lack.
Plus, Impressions games always had a little cheeky humor, especially in their VO. They just brought it to the surface with Zeus.
Zeus was definitely one that took time to grow on me. It demonstrated a lot of learned lessons in design though, and I think if it wasn’t so much ‘more of the same’ in a genre that was fading/changing, it might have been the biggest hit.
Daagar
1725
I don’t know of any game that has done this as well since then. Can’t wait for the remake just to do it again.
Giaddon
1726
Man, I hope you folks played Nebuchadnezzar. Fantastic modern take on the Impressions games with a touch of Anno. Even has cool monuments you design and paint yourself!
