OK, now I remember the shipping costs. I completely forgot about it - I tend to have trouble remembering everything about games I played after a while. When you said profit you meant your balance that ticks up, right? I didn’t make the connection although I should have. I thought your were talking about profit on a trade route. I did over expand one time and hit a deficit and got bailed out once. After that I was more careful and didn’t have any problems.
I did complete the endgame mission - I think it was get a #1 corporation ranking and fully upgrade your corporation HQ, right? I basically just did what I needed to do achieve that, and on normal difficulty it didn’t require a lot of thinking. It’s not like I quit after playing for 5 hours. I grew my first city up to the point where land was scarce or used up and I built up enough on the other biome types to fully upgrade my corporation HQ. I think I purchased a couple more biomes because I could.
My lack of knowledge now isn’t because I didn’t play the game, it’s because I’m forgetful :-)
You are right though, that I probably shouldn’t have bought the game (like my tag says). The lack of pushback in city builders tends to make me lose interest sooner rather than later. I should have know that would happen.
Oh, I wasn’t accusing you of having not played the game to the end or anything like that. Believe me, from my years of experience reviewing, I realize that’s one of the weakest responses to someone else’s opinion! I just wanted to disagree with your characterization of how trade works. You’re right that it differs from what a lot of people might have expected from the earlier Anno games, but it still involves player input and it’s still a core part of the design. I guess I just wanted to raise a semantic objection. :)
And what I mean by endgame isn’t necessarily getting to the last mission where you build your headquarters. That’s certainly the “end of the game” for some people – I admit I didn’t play it much beyond that point – but what I meant was the “endgame” in the sense of the endgame of an MMO. In other words, what do you do when you’ve chewed through all the normal progression content? In Anno 2205, you work your way towards stuff like getting a million population or occupying all the maps or earning the high-end achievements. At that point, I feel there’s more of a meaningful challenge to the gameplay and less of a relaxingly inevitable progression.
OK, I understand where you’re coming from even though I’ve never played through the content of a MMO :-)
You’re also right in that I misrepresented (unintentionally) what trade is actually comprised of, but I’d still argue that it wasn’t particularly interesting!
I just wish that they could have made the game require more thought from the player to have success and not make the player play as long as I did to possibly get to the point where the game may through up more substantial hurdles. I wonder how hard mode would have been. My guess is that the player would just need to expand very carefully.
The journey can be long, but it must be interesting as well. That is where most games get it wrong. They make a very long, BORING, ride to the end.
This is why I tend to play games on normal instead of harder. Harder just means either more unforgiving or more grindy. So in this game if harder just means lower resource yields and bigger expenses, then that is just more grindy.
Jumped back into this, and finished up the 3 starting sectors I had picked, probably going to work on a few more sector projects as the month rolls along. I own all the zones, I just have to load them and see what they want me to build. :p
It was a moment where you pretty much plop the HQ building and then toss in a few modules. Also anno buildings like this are usually huge and breath taking, it was a let down imho.
Back when 1404 was out, you got to build the Imperial Cathedral. As it was going up you got to view in different stages of construction as you met requirements to build it, it felt like you were really working toward something awesome.
I guess the sector projects are now sort of like the cathedral, but they just don’t seem as meaningful.
I still agree with most of the ANNO player base in that 1404 was the best in the series, and it still holds up very well. :)
Yes it is! So far in Tundra, I’ve got the moon power up and running, and its made the zone a lot easier, since you have so little room to build and your limited to wind power for quite some time. MOAR PICS? YEP!
4 zone projects complete, working on Tundra now, trade routes everywhere!
And I finished the sector project in Tundra, your goal is to save the virus infected and leaking seed vault that the Eco’s set up sometime after Anno 2070.
