Anyone played the DS version? I’m thinking about picking it up later today. I saw it at Best Buy a couple of days ago, wondered what it was, and didn’t realize until I got home that it’s the new Anno game, and technically shouldn’t even have been on shelves until the next day.
They seem to have gone with a more cartoonish look for that one, and dropped “Anno 1404” from the name entirely – it’s just called “Dawn of Discovery”
Has anyone figured out how to assign Warships to protect the Academy in the 4th campaign mission? I figure I’m missing something obvious here.
I’ve got 3 warships right next to the island, but can’t figure out how to complete the quest.
Edit: Never mind! Turns out, you just park the ships there and wait for attacks. Eventually, there will be a few waves of ships, and then you get rewarded.
How do you find the people who you are supposed to turn in for quests? It keeps saying they are in my warehouse but they aren’t, not under any of the leftmost or topmost tabs. I keep losing out on a bunch of honor because I can’t find the Nun or the Knight or whatever.
Been playing this all weekend. I like it a lot - the design is just as sound as it was in the previous games, though the Orient aspect with its separate unlockable building path is a great improvement on 1701. The game has a lot of character and is very well presented. It’s still VERY addictive. Did NOT want to go to bed last night.
The DRM activation went cleanly and you don’t need the disc in the tray to play once activated.
Stuff I don’t like:
Lots of little glitches - label/mission text not right, mission messages appearing out of order or before you’ve actually completed a task. etc. The lack of Annopedia is unforgivable. The game basically has no documentation whatsoever, which is a dreadful state of affairs for a title which has complex logistical and supply relationships in play. Not sure what Ubi thinks they’re playing at with that…
Also - does it take like 1000 years for levels to load on anyone else’s PC? The game runs really well when a map is loaded and running, but actually loading the map takes an age.
After you’ve picked up the special person or people walking around your village, they’re in your warehouse. The warehouse has 3 special tabs, represented by 3 crates on the lower left-hand side of the warehouse dialog box. The first crate is your regular trade goods, the second crate is your “special” goods, and the third crate lets you denote goods you have for sale, or what you’d like to buy from allies.
On the 2nd crate, you’ll find your wayward individuals. This second crate also holds things like upgrades for ships or towns.
Ok, twice now I’ve been burned on the continuous end-game. The problem I have is with the undocumented advancement system. I’ve managed, both times, to get to phase 2 of my imperial cathedral, and then they ask me to get at least 3500 noblemen…and there’s just no more room. My city spans the majority of my beginning island, with areas for peasants, citizens, and patricians.
I’ve tried moving industry to another island, and then shipping it in, but no amount of ships seems to stabilize the economy for such critical things like linen or cider. I’ve tried supplementing that with purchasing the goods from allies, but they don’t visit or buy enough to make a difference (even with honor upgrades to their trading fleets).
After looking around the web, I noticed one thing about the official screenshots showing the cathedral being built: They only have noble houses in the city, with nothing of a lower grade in the shot. I don’t know if they have a group of peasants, citizens, or patricians off screen, but it seems to be telling me that I should be able to advance each building. Unfortunately, there is absolutely no documentation on the subject, so I’m left trying to figure this one out myself.
Anyone have any ideas?
Is this worth the $50? Also, is it only available as a download?
I’m trying to decide between this, Blood Bowl, and ArmA II as my Buy A Game Today purchase. I’m leaning towards this one, but I haven’t played any previous Anno games. While I’ll eventually pick up ArmA II, I’m content with Far Cry 2 so don’t need another shooter right away…and I might just wait until September to get Blood Bowl on the 360.
Like I said, I’m leaning toward this one, but the first post claims it’s “buggy, buggy, buggy” and so I question whether throwing $50 at it is the correct move. Further, I’m not sure I’ll dig this game. I have this strange fascination with citybuilders and keep buying them and wanting to enjoy them, yet keep not liking them. The last one I bought was CivCity: Rome, and I…ugh. I didn’t enjoy that one bit. No sir.
I guess I’m asking you to sell me on Dawn of Discovery. Lil’ help?
The bugs are very minor and no more than passing annoyances really - text problems, the odd glitched out-of-order mission message.
It’s still a superb game - the best of the current generation of city builders.
I bought it at Best Buy over by Westtown, and they had at least 5 more copies on the shelf, so, no, you don’t need to buy it on a download if you don’t want to.
I can’t rate this game high enough. It’s a challenge, as there’s a hell of a lot undocumented, but it’s a challenge that so far, I’ve been willing to meet. In many ways, it reminds me of the height of the city building games from Impressions (Emperor, Pharaoh, etc) but with more of an eye toward a realistic trade and economy model, and certainly deeper. The graphics are outstanding.
The bugs that I’ve encountered are very minor, and the kind of thing you expect to be fixed in some sort of minor maintenance patch. The only crashes I’ve had could be easily attributed to me being an Alt-tab whore, and running VLC in one of my windows with an episode of the Wire (finishing up season 4).
Dude! I went there over lunch and they didn’t have it…which gives me more time to obsess over which game to buy, I guess.
There ARE bugs but they are minor (the worst being the tool tips not matching). It’s absolutely awesome otherwise if you like City Builders. It’s what I had originally hoped that Settlers would grow into. I’ve played it for four days straight and still want to play it more. It’s even keeping me from playing Devil Survivor, a game I’ve been looking forward to for months. I downloaded mine from Direct2Drive.
The game won’t start at all. I double click the shortcut and it comes back after a few seconds with the following error message.
The application failed to initialize (0xc00000005)
The i doulble click ok twice and nothing.
I can’t even get a start up screen.
Well fuck, wooley. Looks like you are totally screwed! bwahahahaha!
So this is how you get 3200 posts?
Oh, I’m sorry. Did you want me to seriously respond to your typo-riddled, lazily constructed call for technical help in which you left out all relevant information regarding your specific system and the version of 1404 you purchased? My bad.
Yes, although I fail to see any typos. I did expect a serious reply.
I’ve been working on the first of the standalone scenarios. There are no competing AI’s, so the only real challenge is keeping the money flowing. So far I’m really loving it. Always a lot to do but it is pretty relaxing. The presentation feels spot on and really helps draw you into the game world.
Try a little harder next time, and maybe we will take you seriously.
But who am I to judge? Wooley seems to display a fine command of the English language!
Google that error and you’ll see that it’s non-specific to Anno 1404.
And never come back here ever again.
I uninstalled the game and erased the file that I got from D2D.
This time I downloaded it, it said something about the file Data3.cab not matching, and suggested that my download was corrupt. I chose to ignore that and continue installation. This time the game works. Go figure. Maybe the crash will happen later, after I have 50 hours in my city.