Anno 1404

[texta]

Set in the Orient, ANNO 1404™ offers a richness of features never before seen, bringing the ANNO™ series to a new level. Exploring a strange and fascinating island world in the utmost East, players will get to know the culture and technology of the ancient Orient while learning the tricks of local trade, diplomacy and economy in order to build their own metropolis.

New customizable elements, dozens of embellishing objects and bigger islands and worlds will provide players with endless opportunities to express their creative vision, making all metropolises look truly unique. A new intuitive interface, as well as a motivating, fully modifiable sandbox mode will make it easy and enjoyable for everyone to play.

Basically if you've never heard of it: It's a Simcity/Age of Empires cross set in 1404.

I just installed it today and it's pretty fun so far (having never played any of the other games). I'm getting my head around it all, but I expect it's going to eat into a lot of game time.

[Fenrir]

One of the things that got to me about AoE, is that I developed a sense of achievement and ownership for the town I built up, the army I cobbled together, the technologies I'd researched, etc, only for it all to be taken away as soon as the main objectives had been ticked off, and to find myself back to square one in the dark ages on the next map. Sure, the buildings, units and such didn't possess the depth required to justify being carried on through the game, they didn't take long enough to develop to justify permanency, and you couldn't build enough of them - but all of these things could've been addressed. They made this gameplay model work very well, of course, but I just can't help but wonder how awesome it would be to play a game using the same engine, where you raise the exact same civilisation all the way through the game.

Oh, relevance here? Er, does Anno lean more towards a Sim City-style continual civilization, or an AoE-style reset at the end of each "level"?

[AranchineD]

Actually I'd say Anno 1404 (basing this post off the entire series) learns almost entirely to the Sim City/The Settlers kind of gameplay rather than an actual RTS.

I've only ever played Anno 1401 on DS, but I thought it was fun, if a little hard to control on the small screen. I'd love to pick this up if I had a better comp.

[texta]

So I've but a few hours into this game and I'm calling it as fairly reasonable.

It feels like it's drawn elements of a lot of different strategy games (or maybe I've played too many and nothing feels new anymore).

A large part of the game is keeping your citizens happy. This involves building various farms and mines and then refining their products into other products and shipping them around. And then the rest of the game is shmoozing or fighting with the computer opponents.

I'd probably give it around 8/10

EDIT: Here's a random screenshot to get you excited

http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/1046/annoe.jpg

[Thraxas]

EDIT: Here's a random screenshot to get you excited



The sad thing is, it did get me excited. I've been semi-following this for a while and am definitely intrigued by it.

[Silverwolf]

Sounds really cool, I think i'll check this out!

[Melas]

I'd love to play this game, unfortunately, I'm having hell with nvidias drivers and vista/win7 which causes most games to lock up my computer :(

[Clockw0rk]

4chan /v/ went pretty gay for this game at launch, which says a lot to me. I was almost tempted to get it until I remembered I don't like Civ/Simcity/Settlers/AOE. I know they're good games, I just can't get into them.