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Rob Zacny

Three Moves Ahead Episode 471: Anno 1800

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Three Moves Ahead 471:

Three Moves Ahead 471


Anno 1800
Nice island you got here, shame if it wasn't fully industrialized! Fortunately Jon, Troy, and Rob are here to strip mine, clear-cut, and redevelop the hell out everything in sight. Troy puts this latest entry in the broader context of both the series and city builders in generals, Jon has made some mistakes, and Rob is both dazzled by the game's beauty but wishes it more fully captured the impact of heavy industry on nature. Also he is convinced somehow he can make a sensible grid layout out of a game built to confound them.

Anno 1800

 

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Great discussion. I liked that discussion of what a game like that could be and which socio-political issues it could tackle. Especially with you all acknowledging that lack of those doesn't make the game itself worse, devs do the game they want to do.

 

I've only played Anno 1404 but I remember its story being similarly simplistic and cartoonish. There was an evil cardinal who says you should go for a crusade. But then it turns out Pope didn't really sanction it, and Vizir you meet is a really nice guy, so you beat your companion, overly zealous lady knight, till she understands the power of friendship and it's all kumbaya.

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Question, what happened to Hermes? I believe this is the third episode in a row that he wasn't evolved in as a producer. There was a distinct lack of Troy's Goodfellow middle name joke.

 

As someone who has played a lot of Anno 1404 & 2070 I found this discussion to be rather average. Some important aspects of the game that differentiate it from other entries in the series were glossed over (like workforce, industrialism and tourism). The Anno, at least since 1404, was always cartoonish and tongue in check. Every friendly character is always smiling and happy and every hostile character looks menacing and as if they were your superior. It also makes ample use of character tropes like the ilitarist mentioned. 

 

With that said, Anno's settings tend to inform what sort of social stuff that will be present and what the general narrative will be. Anno 1404 was very much about getting in contact with the Orient and scaffolding the construction of a western society and a middle eastern society side by side. Anno 2070, on the other hand, was very much a case of either having a Tycoon paradise or a Green heaven and both sides would eventually be able to house techies who were basically the promise of fixing nature by relying on technology. Pollution and energy consumption were important aspects of that game with each of the two main factions having to balanced its specific factions need for space, energy and how far they could push pollution and how well they could clean it. 

 

About the quests where you have to find people in the streets. That's been a stable of the series since Anno 14404, maybe even before that. I that was Rob said is more or less right. These quests were you have to go around looking for people serve as a way of spending time while recourse stockpile and having a closer look at your ant farm. And citizens did riot and burn down your buildings. The problem with citizens revolting is that you very, very rarely run in a situation where they will be angry to the point of harming your settlement.

 

Anno games tend to run into the problem where you either have too much of any given resource or too few and in order for you to properly balance your resources you need to go into the wiki and look at how many citizens a single production chain can supply, how many of X resource buildings do you need for a given production chain to run at 100% efficiency or just use the fan made supply calculator. This aspect of the series isn't very noticeable in the first few citizen levels but when you get into the late game and building space starts running low efficiency is the name of the game. Lucky for Anno 1404 there's a excellent fan made patch which allows you to see all of this stuff in-game.

 

All in all didn't really gave me a sense of how much and what has changed in Anno 1800 from the last installments, which may be a factor of the little prior contact that the panel had (except Troy) with the series. But, hey, I'm nonetheless happy that 3MA got to cover this series.

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I'm surprised someone noticed... The short story is that after many years of doing this I asked for the summer off. 

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Everybody noticed!

 

Gather your strength and then force them to talk about AI Wars 2 or some Japanese weird strategy RPG.

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20 hours ago, Michael said:

I'm surprised someone noticed...

"This show, as usual, was produced by Michael Hermes..." is the unofficial sign-off that ends the conclusion "segment", so it's definitely noticeable.

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