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 Anno, sometimes called Anno Domini, is a long-running series of city-builders produced by a German company. Where the Anno games differ from more traditional city-builders like SimCity and Cities: Skylines is in the Anno series' focus on trade and logistics, rather than on urban planning or development. Anno games have a well earned reputation for being beautiful, engrossing, and completely opaque and frustrating to new players. It is my hope to break things down for people who have no idea what Anno is, and walk you through building a beautiful (or at least functional) city. While there's quite a few games in the Anno series, most of them historical in setting, I will be playing Anno 2070. 2070 is generally regarded by series fans as one of the better entries in the series, and I personally prefer the sci-fi setting over the historical settings of most of the rest of the series. I will also be playing Anno 2070 with the Deep Ocean expansion pack, the game's one big expansion. Fortunately, it's a good one, and is widely credited with turning a mediocre base game into one of the golden entries in the Anno franchise. To this end, I will be playing the game in its sandbox mode, rather than campaign or any scenarios, and will be playing the game as easy and relaxed as I can. It's how I prefer to play, and this is an extremely dense game in terms of mechanics so I hope I can break things down bit by bit to show people who have never played an Anno game how it all works. I also make no claim to play things as efficiently as possible! I've built a successful city in this game once before, and I hope to do so again. As such, feedback from series vets is welcome, but I'm not going to min-max everything. Laymen and new players, questions are always appreciated! Updates Update 1: Breaking Ground Update 2: Survey Says Update 3: The Fourth X Update 4: Island Hopping Update 5: Billy Bob's Last Stand Update 6: Urban Renewal Update 7: Land of Milk and Kiwis Update 8: Into the Depths Update 9: Tech Advance Update 10: Neath Dark Waters Update 11: The Winding Road Update 12: Research and Development Update 13: A Monumental Undertaking Update 14: Global Distrust Update 15: Taking Care of Business Update 16: Media Blitz Update 17: The Success of Excess Update 18: Fool's Gold Update 19: Monument Women Update 20: Going for Platinum Update 21: Through Waters Deep Final Update: Completing the Circuit Post Script Cythereal fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Oct 19, 2021 |
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Jul 31, 2021 18:20
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Breaking Ground If you're brand new to Anno 2070, one of the first questions you may ask is: where is the button to start a new regular game? Start with the Mission Map at the top of the buttons on the lower left side of the screen.  From here, you want 'Continuous Game' in the top left.   I'm starting with the Easy map as a baseline, but I'm going to tweak some settings under the Game Settings button on the right hand side of the screen. Note the reminder that I'm playing with the Deep Sea expansion - if you only get the base game, well, I have never played Anno 2070 without Deep Sea so I have no idea what the base game is like!  For a first-time player I strongly recommend this as the setup for 'Third Parties' - AI presences on the map. This configuration, however, makes all AI presences on the map completely passive. They will not build cities, they will not go anywhere. I'll get into more detail about them later. However, there are more game settings to tweak.  The Game World settings, I'm leaving on default for Easy. They're pretty self-explanatory. In the lower right, you can also see that I've set the map size to large.  These are my favored starting conditions. The weird one here is 'Ark Storage.' Anno 2070 has what's kind of a New Game + feature where you can bring forward bonuses from one game to the next, and I had initially planned to use this feature. However, I discovered that monkeying with Ark Storage in one game affects all active files where I have Ark Storage on, so I've had to turn it off. The other features here, I'll explain as they come up, but in short this is going to give us a comfortable cushion to start the game with, and start with the whole map revealed for us.  Finally, we have victory conditions. I've set this to building all three monuments. There are three different factions you can build your city from in the game, and each has a big, fancy monument at the peak of their development line. Completing all three is the goal of this LP.  And finally, there's the choice of two starting factions. I'll explain these more in detail later, but in brief: The Eden Initiative, also known as the Ecos, is a federation of environmentalist activist groups, refugee resettlement programs, and private firms invested in sustainable industry and biotechnology. Eco technology and infrastructure tends to have higher up front costs, lower nominal output, and other drawbacks, but they're also less expensive to run long-term, have little to no risk of industrial accidents, and are very environmentally friendly (a big mechanic I'll cover in a later post). The Global Trust, also known as the Tycoons, is the world's largest commercial and industrial conglomerate, and the world's leader in energy production and heavy industry. Tycoon technology and infrastructure is oriented around the bottom line: they have lower costs and higher output, but seriously damage the environment in the process, have higher long-term costs, and some have a risk of serious industrial accidents. Whichever side you choose doesn't entirely lock you in, you'll unlock the other eventually. There's also a third faction, SAAT. The Techs, as they're called, are not playable from the start of the game under normal starting conditions. We'll see them and what they can do later, but if you've played other Anno games, they're one of those subfactions that you develop to unlock new toys for your main group. Ecos versus Tycoons as a starting faction is a matter of taste, but I'm a firm fan of the Eco philosophy so they're my faction of choice. And with that, it's time to start.   Good morning everyone! Welcome to the Pioneer Program, the World Council's development program for resettlement project administrators and would-be governors! I'm Aurora van de Velde, you might recognize me from the New Rotterdam project in the North Sea. As part of the Pioneer program, I have been put in charge of the Tierra del Fuego Resettlement Project off the South American coast - and you will all have front row seats to my command ship and interface! While I don't claim to be a world expert, I do have one successful resettlement project under my belt and it is the World Council's hope that I'll be able to show you all the ropes! Questions are always appreciated! What we see here is the Leviathan, my ark, and the Arctic, an armed cargo ship provided to the World Council by the Chilean government to support this resettlement project. First things first, I send the Arctic down to the island where the Chilean government already established a warehouse. Of course, calling a modern storage and transfer hub a mere warehouse is something of an understatement. By clicking on the Arctic and then clicking on the warehouse, I can see the cargo currently held in each and transfer them at will. The Chilean government has provided us with a supply of building modules (most governors just call them bricks), tools, and fish. By clicking on the goods carried aboard the Arctic, I can transfer them to shore. Like so. Both the Arctic and the warehouse only have a capacity of 40 standard units for any given resource right now. If this sounds like a lot, it's really not. A developing resettlement program runs through building modules and tools like water. Now it's time to start building. Click the 'house' icon along the bottom right bar, and then click the scruffy looking guy's face. This face represents Eden Initiative Laborers, the hard-working rank and file of the Eden Initiative, most of them refugees fleeing from one crisis or another. To start with, every city needs a City Center, a combination of town hall, internet hub, and public utilities center. You can see that this will cost 600 credits, 3 tools, and 5 building modules to build. There's two important things to see here. One is the lit-up radius around the warehouse. You can only build where you can get the construction materials out to, so warehouses define where you can and cannot build. On a similar principle, housing can only be constructed within a set radius of a city center. What with personal automobiles being a thing of the past and good riddance, people can only commute so far. The grid circle around the projected city center shows the area where houses can be build. I like to put my first city center as far from the warehouse as I can. This might seem like a lot of room. Trust me, it's not. Ta-da, effectively instant construction thanks to modern technology! This is why it's so important to stay close to warehouses, incidentally. Suburbs are a disease. There's one other thing we need to do before this place is ready for people to live, though. Clicking on the face of your EVE AI, next to the scruffy guy, brings up a set of general purpose blueprints. Roads, as you can see here, are vitally important to any city. I start by circling the city center in roads, then paving a road down to the warehouse. Roads only cost money to build, not building modules or tools. Back to Scruffy, it's time to start building houses. Well. Calling a laborer barracks a 'house' would be overstating things, but it's a sturdy roof over one's head. There are two requirements for a house: they must be located within the working radius of a city center, and they must have access to a road. I like building houses in 3x2 blocks. As housing becomes available, new residents will move in to your city and start working. Income taxes on residents are in turn your primary source of income as governor. Laborers will trickle into the new barracks over time, depending on how well you're meeting their needs. In fact, just from this residential block, enough laborers have moved into the city that cold rations just aren't cutting it anymore. They need locally sourced food! Your EVE unit will helpfully inform you whenever enough development has taken place to make a new facility available, as indicated by the 'house' icon on the left edge of the screen.  To meet this need for food, we've built a Fishery on the coast next to the warehouse. Fisheries, and other coastal buildings, can only be built near a coastal warehouse, and as you can see this isn't the most expansive beachfront in the world. A single Fishery produces enough food for about 250 laborers, so we won't need another one just yet. Fisheries are thankfully very self-sufficient and will attend to their work with little interference from you unless there's an emergency. The settlement is starting to grow, so it's time to start getting self-sufficient for other resources, too. Most importantly, building modules. Return to Scruffy, and click the Building Modules icon. Alas, you can't just pull Building Modules out of the ground. It's time for our first production chain. Production chains are an absolutely vital part of building a modern city, very few resources can just be produced as-is, like fish. You instead start with raw resources that you can produce or harvest, and then refine them. The first step to making building modules is basalt, which this island has in abundance. To harvest that basalt, the Eden Initiative has provided schematics for the Basalt Extractor, seen here. But wait, there's more! The extractor itself is only half the story, it needs extraction sites, too! Two of them to operate at full efficiency - you can build only one, but you'll halve the output of the extractor. You can see in the lit up area around the extractor where sites can be built, they don't have to be adjacent to each other or to the extractor. And there we have a fully operational Basalt Extractor, producing Granules. Granules by themselves are no good. We need a Smelter. Here you can see the projected Smelter's supply radius. You see, as the Basalt Extractor produces Granules, they need to be physically hauled to the Smelter for processing. I'm building the Smelter close to the Extractor so the Granules can simply be hauled directly to the Smelter, but in the absence of that Granules can be taken to a nearby warehouse and then taken to a Smelter. Fortunately, in terms of efficiency the Building Module chain is as simple as it gets: one fully functional Basalt Extractor supplies one Smelter at 100% efficiency. One other important detail about any kind of factory: it takes time to bring in and train workers. No farm or factory will operate at 100% efficiency right away, there's always a warm-up period after initial construction. You can't just instantly replace things. As it stands, income is finally in the green for us and we're making a small supply of building modules. All this may seem impressive, and I suppose it is, but there's a whole lot more to do in the future. This is just the first step, my friends. One last thing. By clicking on any warehouse on an island, you can see some important statistics: how many buildings are on an island, how many people live there, maintenance costs, and income from the island. You can also change various names, and I'll be taking suggestions/votes for the name of the island and the armed cargo ship. See you next time!
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Jul 31, 2021 18:21
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I never got too far into this game, even though I generally like sci-fi, and I devoured all the earlier Anno games. This looks cool so far, thanks for LPing it, Cythereal. I quite like Arctic as the name of the cargo ship, but I'm not really sure about the island. Can we get an overview shot of the whole island perhaps?
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Jul 31, 2021 19:08
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Torrannor posted:Can we get an overview shot of the whole island perhaps? I was going to do this as part of the next update, but sure! Helios, as the island has been tentatively designated, is roughly diamond-shaped. The settlement is on the western point of the diamond, nestled next to a large mountain. The northern point of the island is flat and empty. Plenty of room to build, but for now little of interest. The eastern point of the island is very mountainous, and survey crews have identified multiple good sites for mining.  The south of the island is also very rugged. All told, this is not an ideal site for the Eden Initiative, for reasons that I'll discuss soon. The Eden Initiative benefits immensely from good beach access, and this is a very mountainous island with few good approach sites. We'll make do, of course, but it's no wonder the Tierra del Fuego has been sparsely inhabited throughout history.(Tierra del Fuego is a real place, incidentally!)
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Jul 31, 2021 19:34
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I never played these games but I'm always interested in new 4X LPs
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Jul 31, 2021 19:43
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Playing these games in German without knowing German fluently is how I learned what Werkzeug meant. Call the island Carcosa, what's the worse that could happen?
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Jul 31, 2021 19:54
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This was my first anno game and I bounced off of it after playing ~20 hours or so. I was just this morning thinking of downloading it again for another shot because the sci fi setting appeals to me more than 1800. Looking forward to this LP
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Jul 31, 2021 20:08
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Always wanted to get into Anno, but it seemed too intimidating. Glad to have someone who knows the game around to explain it. Paraiso seems appropriate. This place will be much improved in no time!
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Jul 31, 2021 22:12
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I'm very much looking forward to watching this LP. Anno 2070 is a game I couldn't quite get into, not like the earliest Annos. I dunno how, or why. Maybe it had just been too long since I'd last played one.
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Jul 31, 2021 22:15
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Anno is great because while the series can be a bit obtuse to get used to/get into it's also a game series where the games have no shame about letting you break their mechanics to the fullest extent once you get to late game. Though sometimes you do a quest for someone early/mid game and get a game-breaking item within the first couple hours.
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Aug 1, 2021 02:55
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Jossar posted:Always wanted to get into Anno, but it seemed too intimidating. Glad to have someone who knows the game around to explain it. No no, this isn't Tropico, El Presidente won't allow us to name an island Paraiso.
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Aug 1, 2021 04:24
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SIGSEGV posted:
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Aug 1, 2021 08:10
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Fair warning, I have no idea what either of those ?references? - Carcosa or Paraiso - mean.  Siegkrow posted:No no, this isn't Tropico, El Presidente won't allow us to name an island Paraiso. I know nothing about Tropico, so don't expect me to get any jokes or references.
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Aug 1, 2021 12:11
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Neither do I, so I was just using it in its original meaning as the Spanish word for "paradise". Tropico is a series of management simulations that are based around developing islands in a similar, albeit less intricately detailed fashion than Anno, with the central conceit being that you are managing things as though you were the semi-democratic, occasionally dictatorial ruler of a fictional Cold War to modern era Caribbean country. Carcosa is a mysterious ancient city originating from the works of Ambrose Bierce, but better known for its portrayals within the Lovecraft Mythos, specifically the stories of Robert Chambers. Chambers describes it as the seat of the Outer God Hastur, a strange place with long shadows and dark suns hanging in the sky.
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Aug 1, 2021 12:31
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In that case, I'm voting Carcosa, too. The name also has a nice ring to it, and I'm sure nothing will go wrong!
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Aug 1, 2021 14:45
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Tbh, neither Carcosa or Paraíso ate the kind of names you'd find in the Tierra del Fuego archipiélago. Most of the islands have generic English family names, since they were named by the explorers who saw them during the age of exploration. One of the islands is called "Isla Observatorio" which I find to be a nice name tho!
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Aug 1, 2021 17:17
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Yeah. For instance the capital of Chilean Antártica is a town named "Puerto Williams" Since we are rebuilding civilization in this region, I think a good name for the city would be Nuevo Puerto Williams. DelilahFlowers fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Aug 1, 2021 |
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Aug 1, 2021 18:15
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Siegkrow posted:Tbh, neither Carcosa or Paraíso ate the kind of names you'd find in the Tierra del Fuego archipiélago. Most of the islands have generic English family names, since they were named by the explorers who saw them during the age of exploration. isla del Winthrop Warburton Farnsworth IV
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Aug 1, 2021 18:23
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 Sharing this loading screen for a glimpse of what the world in Anno 2070 is like. RIP Florida.
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Aug 1, 2021 18:25
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Cythereal posted:
And nothing of value was lost
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Aug 2, 2021 01:46
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Eh. I had planned to hold off on the next update for another day or two, but I got bored and the early game is fast. I absolutely do not promise daily updates.  Survey Says  While I don't share the enduring fascination some people have with the literature of a man whose brain broke at the idea of consensual interracial relationships and those who followed in his wake, the Chilean government thought naming this island Carcosa was funny, so here we are. I'm going to start today with a more detailed examination of elements of the command interface. The panel on the left third of the bar is visible at all times, and consists of four elements.Top left is your current credit total, self-explanatory. Bottom left is your current credit income. It's natural for this to fluctuate over time once your city starts developing, you get used to sorting out a feeling of how well it's going. Top right is your current stock of licenses. Look, everything has DRM these days. Everyone hates DRM. You hate it. I hate it. The Eden Initiative hates it. Global Trust hates it. SAAT hates it. But if you want to play with not quite standard technology, you need to pay licenses for the privilege, to the point that it's become a currency among those in the know. Now, you don't spend licenses on buildings and upkeep like you do credits. Licenses are spent on a variety of special things, and I'll be demonstrating one way to spend licenses in a little bit. Bottom right is your total population on the map. The middle pane is visible whenever your screen is focused on an island. You can see the name of the island, and below it the island fertilities. Fertilities represent what crops a given island's weather and soil conditions are suitable for growing, there's no such thing as universally good farmland in 2070! In this case, Carcosa is suitable for growing tea, rice, and coffee. We'll make use of one of those soon! The question mark means that there's room in the island's ecosystem for introducing one new crop. I have plans for Carcosa in this regard, so don't worry about it for now. The >> symbol lets you quickly jump your command interface around to other islands you've settled. And on the right panel, going from left to right, we start with the island's supply of available electrical power. Self-explanatory, no? The second icon, the leaf, is the island's ecobalance. 'Ecobalance' is a cumulative index of the island's ecological health, soil conditions, level of water and atmospheric pollution, and so on and so forth. An ecobalance score of zero is the default baseline, and doesn't affect anything. However, most buildings - especially power plants, mines, and factories - harm the island's ecobalance with their pollution. There are also ways to improve an island's ecobalance, though we don't have access to any right now. The landscape of an island goes through significant changes at high and low ecobalance ratings, from sunny green paradises to dark, storm-lashed desolation.At a high positive ecobalance, the better working and leisure conditions lead to a happier and more productive population, which on the gripping hand means more money for you! High ecobalance also leads to farms becoming more productive in the fertile soil. A low negative ecobalance does much the opposite: crops wither and farms become less productive, and the dreary surroundings and need for acid rain resistant housing and clothing leads to a less productive population, which means less income for the city. Significant negative ecobalance can also trigger devastating natural disasters which can further lay waste to your settlements. Now, we've partnered with the Eden Initiative for the Tierra del Fuego project, so all of this is doubly important. Eco citizens and biotech respond very strongly to the island's ecobalance, doubling or even tripling their output in verdant conditions! Contrariwise, they also respond just as harshly to a negative ecobalance, drastically dropping their outputs and deserting the settlement. If you've partnered with Global Trust, though, Trust employees and crops are made from hardier stock and respond significantly less to the effects of ecobalance, positive or negative. Me being who I am, I'm going to work for a high positive ecobalance everywhere I can swing it. I know Global Trust would call it a waste of resources. They can bitch from their balconies out in air they can actually breathe. Oh, and further right from ecobalance you can see the island's available construction materials, building modules and tools in this case.   Now, something I consider very important whenever you settle a new island where people are going to live: select the city center, and click the Ascension Rights button to disable the right. We'll see what this means in a little bit. One other thing while I'm here. Clicking on a house will show you a snapshot of the citizen needs for the given type of citizen. Scruffy here is not a complicated man, and neither are his fellows. He only needs four things to be completely happy: Community (provided by the City Center), Food (provided by the Fishery), Drink, and Activity. Right now you can see that Community and Food are fully satisfied, and indeed are satisfied for all the Scruffies currently on Carcosa. I'm going to hold off on doing anything further for just a moment, to give time for more Scruffies to arrive. Until then, it's time to meet our neighbors!  Just to the northeast of Carcosa, mister Rufus Thorne has set up shop. Rufus Thorne is the Chief Operations Officer for Global Trust, and prefers to run things in the field from his ark, the Haven. It's never a surprise to see him hovering around a new World Council resettlement program, and he's always eager to do business. His first menu here shows that he's willing to sell building modules and tools from the Trust's surplus for credits. His second shows a selection of special goods that he's willing to exchange for licenses. There's one interesting item here, but I'd rather check with the other neighbors first before seeing if I can afford it. On the right side of the items screen, you can see the button to discretely pay off a shipping manager to see a different, random, selection of items. His stock will expand and develop over time, and Rufus Thorne is a reliable business partner. He's a rude, sexist pig at times, but he's also honest and puts his money where his mouth is, which are pretty rare for a Global Trust executive.(Note: I'm not kidding about the sexist pig thing, we'll meet Yana Rodriguez shortly and Rufus will occasionally accuse Yana of sleeping her way to the top.)  Professor Salman Devi is a member of SAAT's governing Science Council. While a brilliant scientist in his own right, Devi is also a gifted diplomat and negotiator who prefers to conduct his research in the field aboard his ark, the Vortex. He's another familiar face to most resettlement program governors, and offers mostly the same services and goods as Thorne. Yana Rodriguez is the Field Operations Officer for the Eden Initiative, presumably here to monitor the Tierra del Fuego program and study the local ecology from her ark, the Biosphere. She's another trustworthy trading partner, and in this case has an item I'm very interested in. The Pelagic Trawl Net, once installed at Carcosa, will upgrade not only our existing Fishery on the island, but every future Fishery we build there, increasing their output by 25%. Normally, a Fishery will only harvest enough food for 250 Scruffies. With this upgrade, they can feed well over 300! With our limited waterfront on Carcosa, I decide this is something to spend the majority of our licenses on immediately.(Note: You can unlock the Haven, Vortex, and Biosphere as skins for your ark through achievements should you be so inclined, but I chose to stick with the basic model for the purposes of this LP)  While no one here suggested an alternative name for our cargo ship, a viewer in alternative channels suggested naming the ship for Arturo Pratt, which I happily adopted. I order the Arturo to drop off its remaining cargo with Carcosa before heading out because there's an important quirk about ships: the more heavily a ship is laden, the slower it moves. This speed penalty is drastically reduced for proper freight vessels, but significant for military warships. While the so-called 'commando ship' is an effective hybrid of military and civilian design, the ship's propulsion is fully military in nature, so dropping off the Arturo's cargo makes a significant difference. Or at least as much as we can, Carcosa's storage space is still very limited. Having sent the Arturo off on that mission, enough Scruffies have arrived on Carcosa to provide for their Drink need. Eco Laborers are men and women of good sense, and tea is their drink of choice. Remember how I said that Carcosa has a fertility for tea? You can't build tea plantations just anywhere! Fortunately, if you partner with the Eden Initiative for a resettlement program, they'll always make initial landfall on an island that can grow tea. Like the basalt extractor, a tea plantation needs fields in order to run. Unlike the basalt extractor, a tea plantation needs three fields rather than two, and they're rather larger.  One tea plantation ready for planting! The fields of the plantation will turn green as the tea plants seed and grow in the farm's warm-up period. Tea plantations are rather large and awkward to place, but a single plantation will keep Carcosa well supplied in tea for a while yet. While not yet urgently needed, I decide that it's time to improve Carcosa's electrical infrastructure with the Eden Initiative's preferred source of power, a wind turbine. Bluntly, I hate these things. They're much more eco-friendly than the Global Trust's coal power plants, but... Well, you'll see just what that radius you can see means when I build another one. With significant research, wind turbines can become highly efficient and a welcome asset, but for now I'll be building as few of these things as I can get away with and there's a reason I'm cramming this one in a corner.  In the meantime, the Arturo trades the majority of our licenses for the improved fishing nets. You can see the nets taking up a cargo slot on the Arturo, and I order the Arturo to come home. I transfer the nets from the Arturo to Carcosa just like how I transferred the bricks and tools and fish at the start of the Pioneer Program. The nets immediately slot into the logistics infrastructure network at Carcosa. Initially, our network can only sustain three non-standard upgrades on any given island at once, marked by the yellow symbols on the upgrade slots. We'll unlock the others eventually with SAAT's help, but that's not going to be for a while. Still, this is actually helpful, unlike the gargantuan container ship Rufus Thorne has sent to Carcosa. There is nothing on this island yet worth sending a ship that big to haul to or from! Intimidation or dick waving, I suppose.(NPCs will send ships to every island you've settled. There is a way to make this useful, later. For now, though, it's just local color.)  As you can see, the fishery is now operating at 125% efficiency! The extra capacity isn't needed just yet, but future proofing is never a bad thing in my book. And with the tea plantation up and running, Scruffy has his Drink need met! The more needs of a given citizen tier are met, the more will move to your island and the more productive they'll be, which means more money for you! I have one more thing for the Arturo to do today, and I decide for the moment to drop off its remaining cargo of tools with the Leviathan. Arks have enormous storage space, and on the Ark's bar you can see buttons for fish, building modules, and tools under 'Express Delivery.' Should you run desperately low on basic goods, you can elect to simply purchase large quantities from outside sources. It's expensive, and I always try to avoid it, but it's an option that's there if you need it.  As it turns out, I can just barely afford an Auxiliary Drive from Rufus Thorne, which I install immediately on the Arturo Pratt. Ship upgrades apply individually to the ship in question, and different models of ship have different numbers of upgrade slots. The commando ship has just the one, and as the early workhorse of the Tierra del Fuego program, I think a 30% speed increase on the Arturo will serve us nicely. This does of course leave us without many licenses, and it may be some time before we can acquire more. Still, I believe this was a worthwhile investment for the future. While the Arturo has attended to that errand, I've built a few more houses on Carcosa, enough to unlock the solution to Scruffy's final need: Activity. For Eco Laborers, this means a concert hall. Public activity buildings like the concert hall show a radius around them to mark where their influence spreads. All barracks within the circle will enjoy the benefits of the concert hall. Now, I could position the hall to cover absolutely all of the barracks I've built so far, but I'd rather not cram the hall in against the mountain. Instead, I position the hall in a way that will cater to future expansion of Carcosa even if I don't get quite as much benefit right this second. Within the concert hall's area, all our Scruffies have all of their needs met! Scruffy is now at his maximum happiness and productivity, and if my task here in the Tierra del Fuego was just to make a refugee work camp I might leave it at that. However, those arrows above the houses mean they're ready to ascend. Remember what I said earlier about denying Ascension Rights from the city center? Doing that allows you to manually control what houses ascend rather than letting it happen organically. I prefer it this way, letting me carefully control the development of my settlements.  For the price of one unit of tools per house... Behold the face of evil. Eco Employees make you more money than Laborers and unlock many new features for a growing city. In return, they're a fair bit harder to satisfy, and if you partner with the Eden Initiative you will grow to loathe that 'Lifestyle' need they have. Scruffy was easy to please, and I hope you all enjoyed the simple foundations of getting started. Laborers are just one tier out of four, for a single faction.  Next time, we see what Billy Bob and his hat can do for the Tierra del Fuego. Aurora van de Velde signing off.
Cythereal fucked around with this message at 11:47 on Aug 2, 2021 |
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Aug 2, 2021 02:30
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quote:
While it is a rather poor joke, I must point out that Carcosa is actually a creation of Ambrose Bierce and neither lovecraft nor robert chambers. While Bierce's legacy is fraught to say the least, I would find that a rather poor descriptor of him.
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Aug 2, 2021 05:32
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NewMars posted:While it is a rather poor joke, I must point out that Carcosa is actually a creation of Ambrose Bierce and neither lovecraft nor robert chambers. While Bierce's legacy is fraught to say the least, I would find that a rather poor descriptor of him. Fine. Edited the post to make it clear that I'm giving Lovecraft poo poo, not Bierce.
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Aug 2, 2021 11:48
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Damnit Cyth, now I'm half tempted to do my own LP of the more historical Annos you don't play... But then I'd have to get everything set up for LPing which I haven't done in a long-rear end time, and I'd have to stop/restart my 1800 run when I'm on one of the best runs (or at least one that my ADD hasn't rejected yet) which I'm loathe to do...
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Aug 2, 2021 11:53
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Anno 2070 is actually my favourite of the series and this is a great LP!
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Aug 2, 2021 12:03
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I'll go into this a little more in the next update, whenever that ends up being, but what folks have seen in the first two updates is the core gameplay loop of Anno games: settle islands, build houses, produce resources and build buildings to meet the needs of the residents, ascend residents to higher tiers with more complex needs, and onwards towards the top. NewMars posted:Anno 2070 is actually my favourite of the series and this is a great LP! Glad you're enjoying it! Alkydere posted:Damnit Cyth, now I'm half tempted to do my own LP of the more historical Annos you don't play... An Anno LP from the view of someone who really knows their stuff could be interesting. I make no claims to being an Anno expert, I just wanted to break the game down to show people who have never played Anno how it all works.I'm actually hoping to do Anno 2205, which I feel is a very underappreciated entry in the series, but I felt that 2070 was a much better game for introducing people to the series.
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Aug 2, 2021 13:26
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Oh those worker requirement bubbles would annoy the absolute poo poo out of me I can tell right now. I would spend hours trying to place them juuuuuuust right.
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Aug 3, 2021 09:51
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Cythereal posted:I'll go into this a little more in the next update, whenever that ends up being, but what folks have seen in the first two updates is the core gameplay loop of Anno games: settle islands, build houses, produce resources and build buildings to meet the needs of the residents, ascend residents to higher tiers with more complex needs, and onwards towards the top. Your first few times the loop includes a few moments where you freak out at a new requirement and have to take a moment to at the very least pause the game (or restart) as the game adds a new requirement or a resource chain that leaves you going "And I have to get how many whats from where?" 2070 is rather light on these other than the whole how expensive some of the Tech stuff is. Oh and how absolutely dedicated they are to blowing themselves up or releasing plagues. I just wanted you to make me a mining drill! How did that end up a plague!? As compared to 1404's poo poo like "Oh you unlocked the top tier residents? Turns out the penultimate tier has suddenly developed A BRAND NEW WANT!" and 2205's "Yay! The moon! Now I'm bankrupt!" mixed with the endless bullshit Lunar Cobra Commander can annoy you with. Of course those are both nothing compared to 1800's list of dick moves (I guarantee you every single person who goes into that game blind will restart at least once after reaching Engineers). Oh and Engineers also pull that dick move where they have a building unlock a good ways after you unlock the next and final tier of population. At least 1800 tells you very clearly what's coming up in terms of unlocks instead of just inserting a fresh need in the needs wheel. Cythereal posted:An Anno LP from the view of someone who really knows their stuff could be interesting. I wouldn't know if I can be considered "really knowing my stuff". I just...have played the game a lot. There's some really crazy folks out there. Also I would love to see a 2205 LP. It has its flaws, but I'm not gonna blame the devs for experimenting. Especially when they learned some great lessons from said experiments and came back swinging in 1800
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Aug 3, 2021 11:57
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Good news is, I've recorded the next update and I'm still learning things myself. I never had a need for quays in my previous game, but with Carcosa's limited waterfront they've become very useful.
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Aug 3, 2021 12:09
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The Fourth X Last time, we ended with Billy Bob and his hat arriving on Carcosa. Eco Laborers are local blue collar workers hired by the Eden Initiative, but Employees are full members of the organization with the education and training for skilled labor. However, as you can see, Scruffy hasn't left just because the housing block is nicer! Billy Bob and his hat have all the same needs we already met for Scruffy, plus brand new ones. There's two completely new needs you can see, Lifestyle and Information, but fish also now accounts for only half of Billy Bob's food need. He also craves something new. But, we can't sate that craving right now! Making health food requires more Billy Bobs than we have right now. The solution: more Billy Bobs. Now, you might think you can completely replace all your Scruffies with Billy Bobs. They pay more income taxes and bring in more people, seems more efficient no? Alas, you can't completely replace them. Your total population is always going to be limited by your number of Scruffies. Gentrification only in moderation! We still don't have enough Billy Bobs for health food, though, so what else can we do? Upgrading houses like this is spending a lot of tools! It's time to make our own. Tools don't grow on trees, unfortunately. We need to start mining, and right next to our settled area of Carcosa we have two mountain slots. Only so many areas in any rocky area are suitable for mining or other excavations, so mountain slots are a limited and precious resource. Now, I know Carcosa has plentiful reserves of everything we need to make tools, but how do you? Let me draw your attention to the mini-map. Mousing over an island on the mini-map shows you a complete survey of the island's resources. Carcosa's fertilities, I introduced in the last session. However, now we can also see Carcosa's non-renewable resources. We will not be harvesting all of these resources on Carcosa. For right now, coal and iron are what concern us. We may have been able to make building modules with just a basalt extractor and a smelter, but tools are more complex. Let's return to Billy Bob's face on the building menu.  To make tools requires you to mine both coal and iron ore. These are then supplied to an Iron Smelter to produce iron. Iron is then supplied to a tools workshop to produce tools.  Carcosa's warehouse, however, doesn't reach the nearby mountains! We need to build a new depot to expand our construction area. Each depot comes with a cargo hauler just like the warehouse, and expands our total island storage. All depots and warehouses on an island are linked by an underground rail network, so you don't need to worry about supplying any specific warehouse or depot, they're all good. You can see here the new building radius of the depot. Obviously, just one depot isn't going to cut it. Building a road out to the depot will link it into Carcosa's transport network. Now, if this was just going to be an isolated little network of production, this wouldn't actually be necessary! You can have depots just off by themselves, linked to their relevant production facilities, but I foresee plenty of expansion out this way to come. Spot my mistake with the second depot.  One iron mine up and running, and linked to the first depot. It's when I prepare to break ground on the coal mine that I realize my mistake: I built the second depot too far away from the mountain! I can't build the mine! Fortunately, there's a solution. On the bottom right of the command interface, you may have noticed the 'pickaxe' symbol next to the 'house' symbol used to construct new buildings. This is the button to demolish buildings. (I'm playing on Easy, so I get fully refunded when demolishing buildings. Doing so can still, however, cause you grief if you do something silly like accidentally delete a city center (say, your ONLY city center) because the hotkey to delete buildings is right next to your Steam screenshot key and don't notice until you get the warning that people are deserting the city. You know. Just in case that happens.)  Now, back to the task at hand. Coal mine built, now to add an iron smelter and tool workshops.  Smelter to the southwest, two tools workshops to the northeast, positioned between the iron and coal mines for speed of transporting raw goods. Now, I'm not being 100% efficient here. A completely efficient tool production chain adds a second iron mine, which allows the supply of a second iron smelter, which allows two more tools workshops. Under present arrangements, Carcosa will be slowly producing an excess of iron ore for storage, but for the moment Carcosa doesn't need tools urgently enough to warrant the expense of a fully efficient tool production line. However, building all of this has over-stressed Carcosa's power grid, and this needs to be fixed. This is why I (and pretty much every other resettlement governor) hates wind turbines. Putting multiple turbines too close together causes them to interfere with one another, reducing the power generation of both - and wind parks don't produce a huge amount of power in the first place. The circles you see show the interference radius of both. Overlapping a little bit doesn't cause much harm, but still. We will in time develop ways to significantly reduce this problem, but that's a ways down the road. Carcosa is starting to take shape, but still doesn't have enough Billy Bobs to start making real progress. I assume you all know what building and upgrading houses looks like by this point - please don't hesitate to interrupt me with questions, or for veteran governors, suggestions! Better. However, looking over the city center tells me that Carcosa's population has grown beyond the ability of one fishery to support, even with Yana's improved nets. And there's not enough waterfront to build another fishery. What to do? Well, I could expand to another beach and claim that waterfront. Or I can get a little inventive with the space I already have. In the construction menu, the Fun Box next to Billy Bob and his hat holds mainly ornamental buildings, things to make islands look pretty. I do intend to indulge myself later, once I'm confident Carcosa is well founded, but for right now what I want are the quay walls. These let you build piers out into the water, creating artificial 'shoreline' for waterfront buildings. Like so! I've also connected the quay firmly to shore and added a road, so the new fishery can ship fish to the warehouse.(This is the first time I've ever used quays! My first game was quite fortunate with lots of beaches, but not so here!)  Building and ascending more houses to attract more people may not be the most interesting thing to do, much less watch, but it's the meat and potatoes of building a resettlement project. More interesting is that I decide it's time to start harvesting the Eden Initiative's first unique building material.  What, did you think the forest on Carcosa was just cosmetic? Not at all! It's time to get back to basics, the Eden Initiative loves to use wood for all kinds of structural work. It's efficient, eco-friendly, renewable, and one hell of a lot easier to work with than the Global Trust's preferred construction materials. Now, trees automatically regrow over time, particularly at high ecobalance levels, but you might have noticed that Carcosa is at -17 ecobalance. Not low enough to cause harm, but far from ideal. If natural tree growth isn't enough, however, tree nurseries let you force the issue and steadily grow new trees in the projected radius. The sawmill completes the picture and harvests the trees. We haven't seen anything that needs wood yet, but we will soon.(Trivia: I grew up in an area where tree farming is serious economic business! Where I'm from, though, trees are farmed primarily to be turned into pulp which is then made into paper. Tree farms are easy to overlook unless you watch as you're driving past and realize that all the trees in the 'forest' are in suspiciously straight lines and all look to be the same age.)  While that gets started, I also grew frustrated with the slow pace of building module production and build a new chain next to the old one. This is perfectly normal, in a busy settlement I normally end up with three or four building module chains. As this is going on, though, I see that Carcosa finally has enough Billy Bobs to start producing health food. There's a problem, though... Producing health food requires rice, which we can grow on Carcosa (remember how I said last update that Carcosa's fertilities can grow rice?), and vegetables, which we can't. Now, there's two solutions to this problem. First, I could see if Yana, Devi, or Thorne have vegetable seeds for sale (crop seeds are one of the item types they regularly offer), buy them, and plant them on Carcosa in the island's unclaimed fertility slot. However, I don't have the licenses to buy seeds and none of the neighbors are selling any right now anyway. I also have other plans for Carcosa's empty fertility slot. The other option is to expand to an island that can grow vegetables. This is what we'll be doing. However, right now our only ship is the Arturo Pratt. I'd rather not temporarily lock our only ship into cargo duty. Carcosa needs to start building ships. Now, I could build a shipyard right away. Shipbuilding is a messy industry, though, and would push Carcosa's ecobalance low enough to start hurting Billy Bob's productivity. Fortunately, enough Billy Bobs have arrived to provide our first ecobalance improving building, the weather control station.  Just like wind turbines, weather control stations have an interference radius, further incentive for Eden Initiative settlements to spread out (and, frankly, to research improvements later). The first weather control station is built, but who is this? Traveling aboard his ship, the Lucky Lady, Trenchcoat is an infamous smuggler who operates around the world. Trenchcoat will buy and sell just about anything, albeit for often exorbitant prices. While the World Council frowns on doing business with him, in practice most people tolerate his activities around active resettlement projects. Right now we don't need anything he has to offer, and we aren't producing anything he cares for, but when you need Trenchcoat's services, you really need him.  Another wind turbine, another tree nursery and sawmill, and another weather control center for Carcosa, which bring us up over the threshold for positive eco-influence!  It's not a huge impact right now, no, but this gives me warm fuzzy feelings inside. Now, it's time to build ourselves a proper shipyard. The large ship in the harbor is a cargo liner, the Eden Initiative's primary freighter - this is one of Yana's ships. Rather more modest than the Global Trust's cargo ships in size, cargo capacity, and durability, but faster and cheaper to build and operate. We'll be building plenty of our own in due time. Quite the nice little cove, if I do say so myself! As soon as I build the shipyard, however, Billy Bob's union boss offers us our first quest! There's a wide variety of quests, and rewards. In particular, they're your primary source of new licenses, though sometimes they offer credits instead, and the quest giver usually throws in something special as well. In this case, 13 units of communicators. We can neither build or use communicators yet, but we will. Not what I was hoping for, but it will do. The actual quest? A ship belonging to a minor subsidiary of Global Trust was caught illegally dumping waste in the waters of the Tierra del Fuego. The law can't touch this ship. We, however, can. Time for a little vigilante ecoterrorism! EXplore. EXpand. EXploit. EXterminate.  The Arturo Pratt is on the hunt! Fortunately, Rufus Thorne declines to rescue the ship.   A cold grave at the bottom of the Southern Ocean for ship and crew.  With the polluters now fish food, the Arturo returns the ship's black box and Billy Bob's union boss arranges the shipment of licenses and communicators, which I immediately transfer to Carcosa storage. Carcosa, population 582.
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Aug 4, 2021 00:21
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Cythereal posted:
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Aug 4, 2021 01:01
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kw0134 posted:Holy poo poo, that's brutal. Anti-pollution laws are pretty draconian in the future! As they should be 
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Aug 4, 2021 01:54
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Out of curiosity, can stuff like the Basalt Granules be turned into different things or do they only have one step onwards in the production chain? I love games with, like, a chain of refining, etc. for basic resources, but I always get a bit annoyed when a given resource can only be refined into one thing and its basic form can't be used for anything. At that point you might as well skip the middle man and just have the extractor structure also do the refining at the same time.
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Aug 4, 2021 11:46
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PurpleXVI posted:Out of curiosity, can stuff like the Basalt Granules be turned into different things or do they only have one step onwards in the production chain? They cannot! However, Granules are the only resource in the game where this is true, and I think the gameplay purpose is just to teach you about production chains. There are other resources in the game that have no purpose but to be turned into something else, but always in combination with other resources - the vegetables driving my current expansion, for example, are used in combination with rice to make Billy Bob's health food, and are used in a similar way for a later production chain. If I had to guess, I'd say it's used in combination with limited island fertilities to drive the player to expand and set up trade, a huge part of the game that I'll be covering in the next post. There will come a time when we settle islands to harvest one and only one specific resource to ship to another island. Seraphic Neoman posted:As they should be Not shown: the almost five full minutes of shooting it took to sink that monster. Container ships are the beefiest ships in the game, with 900 HP (the next toughest, battleships, have 800), and commando ships like the Arturo do a whopping 4 dps.
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Aug 4, 2021 12:07
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What do you mean no one likes Wind Turbines, Cyth? They're great! Wait...I'm getting an update...apparently it's offshore wind turbines I like, especially when mixed with some juicy upgrades. Also, about the eco-balance stuff, that Weather Control Station may seem weak sauce for the amount of land it takes up but it stacks with other eco-balance buildings you unlock later. Also it doesn't take up a valuable river or mine slot to use. Also Tycoon eco-balance buildings are more powerful on a per-point basis...but there's a catch! Tycoon eco-balance buildings can only build an island up to neutral while Eco ones can bring it up to Magical Disneyland levels. Also the order you place the buildings in is important: so when you get those Tycoons unlocked you actually want to rip apart all your Eco ecobalance buildings, place down your Tycoon ones to counteract your industries or any ancient nuclear power plants on the island, THEN slap down your shiny Eco ones to get the bonus. Spoiled because I don't want to go too into stuff before Cythereal gets there. PurpleXVI posted:Out of curiosity, can stuff like the Basalt Granules be turned into different things or do they only have one step onwards in the production chain? As far as I remember Basalt Granules aren't used for anything, and in fact later on there's an alternate way to generate There's no resource-substitution for alternate recipes in 2070 (Anno 5), you can't just shove the gravel into another product chain. The devs only started experimenting with that in one of the DLCs for 2205 (Anno 6) but then they went hog wild with it in 1800 (Anno 7).
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Aug 4, 2021 12:13
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Isn't it kinda counterproductive to send that ship full of pollutants straight to the bottom of the ocean? 
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Aug 4, 2021 12:26
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Alkydere posted:What do you mean no one likes Wind Turbines, Cyth? They're great! Wind turbines and offshore wind turbines are perfectly fine when upgraded, hence my notes that they get better with research. We do not yet have the ability to conduct research and build upgrades, however. Alkydere posted:Also Tycoon eco-balance buildings are more powerful on a per-point basis...but there's a catch! Tycoon eco-balance buildings can only build an island up to neutral while Eco ones can bring it up to Magical Disneyland levels. Also the order you place the buildings in is important: so when you get those Tycoons unlocked you actually want to rip apart all your Eco ecobalance buildings, place down your Tycoon ones to counteract your industries or any ancient nuclear power plants on the island, THEN slap down your shiny Eco ones to get the bonus. I'll cover all of this when I unlock the Tycoons. I'm aiming this LP at the newbies and prospective players, so I want to present things one step at a time as the game develops them.Torrannor posted:Isn't it kinda counterproductive to send that ship full of pollutants straight to the bottom of the ocean? What the quest giver wants, the quest giver gets.
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Aug 4, 2021 12:33
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I'm sure a large fraction of it was vaporized during the battle and is now drifting through the atmosphere as aerosols so it's not all in the ocean 
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Aug 4, 2021 12:50
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Torrannor posted:Isn't it kinda counterproductive to send that ship full of pollutants straight to the bottom of the ocean? I'm assuming that by the time they get flagged for illegal dumping and the quest is issued, they've already finished dumping everything they were going to.
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Aug 4, 2021 13:09
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| # ? Apr 23, 2024 20:47 |
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Torrannor posted:Isn't it kinda counterproductive to send that ship full of pollutants straight to the bottom of the ocean?  It can now act as a valuable artificial reef to promote the growth of fish and other aquatic life populations.
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Aug 4, 2021 13:16
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