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The trade union thing is cool in concept and wonky in execution. I'm not hugely familiar (read not at all) with how trade unions operated in Victorian Britain, but I doubt they had a dedicated building close to the factory at hand. Though that being said, I am not bursting with ideas for a better system. There's a German article with some speculation as to the next Anno setting. Not sure I agree with their ratings of likeliness, but I recall a few weeks back reading some speculation in this thread. Most of the time periods are in here too (Rome, Egypt, Vikings) but Fantasy Anno sounds like an intriguing concept. Anno 1800 was a bit of a safe return to the classic Anno formula after the future titles, but I wonder if they will step out of the comfort zone for the next game. It seems like Anno 1800 was well received and I think it could be a toss up between a safe sequel (the article speculates Anno 1926) or another iteration on the formula? I really think Anno AD90 or Anno 9 BC could work. Have ROME as the main session and then others could include Egypt and Gaul. The article seems to think the Roman heavy reliance on slavery could be problematic, but the series has happily ignored colonialism and imperialism so I think they could find a way. It never stopped Impressions Games with Pharaoh or Caesar.
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Jan 31, 2021 20:32
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anno 40005
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Jan 31, 2021 20:56
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Some trade union multiple types work really well together, and some you are better off just dedicating an entire Union to even though you might not need the whole radius.
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Jan 31, 2021 21:28
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mitochondritom posted:The trade union thing is cool in concept and wonky in execution. I'm not hugely familiar (read not at all) with how trade unions operated in Victorian Britain, but I doubt they had a dedicated building close to the factory at hand. Though that being said, I am not bursting with ideas for a better system. The game already has better ideas for many things that are half-implemented: - Freeform fields are better than fixed ones, so why force animal pastures to fixed sizes? - Warehouses upgrade in-place for a cash, building material and upkeep cost. Why not other buildings? - Tourist buildings are modular and have slots for items with set bonuses. So what they could have done is have a single building with fields/pastures for agriculture, and require upgrading to increase the field limit and/or have modules (grain silos, barns, etc) to slot specialists. Trade unions could also be upgradeable/modular and just apply to the whole island. Or attach them to a warehouse or something. The game already makes concessions to realism by having island-wide magically teleporting storage. I guess there are some people who enjoy the optimization challenge of warehouse/production/trade unions placement but I find it really unappealing. City building is a lot more forgiving, though I say that partly because I'm drowning in trade unions specialists and only have a few good ones for town halls.
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Jan 31, 2021 21:56
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mitochondritom posted:The trade union thing is cool in concept and wonky in execution. I'm not hugely familiar (read not at all) with how trade unions operated in Victorian Britain, but I doubt they had a dedicated building close to the factory at hand. Though that being said, I am not bursting with ideas for a better system. Anno 801 could be interesting, a shattered Roman Empire with city states going their own ways, Charlemagne is in full swing, Byzantium is still a massive player, the Islamic conquests are still fresh, Spain is fractured, Vikings are about to turbofuck northern Europe. You could do trading maps with each of those and have a good setting
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Jan 31, 2021 22:01
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Yea actually that does sound really good. Especially because you could imagine the diversity across those different sessions. I'd like to see them branch out from islands and ships, the little archipelagos in Anno 1800 are right at the cusp of "working conceptually" for me whereas in previous titles I accepted the conceit of little cities on islands with no cognitive dissonance at all. I think after 2205s experiment and the clear return to safety with 1800 means that any large deviation is unlikely and the next title will largely stick to the tried and tested Anno form.
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Jan 31, 2021 22:26
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Which is a shame. I like the Anno formula, but I like sci-fi and fantasy settings so much more than historical settings. If 2205 failed as an experiment, imo it was because Ubisoft didn't support it enough and the base game played things too safe. A proper expansion - say, adding proper cities in the arctic and the moon - might have improved things greatly.
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Jan 31, 2021 22:43
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My understanding is that the poor reception was mainly due to the abstraction of the trade routes and how your goods were expressed as a number representing an over or undersupply. I personally feel cooler about 2205 because I find it quite charmless and sterile relative to 2070. There's a surprising amount of personality in 2070 with Vadim, Thor Strinberg and others that just isn't there in 2205. Then again even 2070 is lacking relative to the absurd characters in 1404. I think the future Anno games are cool and think they could do more with it. I like the Solar System concept of Anno 9000 in the article I linked. That being said I also really enjoy the history themed ones too!
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Jan 31, 2021 22:57
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Cythereal posted:Which is a shame. I like the Anno formula, but I like sci-fi and fantasy settings so much more than historical settings. Same. I kinda struggle to think what an Anno game older then 1800 could do to appeal to me, and can't help but feel it'd be kinda limited in like, just how much you could do with mechanical systems?
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Jan 31, 2021 22:58
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Cythereal posted:If 2205 failed as an experiment, imo it was because Ubisoft didn't support it enough and the base game played things too safe. A proper expansion - say, adding proper cities in the arctic and the moon - might have improved things greatly. I've played 1800 a bit more than a month ago, then 2070 for most of january, and the last few days of 2205. 2205 feels utterly ephemeral. The goods are defined by random sci fi (rice is for food, sunflowers for construction, and then your second level citizens consume artifical eyes made from some arctic metal) compared to the tangible goods in the other games (fish is for food, rock and wood for construction). Production doesn't have any "building steam"-phase. Usually, your factories wait a bit for their first delivery of raw goods and running a few cycles to come up with an efficiency percentage. 2205 doesn't have one, meaning your economy doesn't seem to carry any weight, since there's not much of an momentum to anything. And then there's no "near-instant" switching between sessions, you have to bounce through some world map and wait for a multiple-seconds-long loading time. And then everything looks kinda samey. 2205 introduced some nice concepts into the series (sessions, road-distance-based services, expanding production buildings with modules, being able to modify production chains, etc.), but their implementation was weak. 2070 is far better than I've remembered it, though. Maybe it was just tainted by all that online metagame stuff back then? Wipfmetz fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Feb 1, 2021 |
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Jan 31, 2021 23:50
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Wipfmetz posted:Production doesn't have any "building steam"-phase. Usually, your factories wait a bit for their first delivery of raw goods and running a few cycles to come up with an efficiency percentage. 2205 doesn't have one, meaning your economy doesn't seem to carry any weight, since there's not much of an momentum to anything. This is one of the best drat things about 2205. You get immediate feedback on how things are going instead of having to wait, eyeball things, and make an educated guess. 2205 desperately needed more character, but mechanically it was just how I like this kind of game, with immediate feedback and abstracting the bullshit that's not actually fun to deal with (to me).
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Feb 1, 2021 02:47
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Cythereal posted:This is one of the best drat things about 2205. You get immediate feedback on how things are going instead of having to wait, eyeball things, and make an educated guess. But there are other reasons, which 2205 had to remove for that immediate feedback, and those reasons require you to recognize, evaluate and remedy them. And that is what this game genre is about. I'm talking about reasons like inadequate shipping lines, overwhelmed warehouses, "studdering" because of random product usage (e.g. construction materials, where player input causes random product usage of their corresponding product lines). Mind you: There _is_ some momentum to 2205s economy, because there is a noticable storage for goods. It just almost hides that information in tooltips, so it felt even more random that "-5 rice" can be ignored until it cannot be anymore and starts an economic downward spiral. Wipfmetz fucked around with this message at 06:46 on Feb 1, 2021 |
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Feb 1, 2021 06:42
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i actually really like the 1926 idea. let me roll my current game in to the new one.
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Feb 1, 2021 07:01
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What could make it distinct, though? In comparision to a late-game 1800?
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Feb 1, 2021 07:39
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Wipfmetz posted:What could make it distinct, though? In comparision to a late-game 1800? roll in to campy 50's sci fi like...anno meets fallout  your investors lack Mister Handys!
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Feb 1, 2021 07:41
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Wipfmetz posted:What could make it distinct, though? In comparision to a late-game 1800? boar guy posted:i actually really like the 1926 idea. let me roll my current game in to the new one. I think a large expansion that takes the almost-but-not-quite-there-yet steampunk elements like big-rear end zeppelins and expands on that would be interesting. Go hard on Gibson and Bruce Stirling's Difference Engine novel and introduce a monument that is a giant computer. I just can't really see a 1920s Anno working well, not without some big changes to the formula.
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Feb 1, 2021 08:24
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boar guy posted:roll in to campy 50's sci fi like...anno meets fallout Edit: Thinking about it, I really want to see the developer twisting themselves trying to do a marketable Non-Alternative-History Anno 1926. Wipfmetz fucked around with this message at 09:47 on Feb 1, 2021 |
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Feb 1, 2021 08:34
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I agree, they should do a Fallout-meets-Jetsons Anno 1953 steampunk retro-future thing. Play off all that 1950s atoms for peace stuff where science was going to make the word into a paradise. That’d own bones. Nam Taf fucked around with this message at 09:46 on Feb 1, 2021 |
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Feb 1, 2021 09:43
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Wipfmetz posted:But there are other reasons, which 2205 had to remove for that immediate feedback, and those reasons require you to recognize, evaluate and remedy them. And that is what this game genre is about. I don't think that's what this genre is about. Or at least it's not what I play it for. I play the Anno games to build pretty sci-fi cityscapes and industrial centers while juggling the needs of all my various citizens and establishing lines of production for everything they need. Those things you mention like inadequate shipping and overwhelmed warehouses are marked nuisances in my book and I love 2205 choosing to abstract or simply eliminate them. Almost every time I got seriously frustrated with 2070 was because of things like that. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose, but 2205 is probably my favorite city-builder ever in terms of mechanics and one of my personal top ten, maybe even top five, games of all time to date. Just a shame the presentation wound up being so sterile and lacking in character. For all of 2070's faults, the game has a lot more personality to it than 2205.
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Feb 1, 2021 14:27
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I think the faction system of 2070 also helps give a lot of personality to the things you need to supply your citizens. I'll never stop being amused by having to make burgers for my citizens. I think I like the general supply chain and logistics mechanics of Anno - I like that it's a city builder that has like, mechanical systems that isn't just some convoluted tax system where it often feels like you need to sit on your hands waiting for things to build or money to come in.
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Feb 1, 2021 14:39
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Cythereal posted:I don't think that's what this genre is about. Or at least it's not what I play it for. I play the Anno games to build pretty sci-fi cityscapes and industrial centers while juggling the needs of all my various citizens and establishing lines of production for everything they need. Those things you mention like inadequate shipping and overwhelmed warehouses are marked nuisances in my book and I love 2205 choosing to abstract or simply eliminate them. It's completely polar opposite to me lol. I just throw down buildings in grid format to reach population thresholds, and the whole game is about balancing a supply chain to me. Delays in shipping capacity, picking the right structure of hub-and-spoke vs point-to-point, etc. etc. is all part and parcel of that. I'm kinda impressed that a game can appeal to such a broad audience for different reasons without alienating with certain mechanics. It's a hallmark of good design.
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Feb 2, 2021 02:53
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How are you supposed to deal with developing new islands? I figured I would try to specialize most of them, but it seems like transporting goods (via charter shipments) can only deal with an individual good at a time. Am I supposed to have like 30 ships to deal with each of the basic necessities, or should I be trying to have each island be mostly self-sufficient? Or is there another method I'm missing?
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Feb 2, 2021 22:02
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Koramei posted:How are you supposed to deal with developing new islands? I figured I would try to specialize most of them, but it seems like transporting goods (via charter shipments) can only deal with an individual good at a time. Am I supposed to have like 30 ships to deal with each of the basic necessities, or should I be trying to have each island be mostly self-sufficient? Or is there another method I'm missing? Build or buy your own ships to move different products in one ship? Clippers have 4 holds, cargo ships have 6. I like "mostly self sufficient", there's no reason to not produce locally what's supported by the local fertilities, unless you're already massively overproducing elsewhere. Fish for instance, is dirt cheap to produce and should never be shipped imo, unless you're hurting for shore space for other industry. If you have to expand the population on the main island to produce enough for the new island, then those people could probably just live on the new island without much, if any, additional cost. Later you get the commuter dock that allow you to separate residential and production islands entirely (people don't have to live on the island they work) for the low low cost of 1000 in maintenance. That's a huuuge cost when they become available, but trivial later. E: Unemployed people in anno 1800 are good. They pay their taxes without incurring the maintenance cost of their workplace. Caconym fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Feb 2, 2021 |
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Feb 2, 2021 22:22
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Koramei posted:How are you supposed to deal with developing new islands? I figured I would try to specialize most of them, but it seems like transporting goods (via charter shipments) can only deal with an individual good at a time. Am I supposed to have like 30 ships to deal with each of the basic necessities, or should I be trying to have each island be mostly self-sufficient? Or is there another method I'm missing? I never got super deep, but usually I'd not really go above worker tiers on secondary islands - farmer tier can be trivial to make self-sufficient, and often will through effect of me specializing that island into making things I don't want to do on my main island. In some cases, I just have one island producing a ton of stuff, then just have a ship drop off at multiple islands as part of a route. As you get deeper into a game, you can get influence bonuses that give you free workforce, which can often be enough to get what you need out of a small island, and once you start getting your balance up there, commuter piers become an option for when you need higher population tiers in other locations.
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Feb 2, 2021 22:25
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Is influence status, or dynamic? As in, if you aren’t maxing out newspaper propaganda, you lose the bonus? Or do you have to hit the milestone once/in summation?
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Feb 3, 2021 01:52
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Dalaram posted:Is influence status, or dynamic? As in, if you aren’t maxing out newspaper propaganda, you lose the bonus? Or do you have to hit the milestone once/in summation?
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Feb 3, 2021 02:11
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Koramei posted:How are you supposed to deal with developing new islands? I figured I would try to specialize most of them, but it seems like transporting goods (via charter shipments) can only deal with an individual good at a time. Am I supposed to have like 30 ships to deal with each of the basic necessities, or should I be trying to have each island be mostly self-sufficient? Or is there another method I'm missing? You want to sort-of specialise, like if you've settled an island explicitly for red peppers or hops, then yeah absolutely specialise in those. But make the island self-sufficient at the same time. It's a waste of resources to send lower tier goods to small islands, so make sure they have everything they need. Also, if you've settled an island for a particular good, don't expand beyond what you need. You essentially want one rich major city with the highest population tiers, and the rest of your empire is devoted to feeding and supplying it. The only stuff you build on outlying islands is what they need for survival in order to supply your main island. Don't take them past the first couple of population tiers.
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Feb 3, 2021 02:33
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The good thing is that the islands don't really need much since demands are unlocked only after certain population limits. So if you only need a few farmers to run a pepper farm or whatever it's easy enough to just plop down a few farmhouses and a fishery and of that gives you enough labor your set.
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Feb 3, 2021 05:48
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webmeister posted:You want to sort-of specialise, like if you've settled an island explicitly for red peppers or hops, then yeah absolutely specialise in those. But make the island self-sufficient at the same time. It's a waste of resources to send lower tier goods to small islands, so make sure they have everything they need. Huh? How is it a waste of resources? Sure, there's no point transporting fish, but it's perfectly sensible to send schnapps and clothes (+1-2 more goods if needed once you start using frigates or clippers) from your main island to specialized islands until you get commuter piers. What else are you going to use those empty cargo slots on the return trip for?
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Feb 3, 2021 06:02
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eXXon posted:Huh? How is it a waste of resources? Sure, there's no point transporting fish, but it's perfectly sensible to send schnapps and clothes (+1-2 more goods if needed once you start using frigates or clippers) from your main island to specialized islands until you get commuter piers. What else are you going to use those empty cargo slots on the return trip for? Extra cargo slows down ships - arguably at some point you might need your specialty islands moving more then 50 of a good at a time, and it also just might not be worth it to produce the extra shnapps or whatever to keep the secondary islands happy?
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Feb 3, 2021 06:10
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I self-support if I have enough spare population to meet those requirements without pushing over thresholds to higher needs/happiness products. I.e. if you keep under a certain threshold of a population tier, you don't need to meet all of their happiness requirements. This makes things heaps simpler. I also zergrush to tier 1 and hten tier 2 of the globalist influence perk because the +50 or +100 population of each tier makes this so much more powerful a technique. Between that + a smaller total population tier I don't need nearly as much to self-support that island. I'll however generally add another ship to the trade route and back-ship products on the (usually empty) return journey before I try to satisfy evreything though. The marginal extra cost of an additional ship is less than having to recreate a whole support network on an island, get enough people to populate it, then end up having to meet more happiness/need requirements, etc. etc. Staying under some of those breakpoints can dramatically simplify things.
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Feb 3, 2021 12:03
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Season 3 announcement coming up February 9. See you next Tuesday!
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Feb 5, 2021 08:28
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Picked this game up again after a 4-ish month hiatus, to play the tractor expansion and the lion expansion. Im surprised how much i have forgotten. Its a real struggle to get back into my savegame (It took me a month of playing to get there so i cbf to start a new game) I remember why i quit the last time. The ui and management of shipping is so atrocious. The resource consumption also balloons out of control like halfway through the game. I have an entire gigantic island dedicated to beer production and i still cannot satisfy all the demand. And using virtually every artisan i have to make sewing machines on my main island can't satisfy the demand for swing machines on my main island. Welp. I only use electricity for buildings that explicitly requre it, and i don't use trade unions as i find both those features fundamentally clash with the spirit of these games. Electricity requires you to rebuild your entire supply chain once you unlock it which is a huuuuuuge no-no in this genre imo. I cannot understand why everyone is fine with how electricity works. Making a train track virtually next door to where you want electricity and have a train transport oil there? What a bunch of nonsense. Even when electricity was new it was the easiest resource to transport. Gold diggers in the 1800's in Klondyke had electricity from New York for fucks sake. Trade unions and slotting "epic loot" is such a bullshit mmorpg feature that does not belong in these games, again imo. This game is amazing until you get to late artisans. The gameplay is smooth, custom shaped fields is spectacular, the supply chains are manageable and make sense, ship combat is so satisfying, but everything falls apart somewhere around engineers.
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Feb 5, 2021 10:47
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Ineptitude posted:Electricity requires you to rebuild your entire supply chain once you unlock it which is a huuuuuuge no-no in this genre imo. I cannot understand why everyone is fine with how electricity works. Making a train track virtually next door to where you want electricity and have a train transport oil there? What a bunch of nonsense. Even when electricity was new it was the easiest resource to transport. Gold diggers in the 1800's in Klondyke had electricity from New York for fucks sake. Um, what? The first long-distance AC transmission in history only went operational in 1890. (First long-distance DC transmission in the US was only a year earlier.) And it wasn't from New York to bloody Alaska. It was from Niagara Falls to Buffalo. Also, yeah, you're gonna be struggling with workforce if you literally refuse to utilize any of the tools you have to increase efficiency. Eletricity is as big a gamechanger for industry as tractors and silos are for agriculture. You spend some extra upkeep, workers, engineers and effort to rearrange a few buildings to double the productivity of your workforce by providing it. Also beer in particular is a luxury need. You don't have to satisfy it 100% all the time.
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Feb 5, 2021 19:58
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I have seen people argue that the comically small power plant radius is meant to represent electricity being DC only, which is really not historically reasonable since AC was developed at (very nearly) the same time. It would make more sense if a power plant produced a fixed amount of electricity to cover a certain number of homes (and businesses) but I guess they couldn't figure out a good way to do that without making it a magically transported good.
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Feb 5, 2021 20:11
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eXXon posted:It would make more sense if a power plant produced a fixed amount of electricity to cover a certain number of homes (and businesses) but I guess they couldn't figure out a good way to do that without making it a magically transported good. I think that's basically the Logistics/Social Needs (Mobility, communication, security, etc) system from 2205. Buildings made a certain amount, buildings far away had an inefficiency malus and needed more. (So, A building close to a power plant would use 10MW, while one far away might need 15 due to the distance from the plant.) It could honestly have worked pretty well for 1800 I think, provided that you could flip power on/off for buildings easily, since it's a rather flexible system. 1800 does strike me like a game where they experimented with seeing how complex/micro they could make their systems, before pulling them back and simplifying them. From early dev updates about it it seemed like trains would be used to transport goods, and they might have been aiming for -not- having a magical, island-wide warehouse system, then at some point they just became oil-only. (It's fully possible that's not the case, and I just misunderstood some of the wording, who knows.)
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Feb 5, 2021 20:21
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webmeister posted:Season 3 announcement coming up February 9. See you next Tuesday! Holy poo poo, I thought they confirmed LoL was the final expansion? How many more plates can we spin?!? 
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Feb 5, 2021 22:20
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SubNat posted:From early dev updates about it it seemed like trains would be used to transport goods, and they might have been aiming for -not- having a magical, island-wide warehouse system, then at some point they just became oil-only.) I love Anno and think 1800 is great, but the trains really are crap. It's faux Victorian Britain, you've got to have trains and railway. It's basically synonymous with the industrial revolution. But then Anno is all about islands and archipelagos with ships and ports. They don't quite mesh it together and TRAINS can't really take the center stage that they might in another "1800" themed game. They couldn't not have them, so it's sort of bodged in as this way to move oil about, despite every other gold not needing this system. Then, on top of that, love it or hate it Anno is built on a grid system and the train tracks have these horrendous 90° angles. Setting 2070 in a global warming ravaged water world really did them a huge favour allowing them to keep the nautical focus. I think Anno 1800 kind of struggles a bit to fit the time period into its "Anno" format.
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Feb 5, 2021 22:56
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mitochondritom posted:Then, on top of that, love it or hate it Anno is built on a grid system and the train tracks have these horrendous 90° angles.
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Feb 5, 2021 23:28
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Rime posted:Holy poo poo, I thought they confirmed LoL was the final expansion? Yeah after LoL went live they were all "Well that's a wrap, it was fun, thanks for being such a great community!" Only for a week or two later they went "...actually we're gonna make a season three! Here's a video to announce it that reveals nothing probably because we have no assets ready!" I get the feeling that someone at Ubisoft enjoyed the money rolling in and had a little conversation with Blue Byte. That being said: rejoice! They said specifically that season 3 won't have any new sessions.
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Feb 6, 2021 02:06
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