Review: Anno 1800

cre: Review: Anno 1800

The era of optimization

I never understood math. I was terrible at school – I had to take remedial math classes before I could get into my high school – and ever since I’ve either avoided any hobbies involving calculation or when it couldn’t not be avoided, quickly reached for the nearest available cheat sheet.

Playing Year 1800 – my first experience with the city-building franchise now twenty years old – leaves me with the impression that “it must be like this for people who As math.”

Year 1800 (PCS [reviewed])
Developer: blue byte
Publisher: Ubisoft
Released: April 16, 2019
MSRP: $59.99 (Epic Game Store and Uplay)
Reviewer’s Device: Nvidia Geforce GTX 1070, Intel Core i5-4670K 3.40Ghz, 16GB RAM

Careful, when I say that, I don’t mean that Year 1800 is particularly heavy on hand calculation, although you can really get into the weeds with this stuff if you feel like it. I mean, unlike a lot of games of this type, where I just goof off and let things go as they please, I want to optimise my Year 1800 regulation. I want to find the perfect geometric layout for a series of logging cabins in the forest on my island, so they can be serviced by a single wood processing plant. I want to make sure that my schnapps distilleries, my arms factories, my glass manufacturers and my residences have adequate coverage from the local fire station so that they don’t go up in smoke the next time someone one will drop a lantern. I want kaizen shit get out of my little colonial outpost, make the queen proud and raise a ton of money. And if it takes me the whole weekend or a few proletarian riots to do it, that’s just what it takes, right?

Year 1800, balder than one SimCity Where Civilizationchannels the joys of optimization, the same engaging feeling you might feel conducting a productive time and motion study at work, or when you finally realize that the Six Sigma yellow belt waste you took at work just to give the impression that you care about being promoted.

It does so against a frankly beautiful aesthetic backdrop of quaint 19th-century industrial-age architecture. Whether in guided tutorial/narrative campaign mode or starting over in a new session, players will build residences for their workers, meeting their needs by building production infrastructure. But each requested product requires a whole series of buildings and infrastructures to create it.

For example, a basic request from a level 1 farmer is for clothing. To create this, players need to build a sheep farm, which generates wool. Then the wool will have to be transformed by a Frame Weaver into clothes. A luxury product, like schnapps, requires a potato farm and a distillery. These and many more all require warehouses to hold goods, roads to connect them, and layers of infrastructure. Seen from the angle of an educational tool, Year 1800 is remarkably good at making sense of the complexities of modern manufacturing and logistics. If even this simplistic interpretation of the modern production line can be so complicated, it’s mind-boggling to imagine what went into building something truly complex, like the computer I’m typing this review on.

Things get even crazier once you expand beyond your initial establishment. Variations in soil fertility and available resources will ensure that most players cannot build all they can without expanding to other islands – islands that may be occupied by other players or factions . To this end, players can colonize unoccupied islands, trade what they need, buy shares in occupied territories with a bit of diplomacy, assemble successful economic coalitions, or even stage a hostile takeover. And when all else fails, there’s always war, even if the combat is pretty simplistic and not at all interesting. If anything, having to make a fight out of it feels like failing in Year 1800.

And then there is the New World. You can’t have a colonial game set in 1800 without actually having colonies, so the Latin American-inspired environs of the New World are. New World colonies are established and maintained as they are in the Old World, though colonies have their own production lines, aesthetic style, architecture, and worker levels, all with unique needs. Finally, the colonies can provide the homeland, and vice versa, with exclusive products, such as rum, furs and high-tech machinery.

One of the unique things about Year 1800 is that each level of population is necessary for the health of a colony. Each tier of workers (e.g. Farmers, Laborers, Artisans, Engineers, and Old World Investors) can only be used to populate specific categories of buildings, so maintaining a balance is paramount between each type of worker. But with the addition of considerations like tourism and “attractiveness”, players working on a large scale may end up specializing their production on several islands, in order to keep things efficient (and at least avoid certain territories from being polluted by heavy industry).

Apart from these basic mechanisms, other considerations arise. NPCs spawn mini-quests to undertake, usually simple combat or scavenging missions, in exchange for infusions of money or resources. Expeditions can be sent using ships. These return brief choose-your-own-adventure-style story vignettes, with results that are influenced by the quality of the expedition’s gear and crew, yielding rewards like unique gear or finds. interesting for the buildings of the colony’s museum or zoo.

It is perhaps a bit presumptuous of me to say this, being a Annon neophyte, but Year 1800 structurally feels like an exemplary version of the game type each Annon wants to be: A joyous celebration of the perfect supply chain, expressed as an idealized little city-state purring in a clock’s paradise.

Oddly enough, where I think it falls least is not in the “Annon“part of the title as much as the”1800party. As one astute commentator in my current review has pointed out, the 1800s carried a lot of historical baggage, to downplay things in a pretty gruesome way. ‘much of modern society, that same progress was built on the back of vicious and violent exploitation, whether through institutions like slavery or the whole enterprise of Western colonization and imperialism itself. For better or for worse, Year 1800 chooses to tackle virtually none of this, presenting an idealized and sanitized version of labor relations of that time. What comes closest, mechanically, to a kind of accounting is the decoupling between the happiness of a population and its productivity. You can grow and improve a population as long as their basic needs are met, at the cost of their happiness (if their luxuries are not met). Reduced happiness increases the risk of riots and sabotage, which can be countered with special equipment and buildings like police stations.

Beyond that, Year 1800The whole depiction of the work seems oddly out of step with its historical inspiration. For example, the game has few penalties for keeping extra work idle. You can build a vast excess of housing, have hundreds or even thousands of workers of different categories sitting idle, and as long as their needs are met by the available production facilities, it will have no real impact on happiness or stability. In fact, as long as you can meet needs while preventing maintenance costs from sending your income into the red, building up a vast surplus of magical unemployed and taxpayers is a surprisingly viable lucrative strategy in the early game.

That said, I can’t entirely blame Year 1800feet alone. Questions like that are the very definition of a cultural minefield, after all. “Failing to critically address the legacy of colonialism” is a very common shortcoming among games of this genre, and perhaps most popular culture, to boot. It would be unfair to expect Anna, a game that has never shown a desire for historical accuracy or realism (no one even mentions what country these people are supposed to be from!) to be the one driving this conversation forward, though its conscious omission leaves it a bit incomplete, in the same way that a historical theme park suitable for children may appear to a cynical adult.

A few additional flaws become apparent with longer gaming sessions. The minimap is too small and oddly oriented. Ships move too slowly, even with time compression options. The trade route interface is finicky and error-prone. And it’s weirdly opaque in telling me exactly where my money is coming from or going to, leaving my settlement income subject to weird and unexplained fluctuations in cash flow. These are all minor issues, which could be fixed with a patch, or perhaps an expansion in due course, and they don’t detract from the core experience too much.

This leaves us with Year 1800, a polished city-building game with a deliciously flavorful approach to logistical optimization, a beautiful core aesthetic, and a time-devouring pace. To me, that is worth the cost of a historical anachronism or two.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

source: gameplaytrick.com -

from gameplaytrick.com https://ift.tt/KNFxwHQ
via gameplaytrick.com