Islands tend to be smaller in the New World, but you’re not really forced to reckon with tropical storms or anything that might fundamentally change how you play a city builder. Aside from the unique resources, building in either zone feels interchangeable. The main differences are some quality-of-life changes made in the future-era Annos that now map onto 1800, plus one key new “blueprinting” feature that I’m really fond of.Īnno 1800 doesn’t have that luxury, limited as it is by the scope of the Victorian Era. Many of these ideas are throwbacks to the colonial Anno 1701 and the like, just moved forward to the Victorian Era.

It’ll be very familiar to Anno veterans, especially those who were around the last time Anno was set in a historical period. And then when it seems like it couldn’t possibly get more complicated, Anno 1800 introduces the New World, a second city that runs parallel to the first and turns out products like rum and coffee that your laborers in the Old World want to purchase. Eventually you’ll turn some of those farmers into workers, and then into artisans, each with different necessities you need to supply-canned food, sewing machines, sausages, and so on. This is the Anno loop, and it only gets more complicated from there. All of these require labor, which means more houses, which means more farmers, which means more potato farms and sheep pens and factories, and so on. The farmers have needs as well, so you build a dock for fishing boats, create a potato farm and a distillery, create pens for sheep and a factory to turn the wool into yarn and then rudimentary clothes. Now you have farmers-but the work doesn’t stop there. To get lumber, you’ll need to manage the “Lumber Production Chain,” first building a lumberjack’s hut to supply logs, then supplementing with a sawmill to turn the logs into usable boards to create houses. You need farmers, which means you need houses for the farmers, which means you need lumber. Instead you are balancing a bunch of resources against the needs of your citizens, or at least attempting to do so. Money isn’t your only constraint, or even your primary constraint. Sure, it looks like a city builder, but it’s more complicated than your average SimCity or Cities: Skylines. IDG / Hayden DingmanĪnd if you like Anno, it still does the Anno thing pretty damn well-which is to say, it’s a game about optimization.

As longtime fans can no doubt surmise from the title, the game is set in the 1800s, the period of the industrial revolution, with distinctly Victorian Era architecture and a focus on factory labor. After two Anno experiments set in the far-flung future, the series returns to its roots as a historical city-builder-slash-strategy game with Anno 1800.

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