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kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 14, 2019
I know some of you play this, just doesn't seem to be a thread for it yet.
Anno is a series of (I guess) logistics island colonization city-builder games, never touched one before Anno 1800 (technically I booted up Dawn of Discovery that I got real cheap, but I got confused and bored really quick). The basic idea is that you are in a pseudo-historical (everything is history themed, but there's no real countries or maps, just characters suggestive of different cultures) setting where the world is a bunch of archipelagos. Your goal is to make green number go up (or conquer everything) by building up your city. The building and naval combat are shallow as a puddle, but where the game engages is that you simply cannot produce everything you need on one island - not every island produces every crop/mineral - so you have to settle other islands and set up the supply networks to keep them going in order to keep your expansion. It's a very fun game, the Victorian theming of 1800 is only skin-deep but it's graphically beautiful.
I was shocked today to find out - entirely on chance - that it has a first person mode. hold down Control, Shift, and R and you drop down into your world, able to ride any vehicle you come across, with a street view. Now, like a lot of strategy games, the game sort of cheats on its graphics in that it knows that it doesn't need a ton of detail when your perspective is way up in the air, so stuff is blurry and your people have horrible potato face like an early Age of Empires game. But, the environments are incredibly detailed. I was already impressed that the game was full of what I think of as animation "chatter," people walking the streets and doing stuff that isn't literal game mechanics (like how when people wander in Tropico they're actually doing tasks) but adds a lot of visuals. The game also gives you little quests where you basically play Where's Waldo with your city, having to pick out abnormalities (like sheep that have gotten lose in downtown, or an obnoxious drunk), which is a nice way to incentivize the player to take it slow and appreciate the scenery.
But this, when you're on street level you can actually see the stuff people get up to, hear them hold conversations, read advertisements on walls, see the huge variety of shops that are all different permutations of "Worker Residence." It's incredible and I want to see a mode like that in other city-builders and RTS games from now on.
Anno is a series of (I guess) logistics island colonization city-builder games, never touched one before Anno 1800 (technically I booted up Dawn of Discovery that I got real cheap, but I got confused and bored really quick). The basic idea is that you are in a pseudo-historical (everything is history themed, but there's no real countries or maps, just characters suggestive of different cultures) setting where the world is a bunch of archipelagos. Your goal is to make green number go up (or conquer everything) by building up your city. The building and naval combat are shallow as a puddle, but where the game engages is that you simply cannot produce everything you need on one island - not every island produces every crop/mineral - so you have to settle other islands and set up the supply networks to keep them going in order to keep your expansion. It's a very fun game, the Victorian theming of 1800 is only skin-deep but it's graphically beautiful.
I was shocked today to find out - entirely on chance - that it has a first person mode. hold down Control, Shift, and R and you drop down into your world, able to ride any vehicle you come across, with a street view. Now, like a lot of strategy games, the game sort of cheats on its graphics in that it knows that it doesn't need a ton of detail when your perspective is way up in the air, so stuff is blurry and your people have horrible potato face like an early Age of Empires game. But, the environments are incredibly detailed. I was already impressed that the game was full of what I think of as animation "chatter," people walking the streets and doing stuff that isn't literal game mechanics (like how when people wander in Tropico they're actually doing tasks) but adds a lot of visuals. The game also gives you little quests where you basically play Where's Waldo with your city, having to pick out abnormalities (like sheep that have gotten lose in downtown, or an obnoxious drunk), which is a nice way to incentivize the player to take it slow and appreciate the scenery.
But this, when you're on street level you can actually see the stuff people get up to, hear them hold conversations, read advertisements on walls, see the huge variety of shops that are all different permutations of "Worker Residence." It's incredible and I want to see a mode like that in other city-builders and RTS games from now on.