Anno 1800

About the Game

To progress you need to grow your population and keep your citizens happy. The latter is achieved differently for each type of people: for instance, farmers subsist on fish and clothing, but are made content with alcohol. Happiness causes the population to grow – um… as in real life, perhaps? – and once a farmstead is filled up, the building can be upgraded into workers’ accommodations.

Each class of people brings their own demands, and also their own benefits: so you must balance their needs against the value they have to your society. Just as in life, the more complex the building, the more items are needed in order to craft resources and the more workers are required to run them. Large factories can require hundreds of workers, all demanding, food, clothing and soap along with housing

The Old and the New

The game is divided into the ‘Old World’ and the ‘New World’ and you have to play on both maps, colonising and growing raw materials on one hand and manufacturing and distributing on the other, in order to maintain supply lines and manufacturing capacity. This is where the game can get very interesting in multiplayer mode, as a raid in the New World can bankrupt your Old World factory by cutting off a vital line of supply.

Blueprint to Success

One new feature in this version of Anno is the ability to use blueprints to help lay out the city. When planning your city, bear in mind that factories and industrialisation take away aesthetics (which puts off tourists), even as they creating valuable resources. Use the blueprint to balance your cities, aiming to achieve the best of all worlds.

Blueprint mode also allows you to block out buildings that you don’t yet have the resources to build. Once the resources are available, the construction can be completed with a single click.

In between building your city, you might run out of resources and find that you need to wage war to seize assets or land to boost your infrastructure and keep your people happy. You can battle for the assets, or you can work some financial wizardry and stage a takeover, seizing control of factories, islands or cities, for your own purposes.

Ways to play

• Story Campaign

Follow the suggestions of the AI characters to play around the map, gathering crates and fulfilling missions. As you play, you will find yourself becoming busier and busier as your territories expand: your populations boom and you find you need more and more resources to run your growing settlement.

• Sandbox mode

Go off and explore the islands and lands on your own, seeing what there is to see and only accepting whatever missions take your fancy. This is a slower way of playing, and one that might suit someone who likes to meander along in a game, exploring every nook and islet to see what might be there. It is a great way to stumble across unexpected valuables, so be sure to take notes for when you decide to play in earnest!

• Multiplayer mode

Team up with friends or battle it out to score the best resources and grab goodies from under other players’ noses. The game can get very exciting as you have to divide your time between the two worlds, keeping your characters happy and productive and making sure that other players haven’t swiped your best assets for themselves.

Be warned – whichever mode you choose to play in, you will spend more time on it than you plan to!