Dawn of Discovery(Anno 1404)

The Game Room
1

SO I picked up this game. I loved the Settlers series, so I decided to try this one by UBIsoft.

It’s an interesting city building game. Fairly like the Settlers with resource management, with an added complexity of urban planning like the Pharaoh series where you have to carefully build blocks to get the right influences overlapped so your citizens upgrade effectively. Some exploration, but largely simplified you find an entire island at once and see what resources it offers right off the bat.

I’ve started on the campaign, which is basically a tutorial slowing adding in more and more complexity. But man it takes a while. Each chapter takes like 3 hours, and I can tell there is a lot more of the game to go, so it is gonna take a while till I see everything. (barely started sea battle, no land battles yet, but it is about the right level of battle detail for me, I’m not a huge fan of micromanaged battles.)

My only complaint is that the tutorial seems to be going very slow, and there are bugs in the scripting. It tells me to do something, that I can’t do, so I have to go back to resaves guessing at what I missed until I get it. And the Manual is horrible. It doesn’t really give any info, some of which is pretty important. I’m very familiar with resource/city building games and I’m having a few issues figuring things out, It must really be impossible for a newbie to the genre.

Anybody else checking it out?

2

I picked it up late last week off of Steam. I’m probably on the 4th or 5th ‘mission’. Each of those have a number of submissions to achieve and take a few hours each. it plays much more as a City Builder than an exploration game. As you said, more like Caesar or Pharaoh. There seem to be 6 or 7 levels of development for the populace. So far, I’ve only gotten up to the 4th tier.

I’m still feeling my way around for the right mix of resources to industry to population. It’s not very intuitive how much of A you need in order to adequately supply B.

The actually layout process is pretty easy though. I don’t seem to run into the problems with market walkers or anything. That may change later, but it’s not an issue for the moment. If a house is inside the radius of the market, it’s taken care of. Which is good.

The exploration part is an interesting twist. Not very challenging, as you discovered. If you see an island from your boat, you generally get a map of it’s interior.

Combat is interesting. So far, I’ve only gone through one battle. It was easy to win with some simple preparation. Actually Simple is a good word for the entire system. It works out like an simplistic RTS. Not bad for a city builder, really.

All and all I really enjoyed it so far. Sadly, it left me with the urge to play Civilization. IV. Which means I’ll be playing Civ IV for a few weeks before I come back around to it again