Ubisoft recently announced that an expansion to Anno 1404, their acclaimed real-time strategy and simulation game, will be arriving in EMEA (Europe, Middle-East and Africa) territories in February next year, and will this time take players to Venice while adding a much requested online multiplayer mode.

Marketing director of EMEA at Ubisoft, John Parkes said of the expansion: “With Anno 1404 Venice we are proud to bring a whole new dimension to gamers by letting them experience new multiplayer challenges online with their friends.

“We’re confident that this add-on will please fans of the series as well as newcomers to the franchise.”

A list of Anno 1404: Venice’s key features follows below:

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Anno 1404 (aka Dawn of Discovery) is all about building island settlements and strategically managing their economies. It’s also about conjuring up a sense of another era, when time seemed to move slower and everything looked aesthetically pleasing, especially when zoomed in. It’s your very own circa 1404 town, complete with gothic cathedral, cobblestone streets and little 15th century people walking around.

To build a settlement you start with a storehouse on the coast of an island and then place a bunch of peasant houses around a marketplace inland. Pretty soon peasants start moving in, but in order to keep them in your newly established village you will have to feed them. Peasants are rather easy to please so building a fishing hut and connecting it to your storehouse via a road is all you need to keep them fed. The fisherman goes out in a boat and catches some fish, and a little cart from the storehouse goes and collects the fish from his hut and adds it to the stores. The fish kept in stores slowly get eaten by the peasants, so the more peasants you have the more fishermen you’ll need.

Continue reading El33tonline’s review of Anno 1404.