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.

Pretty soon the peasants will need something to drink and their religious needs taken care of too, so you build cider farms and a church for them. Once there are enough peasants some of the houses that have all their needs met will spontaneously upgrade to citizen residences. This opens up a whole new set of buildings to build such as a weaver’s hut, a stonemason and a toolmaker’s workshop. If you grow your town big enough and meet the needs of your citizens (who are a bit more demanding than peasants), then they will be promoted to patricians, opening up another host of buildings to build. The final promotion is to that of a nobleman, again with the corresponding new building options.

Minimal Micro-management

The economy in the game is incredibly detailed. Fortunately the campaign game eases you in at first, allowing you to figure out the basic concepts within a small subset of buildings before unleashing the dozens of buildings and interactions on you later. Despite the detail of different raw materials, intermediate materials and output products there is very little micro-management needed – you can generally set up a set of buildings that supply one another and let them run on their own, filling your storehouse up automatically. You do have to intervene if, for example, you realize that your town is now too big to be adequately supplied by just one cider farm or one beer brewer. In this case you simply build another one, and possibly a wheat and herb farm to supply the brewer, and you’re done – crisis averted!

You might also have to make some adjustments to things to make sure you’re getting in enough gold, but these are macro-decisions – for the most part you’re not embroiled in the day to day economy. You will, however, need to set up strategic trade routes with your outposts. Each island is only fertile in a certain set of crops, so it’s possible that your starting island can’t grow cider and you must find more apple-friendly fields elsewhere. To do you this you load up a ship with enough wood, stone and tools to build a new storehouse and send it off. Upon arrival a quick click creates you a new settlement, and you can immediately build the required producer, link it to a market via a road, link the market to your storehouse and then set up a trade route that picks up the goods from your new colony and drops it off at your home town for your thirsty peasants to drink. All this is done with some elegantly designed menus (the trade route screen is particularly well designed) and a few mouse clicks, with no further intervention required.

The Waiting game

While there is always something to do in the way of improving your towns or accomplishing some quest (if you’re playing the campaign) there is also quite a bit of waiting around for things to happen. If you need to build a debtor’s prison (patrician’s have need of these, who would have thought?) for example, you will need 60 tons of stone, and unless you’ve been avoiding all forms of stone buildings you’ll find that this means waiting and patiently watching the little stone mason chip stone off the quarry, carry it to his hut and walk back to the quarry while the little wagon-man comes out of the storehouse, pulls his wagon along the road to the stone-mason’s hut, puts the piece of stone on it and pulls it back to the storehouse. 60 times. It’s a fascinating little eco-system, but watching it can get a little tiresome.

Fortunately there are other things to do in the meantime, like optimize the placement of your new tavern to ensure that the most number of citizens are within its realm of influence (a very necessary influence if you want your citizens to be promoted to patrician). It seems that alcohol is the primary driver of social upliftment in 1404. But after building the tavern, along with a new chapel (also fundamental in social climbing), you realise you’ve used up what stone you did have and you still have to wait for your mason to chip 60 pieces of stone and your wagoneer to carry them one by one to the storehouse. Fortunately there are almost never any real time pressures in Anno 1404, so you’re free to take as long as you like on things.

But in real life I’m time-constrained so I am a big fan of the time-speed-up button. Hold + down and time goes much faster. I would really like another button to make it go even faster so that waiting for my salt-mine and charcoal-burner’s hut to supply my salt works with brine and coal so that it can produce salt to supply my tannery along with animal hides from my pig farm so that I can produce leather jerkins for my very demanding patricians in order to make sure they are adequately clothed so they can become well-dressed noblemen so that I can build war machines to help with the war effort doesn’t take quite so long.

I haven’t even mentioned the Orient yet. The campaign game is told in lovely moving paintings before each mission and scripted events that take place while you’re forging your island dwellings. It follows a story involving the apparently bad Christians (although it turns out to be a bad apple in the Church, in case you take offense at these things) fighting the good Arabs. Combat is naval-only and very basic. It can also be almost completely ignored in favour of doing more interesting things like making sure your hemp plantations are functioning at 100%.

Because of the obvious injustice of the Crusade (which is clearly not supported by the noble emperor) you side with the sheiks and as you earn their trust they allow you to build Nomad buildings on nearby desert islands which can be made as green as golf courses by building a Noria, a building that looks a bit like a donkey walking around in a circle. It’s clear any attempt at historic or geographic integrity has been vehemently rejected in the interests of fun game mechanics. Not that I’m complaining, I wouldn’t have it any other way. In fact, I would love to see a science fiction equivalent, say an Anno 2100, where you’re trading amazing alien goods for iPods and Nintendo DS’s (because those will still be around in 2100). I would love to see that tech tree.

Anno 1404 is an incredibly compelling and rich strategy game that is a joy to play and, as is often the case, to watch. The beautiful graphics (including super-zoomed-in mode) bring the evocative period covered, including both Notre-Dame-styled cathedrals and Islamic mosques, to life, while the campaign story keeps you doing things and helps you to learn the building and goods interactions. It might be a little overwhelming for some in its detail, but this same detail keeps it interesting for longer than expected. It is a slow-paced affair for whiling away hours relaxing in the presence of the tinkering of mason-hammers and the pealing of cathedral bells while you construct the perfect 1404 economy.

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