Anno 1404: Gold Edition

I adore this game, to the point where I almost dare not open it as I will lose days of my life being absorbed into it! If you are someone who likes systems, economies, micro management, tinkering... this game is your dream. The in game economy is wonderfully complex but also it makes sense. Of course your richer inhabitants are going to want nicer products, and with affluence they want items from abroad. But abroad means longer shipping lines, and more complexity - and what if a pirate interferes and blows up your shipping lines? But you are also building, ultimately, and you get a real sense of your community you are creating than games such as Sim City. It's great as you colonise more islands and really see your world grow. The enemy characters are fun, and full of character - even if they can be maddening with their ability to turn on you at a moment's notice. My only grumble is that the game does cheat. You can isolate an enemy's island and destroy their storage, so you know they can only have a finite resource of something. But they can keep on churning out ships indefinitely. This is frustrating when you want to bring a game to a conclusion as it just protracts things. But that one grumble is nothing to dissuade me from saying this is one of the finest games ever.

I occassionally enjoy a city builder and this is by far the best I've played and I'm glad this masterpiece is DRM-free and free from Ubisoft's invasive meddling. You shouldn't go into this game thinking "I'm just going to beat the campaign" which actually serves to be more like a very lengthy tutorial in my eyes simply because the amount of content in this game is just massive. The biggest strength for me is the custom mode where you can pretty much make it as easy or as difficult as you want for yourself. Pretty much every setting you want to customize is available to you leaving you free to play the game however you want. You can even turn off enemies if you like, to purely focus on developing your settlements for that calm Zen experience. Absolute must have for city builder fans!

Да, отличная игра. Жаль, нет русского языка.

Parts of this game are fantastic. City building, resource and economic management, planning elements are sensible and challenging enough to make it fun. On the adventure side, there is world exploration, side quests, diplomacy, pirates, potentially hostile npc's, gear upgrades, etc. All cool elements of the game. Parts of the game are middling to downright lame. No manual. I repeat, no manual. I played several dozen hours before realizing or stumbling onto things that completely changed the nature of the game. Needs a thorough manual. To be clear, not a player made user's guide, not a bare bones "get going" card, a manual. A manual written by people with good grammar and who have developed or played a part in the making and playing of the game. Now that that's over, I have a knock knock joke. Knock knock, who's there? A manual. For a game built on either diplomacy or beligerence, both the sea battles and diplomacy options are pretty bare bones and uninteresting. I mean, you have as many options for choosing what direction a house faces as you do in diplomatic menus. That seems like a dubious weighting of player interaction with the game. Placing builidings and roads can be frustrating and time consuming. Time consumption laying roads and placing buildings in a real time strategy game is not good. And it's such a basic consideration in game design it seems like a rookie mistake. The game also becomes predictable and grindy. At what point that happens to various players is different. So it's not a killer that the game eventually becomes boring if it happens late in the cycle and you've got your 15 bucks worth. This is a GOG rebuild though, so who knows what truly goes back on the devs and what goes to GOG. As always, thanks to those who worked hard to bring us this and other games.

This Game is probably the best in its genre even 8 years later. By using wine and lutris i managed to get it to work on Linux perfectly