Challanging and fun building game. Settle on an island produce goods and grow a big city. Great music and the art ist still nice to watch even in a low resolution. This one aged very well and is as much fun as it was years ago.
Despite others seem to have problems to play the game on windows 10 in 2021, for me the game works with Win 10 Version 10.0.2.1000.
First of all the Anno series is amazing and each game in it is worth playing, in my opinion.
1503 in particular is a complex city builder that feels ahead of its time in many ways. Keep in mind that like the rest of the series its more about building and managing the economy than warfare which is kind of basic.
There is GameRanger and the Annoverse Discord, where you have good chances of finding people to play multiplayer even now.
I would recommend getting the GOG version, only if you care about it being DRM-Free.
For anyone else who wants to play the best version of this game, currently I sadly have to recommend the Anno: History Collection (A:HC) from the Ubisoft store which includes 1602, 1503, 1701 and 1404 with many worthwhile updates:
- Support for up to 4K resolution with UI that works (the HD patch mod is a nice try, but can't keep up with this)
-64-bit support for support of modern systems (feels less janky than the original)
- Working friend system for easily creating and joining games (much easier than using GameRanger, Radmin VPN, Hamachi, etc.) and a low chance of finding public games
- The people on AnnoVerse usully play the History Collection version of the older Anno Games, good luck finding people elsewhere (it did work once over gameranger)
I am disappointed that Ubisoft didn't release the History Collection as an update to GOG and split the already small player base, but if you want to play the best old Anno games, you can get A:HC from a cheap game key website for ~10€. I will definitely wait for a deep discount on Anno 1800.
Very good game! much more complicated than others from this series.
Here is link to hd patch:
https://chomikuj.pl/quabe/ANNO1503+HD+PATCH
To install it copy the file into main game folder than set resolution to max. (resolution will change only in game not in menu) resolution will be set to 1600x900 enjoy!
You can keep original file if you wanna.
All credits to german community members for this one!
The game itself is an absolute classic. But it won't work under Windows 10 no more and I played it alot with that OS. I haven't played in a while, wanted to get into it again but during the loading screen, the game turns black, you hear the music for one second and then it crashes back to Windows.
Please gog, try to do something about that! It WAS playable under Win10 once!
There is a lot of depth to this game. Or at least it seems. I've always been looking for a game that balances RTS combat with resource management/city building. This is a perfect fit. Seems to lack nothing. My only complaint would be that the UI is a bit complex but honestly it's not that bad.
Has a lot of variety and your city develops if you manage it well. It's very visually appealing too, I prefer the 2D isomorphic visuals over 3D visuals in games like this, I wish they still used this visual style. I highly recommend this game.