If every three games I overturned an island with, say, double the rice production or found a place that gave my buildings extra efficacy, wouldn’t that be a better encouragement rather than the ‘Oh, there’s the corn and fruit island again. Games like Endless Legend or Civilization V do such a great job with exploration because there’s always the possibility of hitting the geographic jackpot – resource-filled regions that produce the same feelings of need and desire as a clean bathroom after an extra large soda and a three-hour movie.Īnno 2070 provides no such rush. Exploring is only fun if there’s the chance of, y’know, actually discovering something new or unexpected. I can’t help but feel that the developers missed an opportunity here. On occasion, there are little nodes that make an island more or less susceptible to environmental degradation. There’s the one with grapes and sugar beets (for champagne making), the one with rice and tea (usually the starting point), the one with veggies and oil, and a handful of others. The variation in islands is pretty limited.
![anno 2070 items anno 2070 items](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nTDWV0zOCH0/maxresdefault.jpg)
Each island is unique, randomly generated, and will have different resources. The standard medium sized map will have about 12 islands of varying sizes, roughly 6-8 of which will be places one might reasonably consider settling. The maps are filled with multiple, habitable islands. Ohhhh… sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip… The player sails the ocean blue with that bad boy until they find a suitable island to settle on. Once the world has been set up, Anno 2070 drops the player seaside with a central floating base (called an “Ark”) and a tiny boat/shipping/mobile machine gun thingie. There are a few other options at the outset: map size, number/type of NPCs and their difficulty levels. Some have suspected this may be a ham handed way for the developers to preach an environmental message to the audience, but if this is the case, it breaks neither the game nor the immersion. In practice, however, the workarounds for the Ecos simply aren’t onerous enough to preclude playing that way, while the Tycoons have no such salve for their earth-harming ways. However, Tycoons get a massive negative to their ecology for doing so, which lowers the productivity of the land and their people. Tycoons, on the other hand, care not for such things and can just reach into the ground/air/water as necessary. There’s supposed to be a tradeoff between the two: The Ecos must be respectful to the environment, which means they have to choose convoluted routes in order to recover their necessities. If you look online you’ll see that most people are playing the Ecos and there’s a reason for that. Floundering and drowning.įirst, the player chooses a ‘faction’: either the tree hugging Ecos or the coal loving Tycoons. Only fitting, then, that this is a game of pirates and depth. So, welcome to Anno 2070, a future where the ice caps have melted and the world is almost entirely covered in water.
![anno 2070 items anno 2070 items](https://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/anno2070/images/f/fd/ATLANTIS.jpg)
Like SimCity, you have zero control of the people themselves but rather provide buildings and roads to create a functional, aesthetically pleasing place for them to live and grow. Like in Civ, you are given control of a people and tasked with growing them across vast lands in opposition to other peoples while collecting new technologies along the way. The Annos are the stepchildren of two of the most venerable franchises in all gaming: Civilization and SimCity. Related Designs, now known as Blue Byte Mainz, will be responsible for the upcoming Anno 2205.
![anno 2070 items anno 2070 items](https://gamingbolt.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/anno2070_add-on_announcement_screen2.jpg)
![anno 2070 items anno 2070 items](https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/anno2070/images/0/03/Ship_Item.jpg)
But with Anno 2205 on the horizon, it seems like a good time to revisit the most current edition of the Anno series, if anything to help set expectations for the upcoming new game.Īnno 2070 was developed by two German companies: Related Designs and Ubisoft Blue Byte, both under the umbrella of UbiSoft. Anno 2070 isn’t all that recent – it was released in 2011 with an eXpansion, Anno 2070: Deep Ocean, adding to the game in 2012.