Nerd alert

Okay, I have warned you now. This post will be about computers and games.

Last week I went through the pain of installing Windows 7 on my iMac. Why? Well, because I wanted to play Anno 1404! I am a big fan of Anno 1701 (the predecessor), I played that game for hours at a time. Anno 1404 was released last year, but I never bothered to try it yet. Now that I installed Windows 7 and have the time for it, I actually bought the game + the add-on. Yes yes, no pirating here.

Anno 1404 is a game that I like because the focus is on trading, economy, building. There are some elements of war in it, but if you don’t want to fight, you don’t have to (as long as you don’t play a scenario).

The centre of your town are, of course, the peasants. They live in houses, around a marketplace. The peasants can advance to the next level if they have certain needs fulfilled. In the beginning those needs are quite simple: fish, cider, a church. But once the peasants advance to the next level of citizens they need more: clothing, bread, beer. Beyond the level of citizens the game gets really complicated. The next levels ‘patricians’ and ‘noblemen’ have so called sophisticated taste. They require wine, leather jerkins, furs, books, a big church, a tavern and lots more.

A beginning settlement

When your town reaches the level of citizens/patricians, it attracts beggars! If you refuse the beggars to enter your town your citizens will pay you gold. However, the beggars might return as bandits. This happened to me in my last game. I had abundant recourses though, so I just built a keep and let it fight the beggars.

The keep fighting the beggars

In order to acquire all the goods your people need you have to build production chains. For fishes, it’s only one building: a fisherman’s hut. But in order to get wine, for example, you need: wood, iron, an iron smelter (which needs coal in turn). From that you have to make barrels at a barrel factory; you need vineyards and wine presses. You can’t make that on one island. So at first you have to colonize more islands. Grapes can’t grow on every island, only some have the required fertility. You see, it’s quite complicated!

New in Anno 1404 is that you can also build oriental stuff. You even háve to build oriental towns, because only when you have a few hundred oriental nomads you are able to build indigo farms, which you need to produce books. The nomads, in turn, have needs of their own. They don’t eat fish and they don’t drink cider. They eat dates and they drink goat milk. Also, they don’t pray in a church, they want a mosque! In order to build the mosque you have to get mosaics. For mosaics you need a quartz mine and clay….

All in all, you are constantly busy attending to all the needs of your citizens ánd nomads.

All the stuff you produce you have to get to and from islands by using ships. You can set up trading routes. I always try to set up the most efficient ones, but I don’t think I succeed! This game is really quite complicated, but that’s what I like about it. You are constantly pondering about how to get these and those goods, to sell goods you have plenty of, to expand your city. But when you expand your city you need more food and products….Ahh, it never ends!

A town with noblemen houses