Despite such surface complexity, it's a reasonably relaxed affair – as much about the gentle joy of building a beautiful city as it is about the challenges of managing a medieval economy. Anno 1404 is halfway between Age of Empires and Theme Park – construction, economy and people-management blended into one game. Everyone wants sufficient food, creature comforts and entertainment and, if you've scrimped on any of that because you want to build a whopping great Sultan's Mosque as soon as possible, your little world will quickly fall apart. Bigger populations mean access to more grandiose resources and buildings, but they're trickier to manage. There's also the option to play back in the West, carpeting the land with more familiar grey 'n' gothic structures and denizens with less oddball requirements.
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YES NO You'll need to get along with your neighbours to access all of this, and also to learn how to irrigate the bone-dry deserts you'll sometimes be building upon.
They're particularly fond of a cup of oatmilk over there, it seems. The shift from the West to the East means you're farming some unusual stuff to achieve this – pearls, coffee and almonds. It's about checks and balances, the desire to spend and expand tempered by the need to keep your populace happy and the coffers full. As with the other Annos, you start off small – a couple of peasant shacks and a town square – and gradually build up to a sprawling olde worlde metropolis, where every building has a distinct purpose. This time it's the Orient, a cue for the game's absurdly pretty gameworld. The Annos – so far we've also had 1602, 15 - are games of building, trading and chopping an awful lot of wood in various locales and eras of the world. Anno 1404 might have set its sights square on the mainstream, but don't expect rivers of blood. Quite naturally, the plan is to make the game itself a strategy barnstormer - in a very genteel way, at least.
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Anno might just be the least-memorably named series in all of gamingdom - so much so that the US version sensibly calls itself Dawn of Discovery.