Game 85 - Anno 2070 - Week 167 - March 23

nno 2070 is a game that has been on my radar for almost 10 years. I picked it up while at uni and played a little with an old friend Brenden but never came back to it. 55 hours later I can see this game is addictive AF. The premise is quite simple: Due to climate change sea levels have risen and much of previously inhabited land masses have flooded. With the new waters and volcanic reactions new land has developed and as a ARK agent you need to find new lands to inhabit to help relocate humans as the pressure for land and resources continues to rise. Gives the game a sci-fi Atlantis vibe that reminds me of BioShock in it’s own way (oh god that’d be an amazing game). Putting yourself in the mindset of these people also adds an extra level of pressure to the cause when disaster strikes. There are three main factions in the world (or at least this part of it) competing for your attention. The right-wing Tycoon’s who are business production and pay high taxes, the left-wing Eco’s who have pollution reduction tech and the moderate Tech’s who are focused on researching new technologies.  

Speaking of managing disasters, the campaign is fun and serves as a great tutorial and it’s well paced. A stark contrast to the previous city-builder sim Railroad Tycoon 3. But it’s also full of drama and catastrophe in a drowning world. You own a mobile base of operations designed to be a response unit for struggling new coastal cities. Your first “superior” Thor Strindberg is a condescending prick. So when he !@#$s up a dam and floods a city, it's all the more gratifying when you come in to clean up his mess. Earning the praise from Mr. Thorne and the corporation.

That was part 1 of the campaign, the rest of the story is pretty run of the mill. F.A.T.H.E.R. is executed well as an AI overlord, but inevitably he goes rogue spreading viruses and nuking islands. So it’s up to you to establish a dominant island and unite the other factions against him by gathering evidence. At the end of the day its only function is a tutorial and this is the best to piecemeal the player different mechanics. Even if some of them aren’t very well explained – like being able to build certain structures on open water, faction buildings requiring certain works, homes being your income source (so go nuts) or eco workers increasing your max fleet cap – it’s still a great way to introduce gameplay. Also about the Tycoons giving you smack talk at the start, Yana and the Ecos aren’t much better. After helping them clean up oil spills, smog, many many natural disasters and cleaning up nuclear fallout! What’s my reward you ask? “The organisation still doesn’t trust you…” WTF get that shit outta here. Jokes aside I do like how the cities carry over between missions. It’s a unique take on a campaign compared to the one and done missions such as Startcraft who often want to move you to different interesting maps. It’d be cool to see more campaign maps that evolve over time as you go through the story, perhaps unravelling over years in a medieval city builder like Stronghold.

Art wise this is a beautiful game with a lot of detail. Especially when you get your island cities humming and see all your “children” roaming around. Zooming in will show citizens going about daily life, flying cars to work and walking prams into the heavily polluted and “safe” industrial area (lol). At first I thought moving the hero unit around would get old fast but then I realised this was just a regular unit and can be destroyed and replaced. Soloing a single unit was mostly for the story and tutorial to get you use to moving. Your navy is made up of many ships as your main mode of transport. Part of the strategy is managing different islands via cargo trade routes as they all have a limited amount of resources that must export to another. Typically I’d choose the biggest city for my island and have a few production islands around this. Battleships and Cruisers are cool especially when you get a fleet going but it’s the cargo ships and submarines that really makes these units shine. The game truly shines when it opens up between multiple islands (your own, allies and enemies) this because a much more fun feature to manage trade routes and build warships that can defend themselves. Although combat is quite limited at first and reminds me of F2P web browser resource management games like Vega Conflict it has some depth to it when you start to develop your tech workers and discover EMPs, cloaking tech, shields and even nuclear missiles. Not only is it cool to sink enemy fleets but if you have the Tech faction unlocked you can explore the depths and build underwater bases. The game already felt unique with it’s hydro-focus planet, then it (almost) went full Rapture. Sadly these buildings are industrial only so no underwater living quarters (sorry Andrew Ryan). While it is awesome to see the underwater remnants from the lost civilisations of today’s world it would have been cooler yet if you could repurpose these and build a true underwater city with all the risks that would entail.

The focus for most of the game is economic management and how that servers your growing cities. The progression loop is as follows:

• Choose eco or tycoon
• Settle an island
• Build housing and foster immigration
• Extract natural resources
• Build factories & farms
• Satisfy citizens desires & upgrade housing
• Unlock a new buildings from upgraded housing and skilled immigration
• Repeat the above
• Plus some trade routes to synergise differing resources between islands
• Eventually unlock tech, repeat above
• Eventually unlock eco/tycoon (that you didn’t choose), repeat above

It can be stressful at times to manage so many resources but once you do you can appreciate the joys of  running an efficient city, then sit back and watch your island paradise flourish. Especially when you zoom in and look at the flying cars move from the upgraded glass towers at the centre of your megacity, off to the worker residences i.e. the suburbs. The civilised ecosystem is an absolute joy to behold and much of it is automatic and melds together so organically. 

My pride and joy (pre-typhoon)

Industrial area keeps the main city alive and running. 

Each faction has their own requirements which I like – Eco’s like sushi and Tycoon’s like hamburgers. One likes technology and the other likes jewellery. One likes classical amphitheatres and the other likes casinos… you get the idea. What I find interesting about the Triumvirate is that the most efficient way to run a society is in harmony, not competing. Eco’s are effective at agriculture and anti-pollution, while Tycoon’s are more productive and produce more income. The Ecos can build wind farms and generators that are more effective in population centres, which are more environmentally friendly than the Tycoon’s coal. While the Tycoon’s can build trash compactors, also effective in population centres to bring up the Eco cities Ecobalance. The tech's can use their technology to enhance various areas of both groups. The synergy is best through balanced cooperation – just as it is in real life. With that in mind I realised it might not be the best idea to build them on opposite ends of the island like I did in the finale of the campaign. So in the next scenario I tried creating a coexisting city. Only problem with that is they both enjoy different activities (even when you get your headquarters). So I think its best to have cities with eco/tycoon districts or just keep them separate. Maybe I could try same city but Tycoons in the CBD and Eco at the edge towards forest and parklands? That’d make the most thematic sense. I also enjoyed building a beautiful parkland but no one used it. Would be cool to have stuff like this not only add eco balance (more trees) but provide points of interest that citizens would stroll down, have picnics, etc. Perhaps the fountains could be this? Also I wish there was an easier way to manage income. It’s so hard to see what costs what. Everything else has a strategy map to oversee your cities – why doesn’t this? A balance sheet or heatmap – something, anything. Like I didn’t know fountains cost -30 income to maintain jesus… Eventually you figure out what costs what but the game doesn’t do a very good job explaining taxes and income.

No one used my beautiful parks :(

At the end of the day this is a world very much still suffering from climate change and you will be struck with typhoons and the black sea (mass oil spills). The game has a pollution mechanic and I’m still unsure if this causes those events or they’re completely random. In one instance a typhoon tore through my beautiful capital metropolis, destroying skyscrapers before ending at my power grid. It wiped out my nuclear power and then of course I ran out of uranium. The mass power crisis that ensued caused years of protests and emigration from the island. I still haven’t recovered in that play through going from a humming 3k in credits per turn and 600k in surplus to a measly 150k in surplus and a few hundred credits per turn. Events like this have a cascading effect – destroying your production and thus exports to other islands. Luckily I had a surplus of credits in this playthrough but I could very much see myself forgetting to setup firestations or a hospital only to lose a cities production – which in turn disrupts an export and causes another city to become increasingly dissatisfied and leave the island because they have no food or drink. Centralising your population on one island is good if the maps islands allow for it but it also puts those cities at risk during natural disasters! There is a lot to weigh up, balance and adapt to in this game – just as you’d expect in when your mission is to turn a flooded dystopia into a tropical utopia.

Lastly it’s worth mentioning that the menu is pretty rad. The first RTS where I’ve created an avatar and the main menu has acted as my “world overview”. I just wish it fully committed by letting me customize my avatar and arc instead of recycling assets from the campaign where I’ll see my character in the wild. From the menu or my ARK control panel I can launch:

• Campaign – basically the tutorial
• Single Missions – different scenarios and missions 
• World Events – single missions towards a global objective. Helps make the world feel more alive.
• Continuous – ongoing game where you can build up your city. Each difficulty is essentially its own mode with easy being free build, medium being normal and hard adding an extra layer of difficulty.
• Multiplayer – above but with friends.

The campaign was quite long and after playing it felt like I experienced everything I could. If the game had more indepth underwater cities for the tech faction (hell make them their own starting faction if there’s ever an Anno 2080) I’d stay for sure. I might go back and play if I get the itch for Anno again. I’d like to see the final tiers of all three factions all upgraded in one campaign, working together and in harmony and perhaps research everything… which will require a continuous campaign of 30+ hours. But after doing a full Tycoon and Eco playthrough to the final tier I feel satisfied in putting this game to rest. I have to say, it’s certainly peaked my interest for other games in the series such as Anno 1800; which has very positive reviews!