If Elon Musk were to rule a country

If this is your first time hearing about the game, here’s my review on it Anno 1800 Is 90% Off On Steam Gameplay & Review .To put it simply, Anno 1800 is arguably some of the most complex resource management and strategy games I have ever played.

The game expects of you to be balanced in all fonts, not only on the economic but also the way you conduct your people and the way you interact with other players in the game which can be AI or your friends(if you choose the multiplayer) option.

It’s as if, we’re being the president of a country and we have to carefully expand our establishment, managing our reserve funds, ensuring our people are not rioting –yes, there’s even police, and police station in this game. Even more so, we have to carefully manage the relation between each company(country) since in this game, corporatocracy is the government system—Think about VOC or The East-Indies.

On top of rival companies all over the map, there is one common enemy or potential friends/trade partnership, the pirates. They are located on the right corner of the map, roaming around the waters and ready to destroy any ship touching their territory without hesitation.

With such complexities thrown into the game, a mere hour on two isn’t enough to advance from agricultural society to a more advanced society in the game. The first attempt to win the campaign, I was only able to advance through artisan’s tier which is only the 3rd tier among the 5 tiers exist in the campaign.

Now, let me show you the kind of game I play as a noob and my most chaotic 25 hours into this game.

Game Settings

Campaign with settings that you can see below.

My strategy

Since I am mostly still learning about the mechanics of the game, I have tried diverse range of approach to this game.

First, I don’t really expand the settlements too fast. Second, I am building just the necessary needs for the people and to get the goal. Third, I am grinding by using trading ships which will help generate extra income. Last but not least, the quests that can generate from as low as $2000 to a whopping $9000 even just for a simple float picking task.

Even with that strategy, I have still failed securing the firth tier of the game which is investors era. However, today as a mark to complete my 25 Hours into this game, I have figured a way to sell a portion of my island share to the queen. This buy and trade shares can generate a good sum of income.

Being a propagandist

One amusing feature about this game is that they have newspaper. In this newspaper you can have the ability to edit the default news that is generated by the publisher. It will appear as something like this that you can see below.

However, the edit version will have news that encourage people to consume, and distract them from the truth where as you see above, I was in the middle of bankruptcy. So, from other players sometimes my influence point is lessening hence affecting my diplomacy with the other owners in the map.

Being a propagandist isn’t so bad in this game as the people’s productivity and happiness wouldn’t be that affected. However, you have to find out how to avert future issues that may arise due to the lack of funds which hinders your progress in the game and worse, a bankruptcy.

Money is everything

In this game, money is everything. It costs to maintain houses, settlements and public services- it’s like a bucket with so many holes that if you can’t plaster them as quickly as you can, it will just leak everywhere and a fast track to bankruptcy.

That is to say, I probably still need to learn a lot or read of the wiki. I mean, there might be something I have overlooked.

Ever since I purchased this game, I have played 2-3 hours almost every day, trying to get to the 5th tier of the game. I even scribbled on a paper counting how many workers I have to get and how many buildings just so I don’t go bankrupt. Alas! Everything is still in vain :D as I haven’t figured out how to advance to the 4th and 5th tier in this campaign.

If you were myself and has played anno 1800, how would you survive? Or perhaps you would love to join this chaos, thinking about building an imaginary island and a wealthy corporatocracy.