Anno 1404 Player Scenarios

A look at Anno 1404 from a beginner's point of view. This is a gameplay example or tutorial, showing beginners by way of a walkthrough how the game is played.

Anno 1404 Player Scenarios Download
Anno 1404 Trainer

A Plan of Action

On a basic level, Anno 1404 is easy to pick up and play. Thankfully, each scenario starts off simply and then grows progressively complex alongside the player’s city. That'll do just fine, thanks! I searched Patches Scrolls for 'Dawn of Discovery' and, having found no results, briefly considered searching for 'Anno 1404' instead (since that was the version I originally played). Talk about a near miss. Thanks for the heads-up. Anno 1602: Creation of a New World, entitled 1602 A.D. In North America, is a 1998 construction and management video game developed by Max Design and published by Sunflowers Interactive.Set in the early modern period, it requires the player to build colonies on small islands and manage resources, exploration, diplomacy and trade. The game design is noteworthy for its attempt to implement a.

Anno, the real-time, city-building strategy series is something of an enigma, to me at least, for reasons that will become apparent.
Firstly, let me preface this review by saying that strategy games have become my favourite genre to spend my time with ever since reaching a semblance of maturity. Their structured and refined systems of progression have provided many, many hours of relaxing and engaging gameplay. On one side of the coin, action titles take a bit more of a mental effort for me to play these days, which is something that cannot be said for a good strategy title which will draw me into months if not sometimes years of interaction. As a result, I have been slowly making my way through the back-catalogue of titles that I missed during my formative gaming years when I was mostly enamoured by James Bond PS2 spin-offs. Games like Alpha Centauri and the original Starcraft are where I have found the most joy, amongst the entire catalogue of Total War games.
Yet, in all this time, Anno has never stood out to me as a series that I would reach anytime soon. This feeling is evoked by the middling reviews and lacklustre appraisals recent titles in the series have received. I even remember feeling quite excited for the release of Anno 2025 back in 2015 after seeing its promotional footage. Yet when the game released, it was a shallower experience than I was looking for and I consequently didn’t take the plunge of purchasing. Afterwards, I shelved any notions of interest for the series at large, believing them to be shallower imitations of greater and grander strategy series like Sid Meier’s Civilisation.
Yet with last month’s re-packaging and re-publishing of Ubisoft’s earliest Anno titles in the Anno History Collection, I reserved my judgement for two main reasons. One, I generally enjoy playing through older titles in strategy game series, something about the design methodology developers had during those times resonate with me more as a player. Secondly, these titles were being released for modern platforms (Steam and Uplay) and would hopefully require as little set-up as possible, a minor foible for playing older games but one I nevertheless appreciate avoiding in remastered editions. So, with this knowledge going, I had decent hopes. And for the most part, those hopes were met.

Years and years.

The history collection is comprised of four titles from the Anno catalogue: Anno 1602, Anno 1503, Anno 1701 and Anno 1404. While not chronological, this is the order in which the titles were originally released. The collection’s advertised improvements cover two main areas: optimisation and stabilisation. Supporting up to 4k resolution, multi-screen support, improved networking for multiplayer sessions as well as including all the bonus content from each game’s DLC collections. The collection delivers upon these improvements but does not address all of the issues one might have covered in a remaster. Now, I cannot speak to the changes from their original condition into these remastered formats, having not played the originals. Yet, I can talk with experience of what I find enjoyable in ‘old’ and ‘new’ strategy games alike.
In essence, Anno 1602 and Anno 1503 are simple experiences of city-building and island expansion without too many peripheral systems on the macro-level of play. Simply build your cities in increasingly harder environments (sparser resources) and repeat. Their visuals, while dated, invoke a great nostalgic appeal and I find this more engaging on a 4k display than I do with the more modern 3D visuals from 1701 and 1404. Notably, their UI has not changed from the original designs, which are outdated in the ease of control and quality of life improvements. To some, this might be an enjoyable scale of authenticity, to me however, it lacks polish. 1503 also includes a horrendous piece of sound design where animals have extremely loud and intrusive audio cues which persist when you hover of them. Upon researching this feature, it was a much disliked quality in that game, so it seems unusual that it was not addressed here in a remaster. Other than that, these games have an extremely engaging gameplay loop, informative tutorials and a pleasing scaling of difficulty in both their campaigns and free-play scenarios. Whilst lacking the bells and whistles of 1701 and 1404, their appeal is solid.
Anno 1701 and Anno 1404 depart from this minimalist strategy routine to provide more of a narrative experience accompanied by its gameplay. Whilst holding onto the core tenants of gameplay established in the previous two titles, they develop upon their foundation by including variable crops, technology trees and greater depth to diplomatic relations and combat. Both are also told with a bit more a historical plot, including cut-scenes and visuals to support the progression of the cities you build as you expand your civilisations. Crusades and adventures to find hidden Aztec treasure give a semblance of momentum to your progression.

Collecting. Dust.

And yet, I cannot help feeling a deeper appreciation for Anno 1602 and Anno 1503. They are helped more by the optimisation and stabilisation of supporting my native resolution in a modern system, lending these games a sense of novelty that I enjoy. Yet with,

1701 and 1404, these games do not boast a greater margin of improvements for not being as ‘outdated’. I cannot help feeling that this collection was not all that necessary and a greater product could have been achieved had say Anno 1503 been solely remastered or remade, where quality of life changes would have made for a truly unique experience amongst the genre of strategy titles. I don’t regret having played any of these games, after all I’ve discovered another strategy title that I do like from a series I had already written off. But will it keep me interested for months hereon or even years?
Probably not.

Anno
Developer(s)	Max Design Related Designs Blue Byte Keen Games Kaiko GmbH
Publisher(s)	Sunflowers Interactive Ubisoft Disney Interactive Studios
Creator(s)	Wilfried Reiter
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows Nintendo DS Wii Web browser Android iOS
First release	Anno 1602 April 1998
Latest release	Anno 1800 16 April 2019

Anno is a real-time strategy, economic simulationvideo game series, conceived in 1998 by Max Design. The series focuses on players establishing colonies on a series of small islands, conducting exploration of the region, diplomacy and trade with other civilisations and traders, while managing resources and engaging in combat both on land and sea. Most games in the series take place during Renaissance and Empire-building historical periods of Earth's history, with cultures, architecture and customs based upon real-life elements from these periods, though in-game civilisations tend to be neutral from exact nations. The more recent titles focused upon future periods of Earth's history around possible 'what if' scenarios based upon current issues.

Each game in the series is mainly a stand-alone title, featuring the same level of reoccurring gameplay mechanics, though with each installment amending existing gameplay mechanics and adding new features, with expansions packs adding in further content. Initial games mainly focused on two modes of gameplay, with players able to operate in single-player or multiplayer over LAN or online connections, while later titles added in a campaign mode of several missions, each featuring their own unique storyline - plots usually focus on players becoming involved in a major incident while beginning life as the ruler of a small island.

While primarily developed for PC, the series has also included a variety of spin-off titles mainly for handheld consoles, which in turn feature more simplified game mechanics to those of the main series. Each title over the series' history has featured a variety of different developers and publishers, with the most recent entries being currently developed by Blue Byte and published by Ubisoft. Most entries in the series have received average reviews from critics. The first title, Anno 1602, was Germany's best-selling computer game of all time as of December 2002, with sales of 2.5 million copies worldwide and 1.7 million in the German market.^[1] Its sequel broke its sales-speed record, becoming Germany's fastest full-price computer game to reach 500,000 domestic sales.^[2] It ultimately sold over one million units in German-speaking countries,^[3] and, when combined with its predecessor, reached 4.5 million sales worldwide by October 2006.^[4]

Titles[edit]

Releases timeline
1999
1998	Anno 1602
2000
2001
2002
2003	Anno 1503
2004
2005
2006	Anno 1701
2007
2008
2009	Anno 1404
2010
2011	Anno 2070
2012
2013
2014
2015	Anno 2205
2016
2017
2018
2019	Anno 1800

Main series[edit]

Title	Year	Developer	Expansion	Notes
Anno 1602: Creation of a New World	1998	Max Design	New Islands, New Adventures (1998) By Royal Command (1998) Im Namen des Königs (1998)	released in the U.S. as 1602 A.D.
Anno 1503: The New World	2003	Max Design	Treasures, Monsters and Pirates (2004)	released in the U.S. as 1503 A.D.: The New World
Anno 1701	2006	Related Designs	The Sunken Dragon (2007)	also marketed as 1701 A.D.
Anno 1404	2009	Related Designs, Blue Byte	Venice (2010)	released in the U.S. as Dawn of Discovery
Anno 2070	2011	Related Designs, Blue Byte	Deep Ocean (2012)
Anno 2205	2015	Blue Byte	Tundra (2016) Orbit (2016) Frontiers (2016)
Anno 1800	2019	Blue Byte	Sunken Treasures (2019) Botanica (2019) The Passage (2019) Seat of Power (2020) Bright Harvest (2020) Land of Lions (2020)

Spin-offs[edit]

Anno 1701: Dawn of Discovery (2007)

A video game for the Nintendo DS, and spin-off of the series.

Anno: Create A New World (2009)

A video game for the Nintendo DS and the Wii, known in North America as Dawn of Discovery.

Anno Online (2013–2018)

A free-to-play browser game (shut down in January 2018).

Anno: Build an Empire (2015)

For Android and iOS platforms.

Anno 2205: Asteroid Miner (2015)

For Android and iOS platforms.

References[edit]