ANNO 1701 Demo

Back when islands were just waiting to be discovered and people have yet to reach every corner of the world, life was centered around a few basic needs, most important of which were food and shelter. As civilizations become more and more advanced, people started to want more from their lives and long for slightly more refined things and activities.

ANNO 1701 is a city sim that enables you to observe this transition, by allowing you to lay the foundations of your own settlement and watch it grow as you provide it with everything it needs. In essence, the game is mostly oriented towards the economic aspect, since it emphasizes on the importance of trading goods with other civilizations, as well as your own ability to transport them inside the city from production facilities to the market place.

Although you start with a simple warehouse, the city can be quickly extended by laying a few buildings on the nearby ground. Beside the obligatory houses that shelter your population, the first few types of buildings include the basic resource gathering ones, such as hunting lodges, lumberjack huts and fishing facilities. As your city grows, more and more buildings can be raised, although they do start to require more refined materials.

As previously mentioned, the focus of the gameplay is the economy and your skills when it comes to trading goods with the other AI players available on the map. This is because, regardless how advanced your civilization might be, every island is only fertile for certain kind of crops, while the other cannot be grown at all. Your citizens, however, evolve to have a lot of needs, which means that you have to provide them with what they require by buying it from somewhere else.

Another possibility is to expand and create a colony on one of the unoccupied islands scattered across the map and take advantage of the different type of soils and resources found on them. The downside is that the sea is a dangerous place and pirates can strike when you least expect it. Thus, the trading routes must be carefully guarded with ships of your own, or you can even go after the pirates eliminate their settlement.

ANNO 1701 provides you with a massive amount of gameplay elements that can be the source of countless hours of fun. The large maps are perfect for extended gaming sessions, since you have more than enough places to expand your empire and achieve economic supremacy.