YMMV / Anno Domini

• Aluminium Christmas Trees: Due to being set during the Industrial Revolution, 1800 shows off more than one thing about the 19th century most people would not expect.
  • The first modern battleships - complete with artillery-style cannon turrets - saw first appearance in the early 1890s. Although HMS Dreadnought (launched in 1906) lent the name to the first of the modern-style battleships. She was more the perfection of an ongoing ship design race than something entirely new.
  • Though the short range of power lines seems like a gameplay limitation. Electrical transmission just didn't have much reach until a practical method of alternating current took hold in the 1890s.
  • Electric vehicles saw considerable popularity in the late 19th century (if you had the money). In fact until an oil boom in the early 20th century sent oil prices through the floor, it was more practical to power a car on electricity than petroleum.
  • Airships were more than just a novelty. There was some serious interest in using them for cross-continental travel in the second half of the 19th century. Later models even featured electric motors for the propellers.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Battlecruisers in 1800. Being steamships, these modern dreadnoughts aren't affected by the direction of the wind, they also have a lot of health, you even get an achievement for building your first one. At release however, a lone battlecruiser could be outmatched by a pair of ships of the line, which by that point in the game almost replace the cheaper frigate. Coupled with requiring generous quantities of two of the more complex production chains as well as electricity (requiring oil) and a steamship drydock operated by tier 4 citizens to build, many players chose to stick with having fleets of sailships well into the endgame. Patch 2 gave them a considerable buff in health and firepower but they remain very expensive to build.
• Breather Level: The seventh mission of the campaign in 1404. After fighting for your life repelling Cardinal Lucius' attacks on your island you get a peaceful mission focused on building up an oriental town and going around doing quests.
• Fan Nickname: Due to his constant mention of gas and his own bowels, Sir Archibald Blake, ambassador and confidant to the Queen is affectionately known in the community as "Farty."
• Game-Breaker: The Orbit expansion pack for 2205 offers some extremely powerful abilities once the eponymous space station is up and running.
  • Economically, tier 2 provides up to six abilities that let advanced production facilities consume different input resources, usually from tier 1 instead of tier 3 or higher (for instance, instead of supplying huge cattle farms with soy beans to get beef for luxury food, all it takes is the cheap and abundant rice (the basic tier 1 foodstuff) and wine, which you need anyway). It's hard to overstate how much of a relief this puts on many supply lines, not least of all because the tier 1 buildings tend to have much smaller footprints - a godsend in a game with limited building space.
  • Militarily, allocating expertise to the (also) tier 2 military abilities turns any crisis intervention mission on any difficulty into a cakewalk. We're talking stuff like "cut the fuel cost of making your ships temporarily invincible by half", "turn the Missile Barrage ability into a WMD-level Kill Sat", or "call in allied ships that provide constant healing for free in a considerable radius for the entire mission".
  • In 1404, Norias. Because Norias with overlapping areas stack, with proper placement, you can have production buildings running at 100% efficiency when by all logic, they shouldn't. Examples include 8 lumberjack huts clustered around a single market building and production buildings like rose nurseries or vineyards using just 1 field rather than 6 or 5 respectively. And that's before you get into using large Norias...
• Memetic Mutation: With the revamp of the Anno Union with 1800, the community has been more integrated than ever. Leading to quite a few of these to crop up.
  • The extremely high consumption rates of various goods.
  • Bente Jorgensen obsessing about butterflies.
  • "Can we grow coffee there?" on any newly revealed zone.
  • "Cigars: Not food, but still nutritious."
  • Hugo Mercier being a Communist.^note A lot of the practical points of Mercia's philosophy echo more than a few popular aspects of Communism (specifically Marxism-Leninism). Such as a rejection of "bourgeois" habits, the disdain for organised religion, a narrative of popular revolution. With the abundant use of "people's red" as the cherry on top. Mercier even started out as a student protester.
• Memetic Psychopath: Some players have found Bente to be quite aggressive and dangerous despite being one of the "easy" difficulty rivals. As a result, there's a theory she's actually an evil mastermind.
• Running Gag: Every single entry in the series is a four-number date that when added together come to the value of 9.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: 2205 is significantly more forgiving than any other title that came before. Even the most advanced production chains are easy to set up and balance, naval combat only happens on separate maps that don't affect your territory at all^note the Frontiers DLC introduced the option to have hostile fleets invade your sectors from time to time, but that can be turned off entirely if you don't want it, natural resources are infinite, citizens never riot, natural disasters don't exist^note in the base game at least, and there's no meaningful competition with AI players whatsoever. It's just you, your exceedingly well-behaved settlers, and vast stretches of beautiful nature just waiting to share their wealth with you.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: After the drastically simplified mechanics introduced in 2205, the franchise returned to older features in 1800 with several additions that upped the challenge of running a successful city even further: You can no longer set the tax rates of your citizens, all production buildings now need citizens to actually operate them, factories could have some positively enormous blueprints compared to before, the introduction of electricity and oil, service buildings like hospitals and fire stations needing time to set themselves up, wind direction influencing the speed of sail ships and the risk of buildings exploding. Combined these new features easily make 1800 A.D. one of the most challenging entries in the series.
• That One Sidequest: The Madrigal Islands sector project in 2205 is just plain insane. Stage 1 includes maintaining a population of 50,000 Executives in a sector with barely any useful building space. Stage 2 requires maintaining an energy surplus of 200,000. For comparison: lunar fusion reactors, by far the most powerful energy sources in the game, produce ~17,500 power when fully upgraded, which is enough to supply an entire sector populated by 250,000 people. They're also the second-most expensive building in the game in terms of both cash and construction materials, and you'll need at least 12 of them to meet the demand, so their combined upkeep will bankrupt all but the wealthiest players. Finally, Stage 3 demands a surplus of 200 lunar Bio Enhancers; even the largest city never consumes more than 20-25 units of this resource, and the whole project is merely about reactivating an abandoned spaceport. To top it off, finalizing each stage requires huge amounts of graphene, with Stage 3 alone weighing in at a ludicrous 999 units (normal monument construction costs 50-100 units apiece). Well, and if you manage to get all of this done somehow, you get... three additional world market trade routes, which is arguably the most superfluous game mechanic to begin with. Yay...
• Tough Act to Follow: With or without the controversial design decisions made for 2205, following on from the success of Anno 2070 was no easy task. The first future-era setting of the series, the myriad of new features it brought along, the variety between factions, and the Deep Ocean DLC being widely-praised for greatly expanding the Tech faction, all with every corner positively dripping with atmosphere. Just creating something anywhere close to 2070's level was a tall order.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Building tooltips in 2205 showed exactly which amount of which resource was consumed to produce how much of another resource, and almost all production steps worked in even multiples (e.g. 2x A —> 1x B). It also displayed the exact values of production and consumption, making it easy to gauge your economy at a glance. 1800 ditched this very convenient system for some obscure reason and went with showing each building's production time per unit instead, which is noticeably less convenient. Worse, however, is the return to the old "trend system" for the warehouses where you aren't given absolute numbers, only an indicator of whether your inventory has been filling up or emptying recently. This not only works with a significant time delay, making it very hard to gauge how much of an effect your recent economic expansions had until 10-20 minutes later. It also triggers when you manually remove goods from the warehouse for any reason, so simply loading a ship for an expedition will throw the respective indicators into chaos. All in all, the economic interface in 1800 is a significant step back from the convenience of 2205. Couple this with 1800's massively increased complexity and the game can get frustrating before you're even halfway through the tech tree.
  • In a case of What Could Have Been, developer diaries for 1800 indicated that they initially had the Cannery building early in the tech tree to provide basic food, but found that returning players in playtest sessions quickly got confused and frustrated playing the game since having a building that required multiple resource inputs to provide bottom-tier foodstuffs broke their expectation that basic fisheries built on the coast would do that. Consequently, they returned to having fishing docks as the providers of starter food without further processing.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Rivers in 1800. Although rivers are not a new feature to the series, they tend to snake everywhere on New World islands. They do not have any building spots on them so their only real purpose is to cut the amount of viable building land on an island in half. Worse, some New World goods such as cigars and coffee require frankly enormous tracts of land to produce the needed crops. Coffee especially as Engineers need it to evolve and Investors need it to max out their houses. Both classes drink it by the barrel and get very upset if they don't have it. By the endgame, the most sought-after resource in any player's economy will likely not be gold or oil, but coffee.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The NPC's in 2205 are highly detailed, but move like puppets, don't lip-synch with their dialog, and don't emote, giving a disconcerting impression.

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