Anno 1800 is a city-building real-time strategy video game, developed by Blue Byte and published by Ubisoft, and launched on April 16, 2019, in North America. It is the seventh game in the Anno Domini series, and returns to the use of a historical setting following the last two titles, Anno 2070 and Anno 2205, taking place during the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.
Following the previous installment, the game returns to the series' traditional city-building and ocean combat mechanics but introduces new aspects of gameplay, such as tourism, blueprinting, and the effects of industrialization influences on island inhabitants.
The game received generally positive reviews according to review aggregator Metacritic. The title became the fastest-selling Anno game, selling four times more copies than Anno 2205 achieved during its first week of release.
This game provides examples of:
- The Alcoholic: Your citizens, judging by the numbers. More than half of the Farmers', Workers' and Artisans' diet is alcoholic beverages (mostly high-proof), whereas the Engineers' diet is almost two-thirds rum (with another 26% being coffee). Investors, on the other hand, only consume 18% of their needs in champagne, not that their diet is well-balanced either. Providing a large city with enough rum can be quite a challenge, as the people will easily empty a clipper full of rum in the time it takes it to make a round-trip to the New World.
- Anachronism Stew: 1800 gets increasingly far from its stated time period as one advances through the tech tree, starting with steam trains (first prominent in the 1830s), which are used to transfer oil to power plants (1860s), to power shipyards that make ironclads (1850s) armed with dynamite-based weaponry (1860). The most powerful ship type is a battle cruiser with gun turrets (1908!). Somewhat zig-zagged as buildings can have cornerstones that date decades into the century and later DLC stories can come with dates that go as far as the 1860s. You can easily be at a stage where your tech is decades ahead of what the date is supposed to be. A devblog of downloadable content subverts this by explaining that the game covers the time of the Industrial Revolution in general, instead of being set in a specific year. 1800 is taken by the creators as the starting point, and the players themselves advance society as they build and expand.
- Anti-Frustration Features: On the lowest difficulty level, buildings can be moved for free, which is helpful if you haven't figured out a good layout yet.
- Anti Poop-Socking: The game will show messages if you're playing deep into the night. "How about a coffee?"
- Apathetic Citizens: Averted with great force. Different to the rest of the series, goods are now divided into needs (which are required to advance) and luxuries (which can make citizens happier). And once you unlock them, your citizens will ask for them. Even farmers might eventually start protesting if not provided with a pub (or booze, going one without the other is fine though). Give your workers long hours by cranking up the default productivity level of an industry and they might protest about that, too. Shutting down the workplace as they take to the streets. All this can be suppressed with a strong police force, however.
- The Newspaper takes this aversion up to eleven as events in the game can now affect your citizens' moods if they read about it. The event of war can come with a whopping 50% penalty to happiness. Goods shortages can drive up demand, even stories of how your wars are going can come with a positive or negative modifier. A fire or plague that leaves ruins behind? That can also make people unhappy. You can offset these by turning your newspaper into a Propaganda Machine and replacing those stories with distracting alternatives with different bonuses. But do that too often and citizens will lose trust in what they read (which can mean riots).
- If you are ever at war, city chatter will reflect it. Citizens expressing thoughts about signing up for the navy, or noticing the smell of powder in the air for example.
- Aristocrats Are Evil: Both Karl Leonard von Malching and Margaret Hunt demonstrate the stand-out worst aspects of the old Aristocracy. The former a fiercely classist money-grubber Born in the Wrong Century, the latter a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing who is perhaps the most challenging of the hard AI.
- Artistic License – Biology:
- Schnapps is a "warmth" need for settlers in the Arctic. This is based on the outdated notion that alcohol makes you warm, whereas it merely makes you feel warm, while actually losing more heat to the environment. Unlike "happiness" needs, this isn't just based on the subjective feeling of the consumer; it should make the settlers more susceptible to contract the Arctic Flu rather than less.
- It's even worse with Hot Sauce (a lifestyle need, not heat, but still). Spicy foods make you sweat, which is why they tend to be more popular in hot climates. In the Arctic, sweating is something you want to avoid; it makes you clothes damp, which in turns worsens their ability to insulate you from the cold.
- Artistic License – Economics: All of your citizens are apparently independently wealthy and only work for fun, as they will be able to buy their needs even when most of them are unemployed and thus should not have an income. An actual Company Town works by siphoning the employees wages, if they were even paid in real money, through the company stores; profit is made by selling the product to outside buyers. Unemployed people (and their families) would be evicted quickly. Indeed, the game is closer to Chummy Commies than the Manchester capitalism prevalent in the era.
- Boring, but Practical:
- Frigate and its big brother, Ship-of-the-Line are Sail Ships and accessible at Artisan levels, with rather basic materials. Being at lower tech level means they are also easily replaced, not to mention cheaper to maintain. Ten Ship-of-the-Line actually have a good chance to absolutely wreck an opponent's harbor.
- Farmers and Workers are the first 2 population tiers, but they will be the backbone of your empire by providing workforce for vital base industries.
- Selling soap to Eli Bleakworth is considered most boring, yet lucrative money-making venture, as he buys them at a premium.
- Big Fancy House: You can build your own palace with the Seat of Power DLC. Like other versions of the player palace in the series, it is egregiously expensive to build and the upper limit of its size is determined by how large your population is. The main building features a colossal dome in the style of the US Capitol, fountains, and entrances crowned by Neoclassical pediments. While its wings have massive glass windows spanning floors with very high ceilings (you can't see inside but windows and doors are easily two stories tall when compared to a regular residence). Even a modest-sized palace can be its own urban district. And while there's big benefits to building it in your capital, there's nothing saying you can't build it in the countryside or on its own island entirely. You can only build one though.
- Bourgeois Bohemian: Artisans. Befitting the real-life Arts and Crafts movement, these foppish middle-class citizens express a lifestyle yearning for traditional revival and counter-cultural living. Mixed with the modernising innovations of the era. With New World Rising come Artistas, a New World counterpart to Artisans who are just as counter-cultural, though much more forward-looking and excited for the new than in the Old World.
- Cool Airship: The Empire of the Skies DLC allows you to build a whole fleet of these. From high speed raiding vessels to floating behemoths that can carry as much cargo as a late game cargo steamer.
- Company Town: In theory, your settlements are this. Instead of paying taxes, income comes from your workers buying essentials from you. As explained in Artistic License – Economics, that's not actually how a company town operates in practice.
- Continuity Nod: One of the possible events during an expedition involves hunting for the Treasure of Hassan Ben Sahid, who was the pirate king from 1404.
- Defeat Means Friendship: Each opponent you defeat in the Clash of Couriers scenario will return to aid you in the final challenge, greatly easing the challenge. Ironically, this also means the Silver medal would be easier to obtain than Bronze.
- Difficult, but Awesome: Tourists from the Tourist Season DLC are very demanding, requiring multiple goods and venue, connected through the Bus Network, all while maintaining a high Attractiveness. In return, they will pay through their nose for the goods and services you provide, giving Investors a run for their money. Most importantly though, is the fact that Tourist income is exempt from Royal Taxes, giving you a steady income even in the highest difficulty.
- Dual-World Gameplay: The game divides a standard playthrough into a Europe-like "Old World" and a South America-like "New World". The Passage adds an Arctic zone to the mix and Land of the Lions expands into the Horn of Africa-styled Enbesa.
- Easy Logistics: Zig-Zagged. One one hand, goods have to be transported to warehouses and between production buildings, which is not entirely trivial, and then possibly shipped to another island. On the other hand, once the goods are in the warehouse, citizens have direct magic access, all warehouses on an island are connected and ships don't have to be provided with food or ammunition (except on expeditions). The commuter pier takes it a step further as it merges the populations of two or more islands in a region without the need for ferries or anything like that.
- Evil Chancellor: Margret Hunt sits on the Queen's Royal Council, is difficult to please, and is keen to destroy all opposition on the map one weak piece at a time. She's heavily indicated to be behind the Pyphorian cult threatening to topple the Empire.
- Fictional Country:
- The Empire, the player's home country, is loosely based on The British Empire of the Victorian era, particularly in its penchant for MegaCorp-like trading companies. The Queen (who remains unnamed, but certainly doesn't hold the title 'Empress') is even a dead-ringer for a young Queen Victoria. British names among the characters abound, although the legendary naval hero Admiral Nadasky has a Slavic name, suggesting some Russian or Austro-Hungarian influences.
- The Empire's greatest rival, which is known as La Corona amongst the lower classes, and A Coroa amongst the elites, is a world-spanning empire with holdings (and perpetually ongoing rebellions) in the New World. It seems based on latter-day The Kingdom of Spain, with some distinct influences from the Empire of Brazil. Their clashes with the Empire, on the other hand, also suggest Napoleonic French influences, with a great naval battle being particularly reminiscent of the Battle of Trafalgar.
- A mission partially takes place in the nation of Monegasque, which is just the demonym for Monaco.
- Enbesa, the primary location for the Land of the lions DLC, is an Eastern African nation said to be incredibly ancient. It appears largely based on Ethiopia with some aspects from other parts of Eastern Africa. Namely the boast it is thousands of years old, with ageless ruins resting next to shepherd villages and its status as independent right in the middle of the Scramble for Africa. Its emperor seeks to modernise the country with the player's help.
- Gaia's Lament: The primary objective of Eden Burning scenario is to construct a hydroelectric dam on an island previously occupied by the Pyrphorians, while cleaning up the pollution the occupation left and carefully maintaining the environment.
- Game Mod: A fair few and encouraged by the developers. Three of the most prominent mods shared are Spice It Up, Old Town and Project Distinction which add decorative items, new houses and monuments to build. There are also item mods such as the Sooper Dooper Shippy Scooter
. - Guide Dang It!: The Expedition feature doesn't tell you a whole lot about how it works even with extended tooltips enabled. New players will find themselves particularly stumped by the question of what goods they need to load on their ship in order to satisfy the various category requirements for hunting, medicine, force and so on. For instance, bringing along some tons of coal to improve your chances during hunting forays isn't exactly a logical correlation.
- Idle Rich: Two flavours by the late game if you have the right DLCs.
- Investors. A mix of Blue Blood and Gilded Age multi-millionaires, Investors don't contribute a workforce like the other social classes in the game. Instead they give influence (a Power-type resource) and huge sums of cash for the best things you can offer them.
- Tourists. Like Investors they are incredibly wealthy people who spend their time not really working for a living. Different to the day-tripper tourists you'll likely have by the mid-game. getting Tourist citizens to your city requires building enormous palatial hotels.and transport to services and monuments by way of a bus service. Zig-Zagged in that they do count as a workforce and a small number are required for certain buildings to function like the restaurant. But most of those you have will be playing the trope straight.
- Impoverished Patrician:
- Karl Leonard von Malching's family lost all their land and titles by the time he was a teenager. He's a non-sympathetic example, as he treats all non-aristocrats around him like dirt and as if they're rightfully his to boss around.
- Anne Harlow used to be a member of a prestigious family before her father was condemned for treason. She considers herself the Last Of Her Kind, taking up piracy in an effort to keep her family legacy alive.
- Infinite Supplies: Every production chain has this.
- Intro Dump: Whenever you meet an NPC for the first time, they will introduce themselves to you. Start a new game with lots of NPC's and a revealed map, then this trope comes into effect.
- Karl Marx Hates Your Guts: Despite living in a Company Town at the height of Manchester capitalism, the prices for consumer goods are fixed, no matter how scarce they might be at the moment. The same applies to trade prices.
- Luck-Based Mission: Expeditions are entirely this. You can improve your chances of success by bringing along a well-chosen assortment of goods and items, but even then you only have a (higher, but still fallible) probability to succeed in the random events that pop up several times per expedition. If your ship finally makes it to its destination, or achieves its goal, you're faced with another dice roll to determine how many, and exactly which, rewards you receive.
- Magic Realism: There are multiple random events during expeditions, including Cursed temples, ghost ships, bizarre flora, and mad preachers, that blur the line between the explainable and the supernatural. Successful choices on these events often involve dispelling the magic behind these strange events. Failing these checks however will conversely leave the mystery solidly intact and the crew convinced they had a genuine brush with the supernatural.
- Mighty Glacier: Barring special ships that require Specialists to build, Ship-of-the-Line combines high hit points, DPS and range, into one tough package. It's rather slow though, and being a Sail Ship means it's at the mercy of the winds. Still, 10 of these have a good chance to wreck any AI harbor, even on Expert.
- Must Have Caffeine: Engineers and Investors require coffee as a non-luxury drink of choice. If a chart made by a Reddit user is anything to go by, coffee is more significant to their diet than any kind of solid food.
- Nerf: 1800 nerfed emergency services and defence buildings by giving them a lengthy "training period" upon construction or relocation, probably to counter the common player tactic of planting these buildings only when necessary to save on upkeep. If you do this now, half the neighborhood will be burned down / infected / rioting by the time your fire station / hospital / police station gets going, and hostile ships will annihilate your coastal buildings before your defence turrets even have a chance to return fire. The civilian examples are also much heavier on micromanagement: they provide additional forces if your average citizen happiness is high enough, but these have to be dispatched manually in case of an emergency instead of rushing out on their own. The ability to activate these reinforcements also has a cooldown itself, although disasters normally happen with enough time between them to make this a non-issue at least.
- No Communities Were Harmed: Bright Sands, with its name, familiar-looking pleasure pier and a mention of it being a fun holiday spot for the young, stands in for Brighton in the UK.
- No Historical Figures Were Harmed: A bunch of characters are direct references to real 18th and 19th century figures. Most obvious being the Queen as a young Queen Victoria. Admiral Nadasky, who is quite possibly Horatio Nelson in all but name. Jean La Fortune, a Composite Character of several figures in the Haitian Revolution; and John and Jane Faithful, dead ringers to Sir John Franklin and his wife. The former famously disappearing in the search for a passage though the Arctic Circle and the latter who spent the rest of her life looking for him.
- Not in My Backyard!: A number of production buildings cause negative Attractiveness to your city, and will lead unhappiness for your citizens. Worse, they provide essential needs for your citizens, so either you make up for the unhappiness penalty...or you build them on another island that's not your primary settlement.
- Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Church is a Luxury public service for Workers and Artisans in the Old World. They stop being a Luxury Need from Engineers onwards.
- Plot-Triggering Death: The death of the their father back in the Old World is what triggers the Non-Entity General's return there, which in turn kicks off the campaign.
- Politically Correct History. The 19th century was a rather messy period of human history, with slavery, nationalism, the rise of the labor movement and violent clashes over social questions. You'll see nothing of the like in this game. In fact, while unemployment due to industrialization was a major factor in social unrest, in Anno 1800, it's downright beneficial, as even unemployed people magically have money.
- Prisoner's Work: Eli's prison is one part penitentiary, one part quarry. There's even mention of the existence of a treadmill in the campaign.
- Propaganda Machine: Your local newspaper will publish issues that have various effects on your island's population. These effects are generally tied to events that have happened since the last publication date, and can be either positive or negative, depending on how those events were handled (i.e. a fire that was quickly put down with an efficient fire response with minimal damage will be positive, while a sluggish fire response that allowed several buildings to burn down will have a negative impact.) The player can, by spending influence, "convince" the publisher to edit those articles before publication, replacing them with something more "optimistic" or at least distracting.
- Scunthorpe Problem: "Essex" is a banned city name. Some of the game's own default ship names, such as "Puff Adder", can actually trigger its profanity filter.note All this in a single player game.
- Skyscraper City: With central feature of The High Life DLC comes the ability to expand Engineer and Investor residences upward into skyscrapers. With an accompanying monument somewhat resembling the Chrysler Building being the end goal and decorations that include searchlights and epic fountains. Build enough of these and your city could resemble a present-day Manhattan or something much more fantastical!
- Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: Like the rest of the series (and perhaps even more so), 1800 comes down firmly on the idealistic end. The game is cheerful, bright and utopian. Black-and-White Morality is in full effect, and every grey character generally comes down at one end as the narrative progresses. For starters, the protagonists' family name is Goode. Beyond the odd opportunity of light press censorship by the player, the Video Game Cruelty Potential that isn't immediately punished is minimised.
- Small Role, Big Impact: Benjamin Harlowe is a Posthumous Character who was executed for speaking against the King, the Queen's father. That simple act led to his daughter Anne becoming one of the last pirate queens. Who can be a major thorn in the player's side. it also drove his wife Margaret Hunt to form the Pyphorians. Who under her command would work to burn the metropolis of Bright Sands to the ground as an act of revenge. With plans of doing the same to the rest of the Empire and overthrow the Crown.
- Space-Management Game: The game is ultimately this. Infinite Supplies is in effect, but space is limited and coastal space is even more limited. This is why the Docklands from the eponymous DLC is such a
Game-Breaker; it allows you to skip most of the space-consuming farms and coastal production lines, allowing you to build more factories to produce export goods. - Socketed Equipment: There are socketed upgrades for ships, harbor buildings, inland production buildings, animal enclosures for the zoo, and more. Most of these have limited range, however, making them much less powerful than the Island or Ark Upgrades from 2070 were.
- Some Dexterity Required: Managing a single island is easy for city-building fans, but you are not going to get anywhere with just one island. So most likely you will have 2, or 3 islands to manage... in The Old World. You need to make way to The New World to import critical resources, which means another 2-3 islands there. Repeat for Cape Trelawney, The Arctic, and Embesa, and you will at the very least, have 10 islands to manage across 5 regions. And this is before managing your navy to fend off threats, explore, or deliver goodies...
- Torches and Pitchforks: Workplaces will shut down and crowds will gather to riot in enormous mobs that wave placards, hang banners of revolution and march furiously though your streets. The Anarchist DLC reintroduces the ultimatum mechanic from 2070, where citizens will present a task you need to solve (from supplying a need for everyone of a specific class to tracking down anarchists in your city) you must fulfil or the people will riot.
- Troperiffic: The campaign plays up as many of the Victorian stage and penny dreadful conventions as possible: an heir returning seeking vengeance, an Evil Uncle, a pirate queen, a conspiracy to destroy the government...all in the service of teaching you the game mechanics and fitting the setting.
- Video Game Caring Potential: True to the series. You can be a benevolent administrator providing your citizens with all the luxuries they could ever ask for. Bright, clean cities with many modern amenities and prestigious cultural venues like zoos, museums and city parks to pass the day by. With the Seat of Power DLC, you can apply powerful cultural or productive bonuses to enhance your cities even further.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: Alternatively, you could work your citizens to the bone, deprive them of any luxuries like alcohol, church services or entertainment venues. Force them to live in cramped, smoggy cities with houses next to polluting industry. No medical care when they get sick, and if they happen to snap and start rioting you can always set police on them with truncheons and prison wagons. Some of the town hall items can also come off more as manipulation strategies than improving quality of life. While certain Worker Union items involve cutting corners with production or replacing the workforce with a cheaper labour pool.
- Video Game Cruelty Punishment: It is not a good idea to completely neglect your citizens' safety however. As strikes, fires, and plague eat into both your worker pool and your profit margins as people leave the city or die. You aren't required to provide your citizens a means of healthcare for them to be happier or advance to higher tiers, but an outbreak of plague can potentially wipe out an entire city and the contagion can spread to your other islands via any visiting ships. Cramped urban planning can also ramp up the risk of fire or explosions in a city. Or in the case of the latter, increase the chance an exploding building sets nearby buildings on fire. Tourists will also quite understandably not be keen to visit a city of chimneys belching black smoke, utterly lacking in parks or things to do. And if the attractiveness rating is low enough, they won't come at all.
- We Buy Anything: NPCs will buy anything you sell, although the four neutral ones have additional, regularly changing sets of goods they specifically request and for which they pay a premium if you sell them directly at their warehouse.
- Writers Cannot Do Math: As a redditor calculated, your citizens require several thousand times as much goods as they would in real life. Even if that were explained by time compression, that still leaves them consuming significantly more hard liquor and, on higher tiers, coffee than solid food. Investors subsist entirely on a diet of chocolate, champagne, coffee and cigars. Presumably, they bring their own food, but the farmers have no such excuse.
