Anno 1800 shows the lengths a mob will go to for a can of goulash
12.20.2023
By Julian Benson, Contributor
We’ve all been there. You spend all day at the sewing machine factory, constructing devices only your skilled hands can assemble. (After all, you wouldn’t trust this kind of job to the workers or the farmers. Bless their hemp socks, they just don’t have the dexterity.) When you’re done, you head on down to the marketplace for a tin of tasty goulash, and the man behind the counter says, “No goulash today. Would you like fish instead?”
And so, after a moment’s serious thought, you start a revolution.
That’s what Anno 1800 is about. Except, in Anno 1800, you aren’t the disgruntled artisan on the bottom step kicking off because they have no access to goulash—you’re the mayor at the top of the pyramid that the citizens are revolting against.
At the heart of Ubisoft’s city builder is a hungry beast, and from the moment you place your first farmer’s home, you enter a race to keep it fed. When you start Anno 1800, you’re faced with a wild island covered in trees, unmined ore, and untapped oil reservoirs. You set down a marketplace and a few farmers’ hovels and draw out a road to connect your settlement to the nearest harbor, and soon you have a line of settlers moving in, marching down the road like ants to a nest.
In return for their labor, the farmers have simple demands: fish for their plates, clothes for their backs, and moonshine for their glasses. Build a fishing wharf, a sheep farm and clothes mill, and a potato farm and a spirit still, and you’ll keep them all happy.
However, as your population grows, you’ll unlock industries that exploit more of the island’s resources, like clay pits and iron mines—and farmers can’t work those more complex machines. For that, you need workers, and workers need more than fish and shirts to be happy. They want cooked sausage, soap, and bread, which needs wheat fields, mills, and pig farms.
And as you build these, your settlement spreads across the island, and your workforce grows, and you unlock new buildings, and then new classes of citizens with new needs that need more buildings, and more growth, and a larger population, and, and, and…
I’ve never found a moment of balance in Anno 1800 where all of my different classes of citizens are happy and satisfied with what they have. There’s always someone who wants a little bit more. So, you build another factory to make the luxury item the artisans are demanding, and in doing so, you need to increase your worker population to staff the building—and in turn, you now need more sausages to keep the workers happy, which means building a new pig farm, which means more farmers.
Anno 1800 may look like an idyllic city builder from the outside, but inside, it’s a madcap rush to stay one step ahead of your populace. If you ever fall behind and your people become angry, you start to see barricades go up in the streets and an angry mob forms, carrying banners and placards. The rioters will march on your town hall to depose you. All because you weren’t able to provide them with enough goulash.
It’s a good thing this city builder is light on combat because your own people are deadly enough.
Anno 1800 is available on the Epic Games Store.