Stephen Portsmouth

From the moment i started playing this i felt this had been rushed. Having played all the other Annos i started on all medium settings but soon found the game unplayable. So i turned the difficulty down and... still found the game unplayable. On the upside graphics are excellent. Gameplay has changed and you can no longer see the area of effect with marketplaces etc. but overall is still very simple and easy to use. The game set up has all but gone, there are very basic things you can change but thats it. No map previews and the stress free easy options on the older versions has gone. Broken mechanics. I like a nice, easy-play city building game and the biggest problem with this game is even on the easier settings you are too much on a knife edge keeping income in a positive. One second you are making a ton of money, next you are losing a ton of money just for adding a building or two and building extra houses makes little to no difference in this version of Anno. Most buildings under produce massively, i have just 3500 population and at the moment i have 9 vodka distilleries and i still cannot produce enough vodka and the cost of running these is ridiculous, but these go for all buildings, too much resources to run for very little reward. You then add another distillery and bang! you're losing money again! So you add more population to balance the books who in turn want more vodka. You add more buildings then you need yet another storehouse because they get overrun real quick. And so on... You can never get on the positive side for long or if you do through using propaganda your people end up rioting... In short i have waited a long time for this, bought it with all DLCs and to be honest i'm very disappointed with the game, the lack of game options and the unbalanced economy mechanics. If you want a good city building game i would say buy Tropico 6 at this point. Anno 1800 could quickly be the best in its genre but it needs some big updates, rebalancing of the game and a much needed game options revamp.