I’m about four or five missions into the campaign for Anno 1404: Dawn of Discovery. The first few are tutorial missions that get you quickly up to speed with resident needs, resource chains, trade routes, etc. In fact, they are one of the better city builder tutorials I’ve seen since they start you out with a city that is already partially laid out so you get an idea of how things should be set up. You get a ton of FedEx quests to complete, and then these are added up to give you a score at the end of a scenario.

Dawn of Discovery seems a lot lighter than the Anno fare I remember. Cities don’t bounce around from poor to rich as much as they used to and the interface is much cleaner. But I remember why these games aren’t near the top of my city builder fan list – the missions take forever.

Now, to be fair, this in itself is not unusual in city building campaigns. Some Caesar IV maps would take tens of hours. The problem here is that there is isn’t enough other stuff to do to make those hours pass. Once you get to the second tier of buildings, you need tools, bricks, wood and gold to build something new and fun. But if you’ve been trading those bricks and tools to make easy coin, you won’t have enough to expand the city, so you need to stop trading that and move on to trading fish or something less glamorous. There is a lot of busy work in this model – if I get a quest from the Vizier that asks me to give him weapons, I need to rejig everything I’ve been doing up to that point so I have the infrastructure in place for weapons. Weapons need patrician citizens who need spices and a tavern which needs 2000 gold and some of those tools and you can’t sell all your fish because everybody loves fish. In other games I love this sort of thing since it requires flexibility. But, in a city builder, it is a bit of a design failure for me because it means that there is a firm limit on how organically my city can grow.

In Caesar IV, your goals were pretty clear but in a vague kind of way. You needed to get to X amount of gold or make Y pieces of furniture or have a prosperity score of Z. How you got there was really up to you. DoD is a little bit tighter on the reins. Islands are usually small, the requirements for each of the dozen or so quests are very specific and if you waste you time occupying an island you don’t need to, then you might as well burn that money.

I am still captivated by DoD, at least so far, because the cities look great and the resource chains actually require quite a bit of planning if you don’t want your town to stagnate. I will probably mess around some in the free build later tonight, and I haven’t tried the military side of things – generally armies and city builders do not mix.