The game is nice, but Ubisoft connect is literal ass cheeks and ruins the game for me.

I can't launch to remote play on my steam deck because the piece of sh!t Ubisoft connect fails to connect 3 different times any time I attempt to launch.

Why Ubisoft do you ruin your games with ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ connectivity requirements and spotty server availability.

Anno 1800 is probably the best Anno has ever been.

And considering how good some of the older games were, that's saying a lot.

At its core, it's still the same thing Anno has always done best:

You build a city.
Your people want things.
You build production chains to give them those things.
Those production chains need more workers.
Those workers want more things.

And suddenly it's 3 AM and you're redesigning an entire island because your soap production is blocking the railway you now desperately need for oil.

Welcome to Anno.

What makes 1800 so good is how incredibly well all of these systems build on top of each other.

At the beginning you're worrying about fish, work clothes and schnapps.

A few hours later you're managing multiple islands, international trade routes, electricity, commuter piers, factories, tourism, ships, expeditions and enough production chains to make an actual logistics manager nervous.

And somehow it still works.

Most of the time.

There is a ridiculous amount of stuff to do here, especially once the DLCs are involved. And unlike a lot of games where DLC just feels like content cut out of the base game, many of Anno 1800's expansions genuinely add another layer to the sandbox.

New regions.
New production chains.
New population tiers.
New logistics problems.
New ways to completely destroy the city layout you were so proud of two hours ago.

And that's probably the best thing about Anno 1800: the game constantly gives you another reason to rebuild something.

Not because your old setup necessarily stopped working.

But because now you know you can do it better.

That is where the addiction starts.

You don't really "finish" an island.

You look at it.

You think about it.

Then you decide that this one road is in the wrong place and six hours later half the city has moved.

The presentation also deserves a lot of credit.

Anno 1800 looks absolutely beautiful, especially once your cities start getting dense and busy. Watching trains move between factories, ships enter the harbor and thousands of little people go about their day makes the world feel much more alive than a spreadsheet-heavy economy game really has any right to.

And yes, underneath all of that beauty is basically a giant spreadsheet.

A very pretty spreadsheet.

A spreadsheet with ships.

The soundtrack is great, the atmosphere is excellent and the whole industrial-era setting fits Anno almost perfectly.

But there are still things that annoy me.

The UI can get crowded once your empire becomes large enough.
Finding the exact production chain or building you need isn't always as convenient as it should be.
Trade routes can become a mess.
And after enough DLCs, the amount of systems thrown at you can become slightly absurd.

Then there is Ubisoft.

Because apparently enjoying a Ubisoft game means you also have to enjoy Ubisoft Connect reminding you that Ubisoft Connect exists.

I bought the game on Steam.

Please just let me launch the game on Steam.

Thank you.

The DLC situation can also look intimidating from the outside. There is a lot of it, and buying everything at once isn't exactly cheap.

But just like with Train Simulator, you don't need to own every single piece of DLC to enjoy the game.

The base game already has a huge amount of content.

The expansions are exactly that: expansions.

Pick the ones that add things you're actually interested in.

You don't need to treat the store page like a checklist.

And unlike a lot of modern strategy games, Anno 1800 actually feels like a complete game even before you start stacking DLC on top of it.

That's important.

I've played a lot of city builders, management games and strategy games over the years, but very few of them have that same "just one more thing" effect Anno has.

One more production line.
One more trade route.
One more island.
One more district.
One more little optimization before going to bed.

Then the sun comes up.

Anno 1800 isn't perfect.

It's complex, expensive if you want absolutely everything, the UI can struggle under the weight of its own systems and Ubisoft is still Ubisoft.

But as a city builder, economy game and logistics sandbox?

It's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ excellent.

Anno 1800 understands something a lot of management games don't:

The fun isn't just making things work.

The fun is making them work better.

And then rebuilding the whole damn thing because you realized you can make it better again.

Recommended.

Ah yes, ubisoft launcher needs my exact location for me to play a game.
I hope the ceo stubs his/her toe to a table foot, and that causes them a aneurism, and consequently, have brain damage, and live like a vegetable.
Let me play a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game, i dont want to login to your garbage platform, nor do i like to give you my location, for ♥♥♥♥ sake.
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥...

fun fact, the game performs worse when u are connected to internet. i wonder why would that be the case, scrapping data from users?
or what?
why should game lag when im connected to internet? (pirated version doesnt have this lag on same device btw)

update to last section, they kick u out of the game if u just turn off ur internet after an hour or so. lmao.
just get the pirated version, i made a mistake by buying this ♥♥♥♥ legitimately and playing 4ish hours.
will try to refund for the reasons above and get a pirated version anyway. lmao.
- refund failed.
when playing offline trying to avoid ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lag, after the pop up error shows up ignore and continue playing, it shouldnt close the game for a couple more hours.
best move would be to just get a pirated version. this garbage launcher is horrendus, buy it when they removed the launcher. lmao.
clowns need u to be online to play solo game...