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Huh. Maybe it's sitting with the tech menu? I know A.D.A.M. talks to you in one window and if you leave it up long enough F.A.T.H.E.R. gets through for a moment. Edit: Update at bottom of previous page.
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Feb 24, 2022 14:32
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| # ? May 4, 2024 23:28 |
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Ebb and Floe Today we're in Akia Floes, the most popular starting arctic sector due to the project. However, Akia can also be somewhat annoying to settle, land here consists of four small-ish islands of equal size and the heat zones mean you can't divide islands between industrial and residential purposes. The trait here is Hot Spot, for +20% output from geothermal power plants. As in Kinngait, I've already settled a small population of Karens here to build up a stockpile of construction materials.    The return of the polar ice caps has disrupted existing trade routes, and Saayman International wants to use Akia as a major shipping hub by blasting through the ice pack. Yes, go with it. Walbruk Basin provided power and Novikov Crater provided workforce, so Akia Floes provides logistics to the sector.  Step one, find a clicky at each of the channels.   Step two, have some Joels.  As in Kinngait, I elect to fill all their needs, so this amounts to a small profit for Esperanza.  Step three, tow job.  Step four, 300 power surplus solved by a single geothermal power plant.  Step five, tow job. In a nice touch, this is the same boats you tow to the site in step three. Now you're towing them back out.  Step six, click the boom.   And with that, Akia Floes gets 50 free logistics pool. In a nice touch, the new channel is passable by cosmetic traffic and by your warships should you need your fleet here.  Step one, three clickies around the channel.  Step two, use a drone to blow up some icebergs.  Step three, world market.  Step four, tow job.  Step five, I don't use the world market for every quest like this.  Two production modules on a methane extractor I was already using for the quantum computers chain meet requirements. Step six, tow em back out.  Step seven, click.   More logistics for the sector, wheee.  Step one, Saayman... tried ramming three or four icebreakers into the ice pack and they all sink. They need us for search and rescue. Scratch Saayman International off the 'not stupid' list.  Step two, maintain a bunch of community centers.   Step three... those aren't icebreaker parts, dude, those are entire sunken ships.  Step four, more Joels. This actually takes some expansion down in Walbruk to supply more stuff, during which time an unpleasant Calamity happens.   Smog can hit any temperate sector and severely reduces income from that sector. Here it's hit Walbruk, Esperanza's piggy bank, and it's dropped our income by a full 90k or so. Now, the cure is to have at least 60 trees and parks for 5 minutes, and I have 921, but that's a minimum of five minutes for that hit, and not everyone will be as fond of planting trees and parks as I am - plus they can eat up quite a lot of money. I've heard from folks who enjoy playing Anno 2205 on expert that having calamities on turns the entire game into a dice roll specifically because of this calamity. Smog can in theory hit at any time, and higher difficulties make calamities happen more often and their impacts more severe. Smog hitting at the wrong time, or just early in the game, can kill a campaign dead on higher difficulties by bankrupting you with very little warning, and even if you already have at least 60 trees it's still a minimum of five minutes of crippled income. Blue Byte or whatever you are called now, this is not good game design.  Moving on, Akia Floes is now home to a happy batch of Joels.  Step five, tow in.  Step six, Akia already had a surplus stock of fusion power cells from when I was upgrading the spaceport to support energy transmission.  Step seven, tow out.  Step eight, boom.  And that's Akia Floes done. More logistics, and it's occurred to me that of the total of 24 quest steps in the sector, 9 were exact repeats: towing the boats in, towing them out, and clicking the detonator. A low effort post, perhaps, but it's a low-effort batch of game design.
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Feb 28, 2022 00:17
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Lunacy Welcome to Mare Relictum. The layout of this sector is straightforward: one huge crater that isn't quite a perfect donut to build, there's a large crevasse to the east, and the central uplift of the crater has a couple of cliff building sites. The trait I got here is Sheltered Crater, reducing the energy consumption of shield generators.    The premise here is simple: Mysterious Woman wants us to restore this derelict moon hotel so she can use it for a spy operation. While you might think that operating a luxury moon hotel would make us money, you would be incorrect. This is the moon's purely cosmetic project.  Step one is diamonds for... the external facade? I have a visceral feeling of disgust to anything that could be described as glitz and glamour so I'm not familiar with attempts to impress the rich, but do people really use diamonds in architecture?  Step two is providing some workforce to staff the hotel. I decline to promote these Bens to Jeremies, they wouldn't be worth the expense of meeting Jeremy's needs.  Step three, provide some titanium plating - that's the moon construction material.  Step four, this is apparently a 'big, authentic lunar city.'  Step five, tow job.    The moon hotel is now up and running, and we can... build high-flying observation platforms. They do nothing. They're on the moon, which is a work camp you want to keep as small as possible. Also, apologies for skipping ahead, but it took me a while to figure out what the first 'light show' setting on the hotel even did: the doohickey out in front shoots up blue sparkles now. Wheeeeee.  Step one, microchip shipment.  Step two... look, this step is about turning the lunar civil war (the only mention, actually, that there was a civil war, every other source about the Orbital Watch implies that it was a peaceful revolution) into a tourist attraction. Let's just say that this could be considered highly topical and move discretely along. As it is, if this looks like major overkill for producing a surplus stuck of bioenhancers, particularly since I'm actually producing them instead of using the world market, I started working on another little project while recording this update.   ...Am I blowing up land mines surrounded by gawking tourists?  Next step, robot fights! I'm already producing enough constructobots on Earth to just ship them in to the moon.  Tow job.   We've turned all the lights on, which can now shoot orange sparkles, and can build robot battle arenas. Again: in what's for all intents and purposes a work camp. In any event, to the world market to ship in a bunch of androids.  Lunar lunch, wheeee.   I'm dropping in one of my favorite screenshots from the game, from another pre-LP save, because... does anyone know if the position of the Earth when seen from the moon changes? Or did Blue Byte misplace Earth when making the skybox for solar flares in Novikov Crater?  Supplying wine, and can you tell I'm getting a little impatient? I do love this game, but I feel like I've run out of things to say about it.   Beef supply. Around this time someone had asked me in discord to show doing at least one step legit, so here you go. Here is the thrilling gameplay you're missing: building a bunch of soy bean farms to supply a bunch of cattle ranches and they'll all get deleted when this quest step is over.  Anti-grav compensators.   Power supply. Maybe it's just me, but I think solar arrays look neat, way better than getting fusion power running here and with Lei Sheng finance calculators it's effectively zero cost to run. Making use of the central uplift in Mare Relictum makes me wish they'd gone for more varied terrain on the moon.   And that is that. Some kind of fan-powered super bounce pad thing for the final tier. Interestingly, Mysterious Woman's valediction for this project includes "Enjoy your profits!" Except... the moon hotel doesn't make you money. None of the sector projects do, though Walbruk Basin and Akia Floes do save you the costs of building the equivalent power generation and logistics. Perhaps this project was intended to make you money at one point in development, same with the weather controller. Personally, I suspect that Anno 1800's tourism mechanic was in fact originally intended for 2205, the moon hotel is fluffed up as a huge tourist attraction and being able to control the weather sure sounds like something you should be able to use to gain some kind of gameplay advantage. As for the ornamentals, my gut feeling is that they were envisioned to go with the higher tiers of lunar cities that we know were planned but never materialized. They seem pointless and out of place on the moon as it is, but they might potentially have fit well in a more grandiose looking lunar settlement where people are here to visit for fun and to live, instead of just work. Much as I enjoy playing Anno 2205, things like this contribute to my impression that the game was launched unfinished, with an attitude that it would get fixed in DLC and expansions that mostly didn't materialize. This moon hotel in particular feels like it was meant for a different game than what we got. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Mar 3, 2022 |
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Mar 3, 2022 01:23
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You're correct; from a fixed point on the moon, the position of Earth in the sky never changes, because the Moon is tidally locked - the same side of the Moon always faces Earth. The Earth will appear to rotate in place (and get slightly bigger and smaller, because the Moon's orbit isn't a perfect circle). e: Apparently I'm not entirely correct; apparently the Earth wobbles around a few degrees in a cycle that repeats every 27 days due to something called libration. But the general location never changes. megane fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Mar 3, 2022 |
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Mar 3, 2022 01:45
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megane posted:You're correct; from a fixed point on the moon, the position of Earth in the sky never changes, because the Moon is tidally locked - the same side of the Moon always faces Earth. The Earth will appear to rotate in place (and get slightly bigger and smaller, because the Moon's orbit isn't a perfect circle). That's what I thought. Odd to me that Blue Byte, then, apparently created an entirely new skybox for the solar flares instead of adding a filter or additional effect to the existing skyboxes. As it is, the next update will probably be the last regular update of the LP. I've decided to fold the Savik Province overview, glance at the final crisis sector I inadvertently skipped over, and look at the Madrigal Islands and Greentide Archipelago projects into the comprehensive look at the Viridian Coves sector project. Madrigal and Greentide are mainly just a lot of making numbers go up, which isn't much fun to play and less fun to read about, so I'll try to finish the LP with something more interesting to look at. 
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Mar 3, 2022 15:38
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Heart of Stone Today I'm starting with a roundup of miscellaneous details. The Greentide Archipelago's sector project is a lot of tedious work for the reward of a new tier of temperate citizen above investors: the synths. I'm showing off this sector from my primary save, the Tlaloc Initiative.  Synths, unfortunately, are something of a booby prize. Rather than the Anno standard of progressively higher tiers of citizens making you steadily more money in exchange for steadily more complex demands, synths have less demands than investors and make you no additional money whatsoever. Factoring in the added costs of satisfying the synths, these residents are in fact a net drain on your income. The benefits of synths are two: first, they stack a ludicrous amount of population, making it very easy to game certain achievements. Second, they produce enormous amounts of workforce. So a citizen tier that costs you a bit of money in exchange for huge workforce generation sounds like a trade worth really considering on paper, and if synths were available in the arctic or moon there could be a good case for them. The problem is that they're only available in the temperate sector and only available after investors. The temperate region, under normal circumstances, will always have far, far more workforce than you need. The other edge case for synths I can think of beyond achievement cheese is if you're deliberately inflicting workforce penalties on yourself. If you remember the Orbit tech tree review, there's a few tier 4 techs that award benefits in exchange for reducing available workforce in the temperate region. If you want to stack multiple such techs, you could potentially run into legit workforce shortages in the temperate region and synths are one way to deal with that. Such a strategy, however, would have to be put in place only after unlocking synths because of the difficult and time-consuming process required to get synths in the first place. The idea behind synths is salvageable, but as implemented they're just a strange and unnecessary feature hidden behind a tedious numbers go up sector project. Now back to Esperanza.  As for the Madrigal Islands sector project, I am not doing it for the reason that it takes a corporation level of 100 to finish the project. That's a lot of numbers go up, and the reward is perhaps even more marginal than Greentide. I've never shown off this screen before because it's never been relevant. This screen lets you see the world market value of all the goods in the game for buying and selling. If you want to sell stuff to the world market regularly, you will probably care about this screen to sell what's in demand. I only use the world market regularly for supplying sector projects as needed. I've seen some people playing on higher difficulties make use of this to import goods as well - on the moon, it can be cheaper to import necessities than to produce them yourself. On the left of this screen, you can also see that there is in fact a cap on the total number of world market trade routes you can have going at once, importing and exporting. I have never had more than two going at once, my habit is to delete routes once I no longer need them. The reward for the Madrigal Islands project, then, is raising this cap. Three phases, an additional world market trade route slot for each. I understand that figuring out rewards for the player is difficult in a game like this, especially in a DLC sector explicitly meant as a challenge for players with a massively well established empire and resource base, but this just seems so very much not worth the effort.  Welcome to Savik Province, the one arctic sector in the Frontiers DLC pack. Unlike the new temperate sectors from that DLC, you can't choose Savik Province as your starting sector for the arctic and the hot springs here are why. They're a recolor of the drainage pumps from the tundra, dotting the sector and preventing access to various areas. You start by building a geothermal drill, which costs biopolymers and super alloys. This last requirement is why you can't start in Savik, there is not a single place you can land that has access to more than one mining slot without drills.   Once built, each drill requires 300 power to run for 10 minutes to clear the path, which will also require some iridium to complete.  Every cleared hot spring projects a considerable radius of warmth around it for housing.  The first time you do this, the game will prompt you to get 500 Joels in the sector.    Doing so unlocks the ability to turn these hot springs into geothermal power plants. There's a catch, though: building a geothermal plant substantially reduces the warmth radius of the hot spring. Given how limited power can be in the arctic, this is an interesting tradeoff you will have to consider. This is good! This is a good quandary to pose to the player! Both approaches have meaningful benefits to the player! More like this, Blue Byte! Unfortunately you can't start in Savik Province and thus likely will not spend much time here. Esperanza, in its entirety by the end of this update, could still be supplied exclusively from Ikkuma Glacier for its arctic needs. I've been grabbing and using the other arctic sectors because I want to, not because I need to. I wish things like this had been a part of the game's core design from the beginning, it's a great idea that's once again superfluous.    I accidentally skipped over the story trip here, but this is Trynmere Hideout, the final crisis sector of the game. Supposedly this is the Orbital Watch's secret base of operations on Earth, and some dialogue here suggests that the Watch has hired Earth mercenaries to do its dirty work on Earth. This will never be properly addressed or followed up on, and the objective here is to capture Watch facilities so Mysterious Woman can hack the Watch's network. We will not harm the Watch's ability to make war and Trynmere cycles through and recurs just like all the other crisis sectors.    It's all suitably Bond villain, especially at night. When I first played this, I was expecting a destruction extravaganza to thoroughly wreck the place. I was wrong. However, this place is much more heavily fortified than the other crisis sectors. There are seawalls, mines, and turrets everywhere. Protect your artillery ships at all costs here, you need their range and building-busting power desperately. Unless you're grotesquely overpowered like I am at this point and just blast through everything in a hail of energy shields and orbital lasers. That works, too.  Once you've found one of the servers, just wait around until the circle feels up. Orbital Watch ships will regularly spawn and attack while you're capturing.  That is that.  Now for the final regular sector project, Viridian Coves. This is what I've been quietly working on off-camera, building up this sector. On a whim, I will do this sector project entirely legit and not use the world market.    The goal here is a grand memorial to the first colonization of the moon. You know, the one that ended in disaster and the Orbital Watch taking over.  Step one, blow up some rocks.  Step two, the Global Union apparently can't find 2k futurebucks in its couch cushions.  Step three, towing. We're job creators!   Y'know, I believe Godwin at his word on this one by this point. A second biopolymer factory (since there wasn't room for more modules for the first) brings us up to 30 biopolymers per tick.  Now to deliver some of those biopolymers.   Phase one complete.  We can also now build fountains that launch blue fireworks in the temperate zone. Hey, they make more sense than the moon stuff.  Find the clickies.  You know, I'm starting to sympathize with Virgil a bit here.  Clickies.  Like I've repeatedly observed, the temperate region does not have workforce issues.  To be honest, doing this LP and really paying attention to what quest NPCs say made me reinstall Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri a few weeks ago. Nwabudike Morgan's gonna have his brain eaten by mind worms.   Now we can make fountains that shoot orange fireworks in helix patterns.  I either forgot to take a screenshot of the first step of the final phase or accidentally deleted it, but I had another save file that came to the rescue. A production of 20 qubit processors legit is going to take some work.  With Orbit production bonuses, it will take a fully expanded subzero cleanroom and then some. Ikkuma is already producing enough surplus molybdenum, but diamonds are coming up short.  Another diamond drill in Walbruk satisfies that need.  If it weren't for the Hardware Optimization tech, I'd need these to produce quantum computers and that would jack up the price of making quantum computers significantly. Diamond mines are expensive, and molybdenum is in high demand for other things.  Building all this nonsense including two transfer routes, to satisfy what four clicks can do with the world market. I of course delete all of this as soon as the quest step is over.  I am not currently producing any surplus titanium whatsoever, much less enough to build up a 120 stockpile in a reasonable amount of time. To the moon!  This is what a fully expanded titanium mine looks like. Rather than digging for titanium in mine shafts, miners use lasers to cut titanium out of the lunar rock. Building modules stack additional laser cutters on the site.  Sufficient.  3k power is trivial and satisfied by a new tidal plant.  ...Was there really not a harbor at the site for landing cargo and personnel to build the thing?  Rathole, yes. Dingy, no. This is why I built this sector up to investors ahead of time, I knew this one was coming.  One last tow job.  The final fountain shoots multi-colored fireworks that explode in geometric shapes.   As good a note as any to finish this LP on, I think!
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Mar 5, 2022 19:46
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Post-Script on Anno 2205 Another LP complete, another retrospective analysis from me. This time, for the first game I’ve LPed that no one’s LPed before me! Anno 2205 is my favorite city builder I’ve ever played, and I hope I’ve shown people why. It’s a bright, colorful, richly saturated world that I often spend a while just roaming in postcard view and taking screenshots. The god window means there’s never any misunderstandings about what you need to do or why something’s not working, there’s no cycle times or trade routes or other things that are vital yet unintuitive. Anno 2205 is for me a gorgeous game to relax with, and often eats far more time than I expect to spend. If you’re at all interested in trying city-builders, I give Anno 2205 two thumbs up as a great introduction to the genre. That being said, I imagine that veterans of the genre will quickly run into the game’s limitations. There’s less variety to the gameplay than you might expect from the different regions, there are only four crisis sectors, and a lot of the game still comes down to numbers go up. 2205 is innovative for the series, but it’s also a fair bit less complex than its predecessors and drastically less complex than its successor. I also can’t shake the feeling that Anno 2205 is fundamentally incomplete. I dwelled at the time on how the moon hotel project feels like it was meant for the lunar cities that we know were planned but cut. There’s no resolution to Virgil and the Orbital Watch. The moon is designed to be an expensive drain you want to spend as little time and effort on as possible despite being the focus of the campaign and most of the marketing. Anno 2205 to me feels like a game that the developers launched half-finished with an attitude that they’d fix it in patches and DLC. While Tundra and Orbit are great DLCs, Tundra is replete with palette swap re-use of existing models. Of the sector DLC, only the free Wildwater Bay doesn’t feel deeply underwhelming. As for the course of the LP itself, I’m calling this one a swing and a miss. Anno 2205 just isn’t a strong narrative game, and I think the reason Aurora back in Anno 2070 worked so well was because I came up with a way to use her as my voice to explain all the nitty-gritty and the instructive aspects of that LP. Chihiro tried and failed to serve the same purpose, in my eyes. It’s been a fun LP that I’ve enjoyed making very much, but for the LP itself I think I’ve done better. For the future, I have no plans for another LP at this time. I very much enjoy making LPs, but for me to LP a game it also needs to be the right game and I’ve now exhausted every game I’ve had my serious eye on for LPing that wouldn’t be a multi-year commitment. I hope all y’all have enjoyed this quiet little tour through Anno 2205!    
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Mar 5, 2022 19:49
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Blue Bytes vision of "environmentalism" is a bit screwed up, what with the nuclear power thing, drying up a bog, restarting oil drilling in the arctic or just blasting away returning ice sheets to keep shipping lanes open... Thanks for the LP, Cythereal! I've enjoyed it a lot
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Mar 5, 2022 20:52
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| # ? May 4, 2024 23:28 |
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Anno 2205 is a somewhat flawed game. But never let anyone tell you it's a bad game. 2205 is an excellent game and an excellent city builder.
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Mar 5, 2022 21:12
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