To optimize your gold, which is the main resource, you need to click on various houses to set a little needle on a continually shifting scale of happiness levels. The economy is hands off once you’ve plopped down your buildings—though, ironically, your tax rate is hands on. There are long stretches of time during which nothing happens. Is 10 honey enough? Why can’t I tell my ship to wait until there are 20? Or is 20 too many? As a result, the Transport Tycoon part of 1701 requires constant attention and tweaking. Unlike Caesar IV, which lets you specify that anything over a certain amount is to be traded, 1701 only deals in absolute numbers. Trade is a lag-intensive operation (these ships are awfully slow), so it’s hard to get a bead on how much of what needs to go where. Yeah, sure, I have “20 food†in my warehouse, but why do I keep running out? How much is being eaten, and how quickly? There’s no convenient way to monitor supply and demand, which makes trading more difficult. There’s no way to manage resources other than as hard numbers. It holds up for a while as a quaint 18th-century version of Transport Tycoon.īut, somewhere north of an hour into any given game, 1701 stops getting by on cute. Getting those goods begins as a simple matter of automating a ship to sell your excess lumber to the trader and then to swing by and pick up some tobacco from your second colony. You’re in an archipelago, where certain goods only come from certain islands. It has scads of charm and personality, and even a shrewd island gameplay model. does the first game very well—the one about the villagers with a weaver’s hut who want a church. It might as well be a different game.ġ701 A.D. The interface and graphics engine have to accomplish something else entirely. Now you’re dealing with a new set of problems on a whole different scale, with a new set of rules. But fast-forward a few thousand people and a handful of tech levels. Perhaps they want a church, or to go to school. It’s one thing to watch a few settlers tending a farm and maybe a weaver’s hut. The challenge of city builder games is keeping up with that inevitable sprawl. The problem with cities is that they sprawl, getting big and messy.
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