Hi, my name is Nick, and it has been at least four years since my last city-building game experience. I’m here to admit I’m back on the wagon ... or off the wagon ... or ... whatever. Anno 1404: Dawn of Discovery is the fourth game in the Anno series, and boy have the developers been busy with this one!

Anno 1404 is best described as a city-building game. The game is set in the 15th century and involves the discovery of the Orient. There are two main methods of playing the game: The first is continuous play, in which you manually set all your options, opponents and hazards and play toward whichever goals you specify, and the second method of playing Anno 1404 is the story mode, in which early missions act more as a gameplay tutorial. You’ll start helping Cardinal Lucius and lending support to the crusades until you find that your support is not being used as you thought. I initially started in story mode, but it was not long before I realized how much content there is in this game. There are a lot of missions to complete and a single continuous game can take nearly 40 hours! That was on easy with one docile opponent to boot.

Like other games in the Anno series, you develop your cities on islands. Each city starts as a warehouse dock, and each warehouse will send workers to pick up goods from industries you build in its area of influence. If you wish to build housing — the only consistent way to earn money — you’ll need to build a community center, which will allow people to get goods in its area of influence.

After you place housing, peasants will move in and provide you with a small amount of cash flow. All they ask for is fish and access to the community center. The money from this won’t be enough for long, and you’ll beg for more. Luckily, people will pay more if you provide them with access to a church and cider to drink. Fully content peasants (meaning low enough taxes) will upgrade their housing if you provide the materials; this upgrades them to citizens and allows more people to move into the same area. Each civilization level will unlock not only the industries that your people need to advance, but also other resources, military buildings and other colony options.

After peasants comes citizens. Citizens are slightly more demanding than peasants. Citizens need spices, clothes and access to a tavern in order to advance to patricians. The patricians are quite the divas, requiring a large amount of bread, beer, leather clothes, books and access to both a cathedral and a prison. To make things a little more complicated, after you get a high enough population, they will start to demand candelabras. Some of these items might require up to six different buildings to create one product! The final civilization stage is the creation of noblemen, who demand beef, wine, fur coats, glasses and gold-lined robes.

If you’ve been keeping count, that is a total of 19 services an area of housing needs to have in order to advance to noblemen. Things can get quite complicated, since each island is only capable of growing up to four plant types (usually three and a single customizable source), and some have few mine resources. You’ll rarely find all the materials you need in one spot. The great part of Anno 1404’s version of complicated is that unlike a lot of other building games, you always know what is where and which part of the world is manufacturing those goods. On the flip side, the most difficult and frustrating part of the manufacturing of goods is knowing how much is being made and needed at any given time.

For example, it seems that to make leather clothes you need a tanner, who requires salt and pig skins. The salt is made from a brine mine and coal (there are two sources), but nothing really seems to work out in proper quantities. There is always more brine and coal than needed to make salt and more salt than is needed to make the final product. But there’s not so much that you could build another set of buildings because then there are large shortages. Even after you mess with all of this, you really don’t know how much you need and how much you are really making! It can be frustrating.

The last major detail in the complexity of the game — and the angle that brings Anno 1404 above other building games — is the integration and development of the Orient. You need to build relations with the Emperor to gain access to better supplies and buildings so that you can run your own oriental colony. Luckily, the Orient is capable of meeting its own needs, and cargo ends up being shipped in just one direction — to your main settlement. Once nomads settle in the Orient, they will ask for milk and figs and, a little later, for a mosque and ownership of carpets. When upgraded to the second and final stage of Envoys, they’ll ask for coffee, pearls, perfume, marzipan and access to a bath house.

The Orient supplies your colony with spices, indigo dyes, gold, quartz, copper and silk, so they are essential to development early on. But of course, there is another trick up Anno 1404 ’s sleeve. The Orient is represented largely as desert with only small areas near water sources. You need to build wells (and restock them with water) in green small areas of the desert to produce goods. Anno 1404 is full of small details like this, and as the saying goes, the pirate is in the details! Or was it devil? Same thing, I guess.

The most disappointing area of the previous Anno game was the lack of action in the world. This has definitely changed in Anno 1404. The Empire and Orient are the two main looming powers you can communicate with, and you’ll receive a lot of quests, support and trading from both. The Corsairs (pirates, yarr!) are a hostile group and will hunt down your trading ships, but play your cards right and they can be a powerful ally as they team up against your enemies and supply war materials directly to you. A number of special individuals and random quests from your settlements are found in structures on islands. Some will sell goods, offer quests and protection, trade for special items and more. There is almost always something you can be doing besides building your colony — some with poor rewards and some with great ones.

After playing 1701 AD (aka Anno 1701), I was very curious to see how the series would evolve as a building game, because in all honesty, I was just lukewarm on it. To put it simply, I was blown away with the latest installment. Almost all the issues I had with the play style and limitations in the previous game have been fixed in Anno 1404. The industries are customizable in shape and design, trading and cargo handling is well-controlled, as is the addition of honor so you can buy benefits. And relations with the Orient add a depth of strategy. All ships can be customized with special items, giving bonuses to running costs, durability, speed, cargo capacity or combat abilities. There also are quite a few options to add bonuses to entire islands.

The largest change has been a complete overhaul to the war system. Ground combat is actually fun, tactical and requires a great deal of concentration to properly accomplish — despite its slow pace. Each ground-based war unit is capable of forming its own ship and taking orders, similar to a cargo ship. The first unit to land on enemy soil establishes a castle, and all units after must pass through that castle to land. Units don’t actively fight; they need to travel to the location you choose and set up camp. They can fight within their area of influence and convert warehouses in a smaller radius (and any buildings controlled by that warehouse).

Also a great feature is the ability to build historic warehouses, grand cathedrals and grand mosques — all epic buildings requiring hours of work to complete and yielding large benefits. All these little things really add up to a complete, balanced and deep game and make this one an absolute joy to play.

Anno 1404 continues the tradition of gorgeous city-building, the graphics are detailed and well-animated, and a postcard mode makes them even prettier. The music in game is probably the best music I have heard in any game ever. Some songs are familiar but classically so (visit the Anno 1404 Web site to hear a bit of it) and don’t get old.

I did have a couple issues with running the game. I found the loading times of save games to be excessive. There also seems to be some issues with large maps and complex civilizations. A highly developed large map will start to crash after a couple hours, and as you continue to build, it will crash in less and less time. A newer computer may have fewer problems, as would playing on the smaller maps, because I had no problems on those.

I have another beef I don’t often mention, and that is the game manual. It is very, very poor. It lacks any detail you need to really understand the game. There is never any information on what a building is capable of supplying what for your people. When you ship long distances, it is not easy to guess or quickly adjust your production capacities. I also noticed that all the mined/collected resources in the game can be regenerated with money — except for pearls. While the amount of pearls left in a source is viewable, it isn’t easy to see; I’m not sure if this is a bug or if they auto regenerate. Something is not right either way.

Anno 1404 is a major leap forward in the city-building genre; where others have failed, it has come up and excelled. Even with the crashing bug I experienced, I kept coming back to play more and more. There is an incredible sense of achievement in Anno 1404 that just pulled me back in. As you try to accomplish more and push a little further, there always seems to be another hurdle thrown your way. The game introduces new needs for your people or population requirements just before you get to the goal you were aiming for, which sometimes requires you to rethink how you are going to work entire trade routes.

There is a perfect balance of complexity to Anno 1404. It makes you think and plan your actions in advance. The game isn’t so complex that you can’t get your head around it; most games fail at this, and that is the real magic. There are also dozens of achievements, medals and goals to obtain in Anno 1404, and I think I’m going back to try earn some more.