venice or bust

I think I'm not hugely impressed with the Anno 1404: Venice expansion.

The problem is that the main thing it's added is the espionage element. Whilst this kinda sounds like fun, in actuality it's a little tedious.

I mean, one of the things is that, even though you're doing espionage, which is meant to be secret, in reality it's more like sabotage. Plus it's not secret. If you do anything, then your victim knows it was you - how is that espionage?

Plus it focuses on adding another of the more tedious elements into city management. Basically, there are a couple of things in the game that I always found a bit boring and tedious. These are kinda 'passive' elements, in that you build the building and then essentially they do their job independent of you.

Of course, they take up space and add cost to your city, which makes them annoying and that's why I always used to turn them off. The things in question are the carpenter, who repairs building and the fire station, that puts out fires.

I mean there are a few other similar things - the game can have storms and sandstorms too - but again, those are pretty tedious, so I used to turn them off too.

Well, the espionage introduces another building like that. The acts of sabotage you can do also mean that you need the other buildings I turn off, because you can start fires and stuff.

Plus, whenever there's an enemy spy in your city you have to do a mission to find them before they cause any problems. Well, those missions were always the most tedious as well - the 'find the person' missions.

So I'm roundly unimpressed.

There are some good aspects - there have been some good game mechanic tweaks (which I suspect are actually mostly in the v1.2 patch - not sure if that's available without the game), for example, and having the new Venetian NPC is quite good. Plus volcanoes are interesting.

They've also done lots of scenarios, which can be fun, but there's no new story element. I would have liked the game much more if there's been a new story-based campaign, I think, as I really liked that part of the original game.

So yeah - mixed bag.

And what doesn't help is that I got so far with my previous open-ended game and the thought of starting a new one, especially now I'm back watching anime and just starting scanning again, actually feels like something I don't want to do.