I’ve been playing a fair amount of Anno 2070 recently.  When I first started playing this game, I tried to play it like a city builder; I tried to create an island that was balanced in its production and consumption to minimize transport of good over long distances.  Needless to say, my early attempts were a jumbled mess and while they had reached a level of stability, any growth beyond engineers was quite impossible.

After doing some digging online, I had a revelation – I wasn’t playing a city builder, I was playing a game about commodity transport.

For me, the essence of a city builder is traffic simulation, managing influences on property values, and balancing a budget via explicit taxation to pay for implicit demands of city services.  In Anno 2070, many of these things are inverted: There is no traffic simulation, there is only connectedness and radius – If goods and services are within the radius and connected by a road, they will act as expected.  Also, There are no property value influences – so long as commodity needs are met, a certain percentage of residential buildings will upgrade to the next higher level (even if they are right next to a strip-mine).  Finally, taxation in Anno is implicit (and mapped directly to happiness), but the maintenance costs of every building is explicit, so it is entirely possible that your city eventually stalls because you can’t keep taxes low and maintain the necessary commodities.

For me, this lead to a much more crunchy kind of game, and a spreadsheet was born.  I wanted the answer to the question, given a number of residences, how many would be upgraded to each level?  Additionally, how many commodity buildings should I build and in what proportions should I build them?  This helped me create an economy without a lot of wasted funds (I didn’t have unnecessary buildings), resources (all my basic resources were combined in the right proportions to create commodities), or commodities (I had only the necessary commodities to fulfill need).

My next steps are to improve my sheet by also computing maintenance cost of buildings, power needs, and eco balance impact so that I can also plan for power and eco-balance as well as simulate budget numbers.  This should hopefully allow me to get an optimal archipelago of commodity flow, which would be pretty awesome.