It really does look utterly beautiful when it all comes together, too, like an exquisitely detailed diorama that you can poke, prod and tweak to your heart’s content. Need to pop a police station downtown but there's no room? Just move the nearby houses further down the street to open up the space. Nobly assisting matters here is the "move" tool that lets you-for no resource cost at all-pick up and move any building to another location. Of course, it's also just as enjoyable to play the more visual puzzle game of city planning, slotting in that new building not only where its specific dimensions fit, but where it also retains proximity to its related structures in the chain. To maintain a firm hand on your economy you have to appreciate the various financial levers available to you, allowing fine adjustments to tax rates and production ratios that can genuinely mean the difference between keeping it in the black and going bankrupt. It's necessary to keep the requisite resources flowing and meet the housing and job demands of your population, but it's not sufficient.
You know you have to spend resources to grow, but your success depends on finding that ever-moving sweet spot between overreaching and not pushing far enough. Managing these productions chains-whether it's work clothes and sails or beer and pocket watches-is an enjoyable exercise in a kind of "balancing the books" sense. Extend this scenario a few hours into a game and it will encompass dozens of productions chains of increasing complexity and inter-connectivity. Building another sheep farm means finding the physical space for an additional farm as well as for all the extra housing for the new farmers. But soon the need for a navy means you've had to build a sailmaker's yard which is now diverting wool previously used by the knitter. Early on the choices you're making here are relatively simple the virgin terrain of your first settlement makes it easy to place the knitter near the farm so the wool is delivered swiftly and the warehouse within range so the finished goods can be collected for immediate sale.
But the basic principle remains constant: Satisfy your population by employing them to manufacture natural resources into commodities that encourage more people to move to your cities.Įverything becomes a production chain for you to configure, massage and optimize. As you grow and expand your reach across multiple islands and into the New World-and your empire undergoes its Industrial Revolution-you'll employ more advanced technologies, extracting coal and oil to fuel great belching factories and formidable steam engines. Each randomly generated map in the core sandbox mode unfurls as a mostly blank canvas, a glistening sea dotted with fertile islands waiting to be claimed by you and your (AI or human) opponents.
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