I’ve been playing a lot of video games lately. Because I told my wife that I would explain “what is Anno and what is Banished” in the next Report, I will be putting off talking about all the yuri I’ve been reading to talk about these games instead.
The broadest way to delineate these two genres, is to explain them as a confluence of tropes, as is always the case. Anno is a “city builder” game insofar as you build infrastructure to maintain a populace, which is true for Banished as well. They diverge when it comes to what this infrastructure entails, specifically regarding scale. I’d term these “strategy” and “survival” respectively. Anno focuses on broad industrial supply chains and relations with NPCs who are doing the same, whereas Banished focuses on micromanagement of local resources down to the level of placing individual workers. I use these games as reference points for these “strategic city builder” and “survival city builder” games as they are often the inspiration of other games in terms of overall game design, so to that end I’ll explain what aspects of their gameplay you’d expect to see in other games.
For an Anno-like, you’d expect a competition with NPCs, typically with land divvied up among discrete islands both you and your competitors can claim. Each island will have specific fertilities and available resource deposits. Residents of your islands will be treated numerically as overall “workforce,” you don’t manage immigration so much as you maintain the necessities of households which will increase or decrease the available workforce per household (this can be likened to population but isn’t necessarily equivalent). Households are then divided by class, and a home of one class must meet all requirement at that class to be upgraded into another class. When it comes to industry, the workplaces merely need road access (or in some cases commuter port access) to the residences in which a workforce resides to fulfill its requirements. Resources generated at a workplace will be delivered to trading posts or warehouses which share an inventory per island, thus allowing any warehouse to pull from it as needed.
For a Banished-like, you’re mainly contending with the environment itself; there might be competitors in some regard, bandits and the like, but Banished itself didn’t have such a militaristic element. Each resident has a name, the exist individually, and they must be housed. Housing can be upgraded, but it only allows for improved environment and does not determine the class of its residents. Workplaces must be accessible by their workers, of course, who will commute from their homes to their work. Resources do not have some mystical inventory, they must be stored in some location where they will later be retrieved. Deposits of minerals can be depleted over time, I honestly don’t recall if this was the case in Banished itself, but it’s common enough in its successors to note.
House of Legacy is a “sandbox strategy game,” where you play the head of a family kicked out of some place because of some war, you must attempt to then rebuild this clan somehow. You start out having to manage a single person’s stamina to do as many gig jobs as possible to earn money to start hiring retainers to do all that for you. Once you have the funds, you can start investing in shops and farms while rebuilding your family’s estate. There’s plenty of political management with relationships with other clans and trying to get smarter people to marry into your family so you can have all your children pass the imperial exams. I only played two hours or so thus far, partly because I kept trying to flirt with girls and some of them brought a harassment case before the local lord to sentence me to lashings? Is yuri even legal in this game? Anyway, let’s call it a 7/10, that’s all mostly my fault for trying to play a bimbo build right off the bat (sacrificed intelligence so I could put the points into beauty).
TerraScape is a deck-based puzzle game. I don’t usually play that sort of thing so I gave it a bit of a try. I don’t really know how to talk about this sort of thing? You pull cards and they let you build things on tiles that sometimes combine, you gotta get enough points to earn more card pulls. I played 3 hours because I was on the phone with my mother and needed something to fidget with, I guess. Let’s call this one a 5/10, try it if you’re into that kind of thing.
New Cycle is a Banished-like set in a post-apocalypse scenario. The aesthetic is fairly neat, being all survivor camp chic, plus you don’t need to stick to the grid. Roads aren’t completely necessary for all buildings, but they do also act as power lines, so you’ll need them for that. I messed up my food supply (I do this in every game, alright) which made people upset, and because they were upset they were more susceptible to being upset, thus they were basically rioting about having been rioting in perpetuity. Sure, if I suddenly increased the standard of living tenfold, they might have gotten over it, but that kind of sucked. I only played 2 hours, I really struggle to get into Banished with all the micromanagement and such… 4/10.
Ballads of Hongye: REBORN is the $2 Chinese version of Anno. It’s got this fun science fantasy vibe; some people complain about the “Ghibli type” illustrations, but it’s cute and not actually very Ghibli so much as just otaku-like? Managing water as a resource in an Anno-like was definitely a new thing to me, but it’s just another stat in the spreadsheet, if not for the irrigation canals that can also be used as fertilizer if you place a pig sty on them. If you aren’t playing the hardcore mode, forget what it’s called, the Feng Shui mechanic can be disabled, but I’d argue it’s a much for fun spin on grid-based building than something like Anno 117’s new 45 degree grid. Some buildings want to face some directions, but they also want the wind and sun to hit the building in certain ways, literally every building you place is a puzzle… to be fair, given that any “city builder” game will have area effects, you’ll always have to think about placement anyway, right? Everyone wants to be near a well, but not that close. Every building can be upgraded like a bajillion times, which you should be constantly doing, and residences don’t just upgrade to other classes, they also get bigger. I played for like 6 hours before the music started getting really distorted and the computer crashed. 8/10.
Manor Lords is Banished with Anno characteristics, in my opinion. Everyone starves because you didn’t plant enough fields in the first twenty seconds of the game and you don’t get regional wealth to buy vegetable seeds until you upgrade burgage plots to level 2 which is also why you can’t afford to import any food either. Okay, that’s just me, I really suck at managing food supplies. Recent updates have added the need for a continuous supply of tools for building maintenance, which is just another reason everything is falling apart and nobody wants to work anymore. There’s castles now, well there have always been manors in Manor Lords, but they got stone walls recently. Did I build a castle? No, I tried to stop nearby bandits from stealing all my flour by sending a militia to destroy their camp, which just pissed them off and they burned down my village… twice. Anyway, I’ve played 23 hours since I got the game a million years ago, mostly because my wife’s computer struggles with it (the fans almost scream loud enough to drown out the cries of my starving villagers). 9/10.
Laysara: Summit Kingdom is a pretty unique Anno-like, inspired by Himalayan cultures. Despite having social classes, or castes, you don’t need to upgrade residences from one to another, you just build housing for that caste. Everything is build on the slopes of mountains, which you can connect to other slopes with bridges or, like, elevators? Lifts? Those require yaks, you’ll be managing your yak population about as closely as that of any given caste. Though, you don’t need to worry too much about population, as you can just make up for workforce by spending money! The deficit on this mountain is insane. You don’t just get money from people, you have to give them spots to “offer” “donations,” and those spots obviously have maintenance costs. Supply chains aren’t exactly Anno-like, since there’s not magical warehouses, you have to denote where any given building exports to, which does have a range that can be increased with better roads. Farm fields are quite interesting, since they connect together so each one can act as if it’s the closest to the road for delivery range. I haven’t managed to satisfy anyone enough to upgrade residences, but that’s certainly a thing that can happen. After 1.5 hours, I can still say I’ll definitely be playing more of this in the future, 8/10.
Flotsam is more of a colony sim, I thought it looked kind of cute so I tried it anyway. Remember how I said I suck at keeping people fed? They all died. All except one person on my boat died. I soft-locked the game by letting my doctor starve to death before I finished the medicine quest. Maybe they didn’t all starve, some of them died of dehydration, because too many starved to run the desalinator after I finally remembered to collect tinder to run it. You can get an electric desalinator, though, don’t know how to run that well enough to still have power for my ship to move though! Actually, that’s just because too many people died to keep the power running. Anyway, how did I play 6 hours of that, 5/10.
Fabledom is, surprisingly, Banished-like. I would have thought it would be more like Anno, honestly. You’re the child of some king and queen who send all their children off to start their own kingdoms, you can choose to be a prince or princess and then if you’re gay or weird. Courtship is a fun thing to add to Banished, everyone’s starving while those two guys over there just work in the tulip field making sure I always have enough tulips to send to the neighboring princess. Look, she’s really into farming, maybe if I can bag her we’ll have less issue keeping people fed? The witch’s curse of hunger is not as important as my love life, stupid fucking “fablings.” At one point, I realized too many of my residents had too long of commutes, and it was ruining industrial efficiency, so I fired everyone from their jobs and hired them at new places, I call this the Great Shift. So many people starved anyway. My soldiers all died because I didn’t have whatever the hell that troll or ogre or whatever wanted and I had to fight it… do I just suck at Banished? I was doing pretty good at making people forget how close they lived to mines by placing trees on all the roads, though. I really like how you can place decorations on top of the roads. It’s not like I lost, yet, I’ll come back to my save and finish that embassy so I can send more flowers to my not-yet-girlfriend, giving this a 7/10 after 4 hours of gameplay.
If you expected me to leave a review of Anno 1800 itself, after waiting until the Steam Winter Sale started, fighting with the payment process because the system was overwhelmed, and having to pay $20 more than expected because they got my ass and didn’t discount it as much as the last sale… you’re wrong? I’m not doing that! I played 5 hours then went back to reading yuri because I’m still not over my last playthrough where I realized I didn’t have all the good DLC and had to wait to buy the game. I don’t know where the fuck I played it before, but I definitely had the High Life and Docklands DLC, so it’s not like I, uh, looted it. Anyway, uh, Happy Hanukkah!