standing next to me rss

why not be depressing?

so like a while earlier I was contemplating some topic or other and I wanted to write a post on it, but I was worried that it’d be too depressing

someone told me recently “your writing is so wistful” and I immediately felt like…am I a depressing person? who wants to read a blog where everything is sad?

but then I was like

holy fuck when did I become such a panderer? I started this for myself, not to:

so okay if it’s depressing all the time and no one wants to read it I guess that’s fine also

anyways I can’t remember what the topic was so instead I’m going to talk about Anno

Anno is a series of games that focus, more or less, around supply chains; your population starts with a bunch of low-tier needs e.g. fish, potatoes, and woolen clothes. the supply chains are “simple” in the sense that:

as the game progresses, the chains start getting more complex. for example, to make soap you need tallow, and to make tallow, you need pigs (supply chain three goods long). to make bread, you need flour, and to make flour, you need wheat, but you might not be capable of producing wheat in your starting location. that means you need to ship wheat from another island to the island you started on.

and then they get even more complex. you discover the New World, and there’re raw materials you can only produce in the New World…but can only produce in the Old World (where you start in). your people need fur coats, and fur comes from the Old World, but cotton comes from the New World, and you can only combine them in the Old World.

there’s also oil, which exists in the Old World, but is much more plentiful in the New World, so you need special ships (that can only carry oil) to bring it over. oh, and oil is used for electrification, but even on an island, it can’t be carried by the roads you’ve built to transport goods around so far. instead, to move oil, you need railroads, which take up more space, which you likely already filled with buildings, so you need to do some significant remodelling.

I usually get stuck and quit at this point (electrification) because the prospect is just so daunting, until I learnt a lesson that I now see hits at the same root of not writing: fear that everything won’t be perfect

I used to spend a ton of time “beauty building” - you can arrange your buildings in grids out of either laziness or efficiency, but it won’t look very realistic.

then one day I spent a whole fucking hour just putting random decorations + arranging the farm fields on a hill

it wasn’t very efficient, but damn if I didn’t feel good about it

and when I hit Engineers (the population tier at which oil becomes relevant), this time I was just like “yo fuck it I’ll make it nice later” and just did a grid until I had enough resources and time to demolish the old stuff and build a good ol’ industrial centre

anyway so back to Anno; the iteration I’m describing above is Anno 1800 (the second newest), but I actually started with Anno 2205, which is set in the future (the number is the year in which the game takes place). 2205 is generally kind of panned by a large part of the fanbase because it changed or discarded a lot of the mechanics that made the game “interesting” (according to them). I’d say that without a doubt, it definitely is the easiest in the series; for example, you need to build ships to transport goods between islands in other titles in the series, but in 2205, entire regions share resource stockpiles, so this aspect of supply chain management is entirely absent.

the setting and graphics were SUPER cool, though

now I wanna play some Anno…

also wtf by just yapping I wrote almost 800 words straight