Anno (Series)

Anno: City-Building Strategy

Anno is a popular series of city-building strategy video games developed by Blue Byte and published by Ubisoft, focusing on sustainable villages, towns, and cities with balanced resource chains, trade routes, defense mechanisms, and living conditions.

What is Anno (Series)?

Anno (Series) refers to a series of popular city-building strategy video games developed by Blue Byte and published by Ubisoft. The games focus on building complex and sustainable villages, towns, and cities while balancing resource chains, trade routes, defense mechanisms, and living conditions of inhabitants.

The Anno series began in 1998 with the release of Anno 1602 (it was called 1602 A.D. in North America). Since then, there have been several main entries in the series including Anno 1503, Anno 1701, Anno 1404, Anno 2070, and Anno 1800. New entries tend to add more complex economic systems, additional ways to set up trade routes, and more advanced combat and defense tactics.

Throughout an Anno game, the player must balance numerous factors in their growing settlement like food production, access to raw materials, housing for inhabitants, taxes, growth, trade routes, diplomacy with AI players, and military defense. Players begin with a basic settlement and limited resources and must expand through developing agriculture, extracting raw materials, producing goods to trade, and maintaining diverse economic activity to thrive.

What sets the Anno series apart in the city-builder strategy genre is the intricate balance between numerous co-dependent systems. Maximizing productivity and technological improvements while keeping inhabitants happy and maintaining defenses requires astute resource planning. The games have received very positive press over the years and built a dedicated fan base for their meticulous and addictive gameplay.

Anno (Series) Features

Official Links