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| I really tried with Against the Storm by Nick Spaz 12/30/2025, 2:45pm PST | ||||
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| I think what makes a good strategy game is giving you a few goals to win, but many ways to do them.
Against the Storm is many goals to win, but few ways to do them. Someone got the bright idea that Anno would be more fun if you broke the complex production chains by letting RNG disable certain buildings. You either randomly get the necessary blueprints or you don't. A goal that requires 4 stages of production? You're out of luck if you're missing even one of the stage buildings. Get them offered to you one at a time in random order so you'll never bother investing in any without knowing if you'll get the full chain. You'll need an open browser tab to the wiki page just to know what those production chains are; the tooltips only tell you what a building produces, not what it consumes or what each good can be turned into. Instead of constantly unlocking new goodies, you're constantly holding off accumulated unlock choices because you don't know what random goals or random resources or random blueprints you're going to get. There's no undoing choices and you just got offered 4 bonuses for stuff you can't build, with 4 unlocked buildings you haven't chosen because not enough time has passed to see what random goals you'll be assigned. The closest feeling I can describe it as is a Diablo 2 Hell run with randomized enemy resistances; you don't dare spend any skill points until you encounter them. And isn't the hallmark of a fun RPG never spending skill points? But then the designers realized how broken a broken Anno production chain would be and just let you cheat with the trader. Luxury Goods and Trade Goods. Nothing else. Use their absurd resale value to buy out every trader's store to victory. All the way up to Veteran difficulty so far and there's still no need for any of the higher tier builindgs; in fact they suck since they consume stuff that could go into more trade and luxury goods. Just build the market for the passive effect that boosts resolve for goods sold, feeding even further into the broken trade cheese. The "boss" seal maps are an utter unfun slog. 
A random Redditor built this in a cave with a box of crayons. "We're not some random Redditor." -Against the Storm team |
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I really tried with Against the Storm by 12/30/2025, 2:45pm PST  The game clearly isn't for you, but you're misleading people. by 12/30/2025, 4:55pm PST Re: The game clearly isn't for you, but you're misleading people. by 12/31/2025, 1:07pm PST Re: I really tried with Against the Storm by 12/31/2025, 1:46pm PST INTER NT by 01/01/2026, 5:51pm PST |
