1503 A.D. review

[Anrhydeddu]

I did not like 1602 A.D. very much at all and it was not until I started playing 1503 that I remembered why. I went through most of the tutorial and here’s my review.

Basically, I am looking for a game that is an North American colonial version of my favorite series: Pharaoh/Zeus/et al. There are some elements from that series in 1503. You start off with a vacant land full of resources and you have to build up the population, using and trading for the resources you have. Going back to the original Railroad Tycoon, I have always loved to play games with a “resource chain”. For example in 1503, a Grain Field can yield Grain through a Grain Farm, which in turn produces Flour through a Mill which is turned into Food through a Bakery. Or, combining Wood and Ropes to build a Whaler through a Whaler Builder which can go out and gets Whale Blubber which is turned into Lamp Oil through a Whale Oil Factory that can be sold at a Lamp Oil Stand. 1503 is full of cool things like this to produce consumer goods, tradable goods and weapons. There are many types of buildings to build and through civilization levels and knowledge/research, you can build more advance type buildings be able to obtain better resources.

But here’s the problem. The information is presently so poorly, imo, that it is hard to even figure out where you are at and what you need to do. While you easily can tell how many of the basic materials (wood, tools, marble and bricks) you have and what is needed of those to build anything, you have no easy way of looking at any of your resources, esp. in a single report, to know how much of X you are producing or where you are lacking. For example, the most basic commodity is food to feed the population. All you have is a percentage of how much the population can obtain. The same is true of leather, cloth, salt and others. For a game that is centered around resources, it doesn’t give you a good way to even make decisions on how you are doing or what you need to do.

The other problem I see is the other element that is essential to resources and that is trading. Trading in this game can be a micromanagement hell. As much as the resource building and information is abstracted (as long you have the right mix of buildings, food magically appears), trading is the opposite. Here you have to physically load each commodity on a ship, send that ship to a specific place, unload, get the desired goods in exchange and repeat. This, however, can be performed through a trade agreement but it is still an unnecessary cumbersome process as far as I can tell (that is, there is no need to have ships to perform the actual mechanics of trading, just abstract that part).

I had not explored Diplomacy and Military that much but it does appear to be adequate.

There are two things about the game that makes it hard to get into even if I was able to workaround the above issues. First, the geography is still islands. I understand the settlement of the Caribbean and the island based economies but in this game, there are no continents at all. Many of the historical conflicts come from having multiple settlements on a single continent. I hated this aspect of geography in 1602 and they kept it the same for 1503.

Second, 1602 had a fatal flaw that made me give up the game and that is what happened when you Paused. In 1602, it kicks you out of the game into a banner filling up the screen. In 1503, they improved marginally by keeping you in the game but giving a popup screen covering the middle of the screen. But there is still no way you can read or look at anything in the game. There are four speed setting: Normal, 2x, 4x and half-speed and after any action, it automatically goes to normal speed so it’s not like Pharaoh where can crawl the game to analyze or read something. This becomes a near-fatal flaw in 1503 and combined that with the lack of presenting information in a clear and concise manner, makes me not want to keep playing it.