Dawn of Discovery Gold Edition: An Underrated PC Classic

There are countless strategic war games on the market, but Ubisoft's Dawn of Discovery (released in Europe as Anno 1404) is the best of a rare species--the peacetime simulator. The occasional naval skirmish notwithstanding, Dawn of Discovery and the expansion pack now included in the game's recently released Gold Edition have a decidedly peaceable soul. City-building, trade, diplomacy, and a wonderfully complex web of resources are the real draw here.

The latest in Ubisoft's venerable Anno series of historical sims, Dawn of Discovery is set at the beginning of the fifteenth century, but don't expect to see recognizable land masses or historical rulers. Dawn of Discovery is a parallel realm, a world with wide expanses of ocean dotted with islands. Virtually all trade, warfare (what little there is), and transportation takes place at sea. By navigating your flagship through the briny deep, you'll discover new lands to claim and new trade partners to fill your coffers.

You can choose between a campaign mode, a number of scenario games, or the sandbox-like continuous game. Campaign mode is story-driven and linear. It provides a good tutorial of the game's basics and gets you acclimated to the interface, so it's the best place for neophyte players to start.

In the first chapter of the campaign, you're a vassal of the emperor and are charged with developing a small Occidental village into a thriving town. Lord Richard Northburgh, the emperor's treasurer, grants you your first ship and all the supplies you'll need to get started with city-building. Throughout each chapter of the campaign, Northburgh offers helpful advice and instructions; he is your set of training wheels. You'll need them at first, too; although the game's controls are generally easy to use and intuitive, more complicated tasks like automating trade routes or maximizing your crop yield with better field placement are easier with some help the first time you do them. No story is complete without a villain, and it isn't hard to predict that the weasel-like Guy Forcas will one day be your adversary. In subsequent chapters, you'll move from the dark waters of the Occident to the cerulean blue seas and exotic islands of the Orient, eventually gaining the Sultan's trust and building settlements there as well.

But Dawn of Discovery is really at its best once the training wheels come off. Once you've finished the campaign, scenario mode gives you new games with pre-set victory conditions ranging from mildly challenging to fiendishly difficult. Without the campaign's artificially imposed limits on city development and resource management, you're now free to explore the intricacies of the ever-evolving network of resources it takes to supply your wealthier citizens. Those picky nobles will never be satisfied with humble linen tunics and a mug of cider; their demands are for more luxurious goods like leather, bread, furs, wine, meat, and even that cutting-edge technological innovation of the fifteenth century, spectacles. In order to keep them happy, your production chain needs to keep pace with your population's advancement. Supply chains can be extensive and require raw materials from far-flung lands in both the Occident and the Orient. If you can't grow or mine it, you'll need to buy it, so foster good trade relations whenever possible.

The continuous game option is similar to scenario mode, but with even more flexibility. Instead of being given a set of pre-determined victory conditions, you decide for yourself which challenges you'll take on or even play with no victory conditions at all--just pure fun in a beautifully designed sandbox. If you enjoy naval battles, fill your oceans with aggressive corsairs. If you enjoy the missions that computer players give you as a change of pace from resource management and city building, simply push the slider to have your allies keep you hopping. Don't like missions? Turn them off entirely. You can change virtually any aspect of the game to suit your taste.

The Venice expansion brings new scenarios and additional resources, ships, and missions, but the fundamental game play of Dawn of Discovery remains largely unchanged. Espionage is a new twist and allows you to take over other players' lands by buying out their council seats--intriguing, but not revolutionary. The most significant change Venice adds is a multiplayer option that the original game sorely needed. Multiplayer is as customizable as the sandbox mode, letting you choose either a competitive or a cooperative game and giving you the power to set your own victory conditions.

If Dawn of Discovery has a flaw, it's the clumsy ground combat system. It's obviously an afterthought, but thankfully it isn't forced on players aside from one chapter in the campaign mode. You can play most scenarios or any continuous game without raising so much as a single army, if you like--and as combat is an uninteresting battle of attrition during which you can do nothing but watch, that's a very good thing. Chances are you'll be much more interested in the allure of exploring, building settlements, raising a cathedral or a grand mosque, prospering through trade, developing your resource network, or just zooming in on the beautiful fully-rendered 3-D graphics to watch your citizens go about their daily lives.

Although its peace-loving emphasis on construction and alliance might make Dawn of Discovery seem like a family-friendly game, younger children are more likely to be frustrated than charmed by the game's complexity. Grown-up gamers who like resource management without too much fussy micro-management will enjoy the intricacy of resource chains, the pleasure of exploring and settling new lands, and the variety of tools available to let them tailor the game to their tastes.

If you like strategy and simulation games but find that war games are hell, then Dawn of Discovery's Gold Edition might be your personal slice of gaming heaven.Dawn of Discovery: Gold Edition is available on Steam and at most PC game retailers.