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What is the most addicting game you’ve played recently, what mechanic made it most addicting, and how do you feel in the midst of that mechanic?
I got into Anno 1800 (pro tip: you can get the base game cheap and cream API the DLC for free) about a year ago and Holy. Fucking. Shit.
I haven't had a game touch my dopamine receptors like that since I was a teenager first getting into gaming.
It was un-ironically as close as I've ever gotten to wire-heading. The temptation to play at the expense of food, sleep, work performance, sex, socialization was intense.
What made it so addicting:
The production chains being complex enough to be challenging while not so complex as to shut down from overwhelm.
Ship logistics was a ton of fun, getting better at that and seeing it pay off was sweet.
The Victorian aesthetic I find really compelling, and the tense action against the other AI (who you later realize are absolutely useless at the game) makes for a really fun juggling balance and tension.
The different areas provide variety and a steady march of new challenges to wrap your brain around.
Each phase of the game has a distinct feel, and is fun on its own merits. Desperate economic balancing when you're on an island or two. Balancing wide/tall expansion with conflict in mid game. And finally hyper-optimizing and paper-clipping in end game once you've wiped out everything else.
I finally stopped playing incredibly suddenly once I was at about 150,000 investors and had just started the final production chains for the higher level skyscraper goods. The level of optimization required at that point (my goal was 1,000,000 investors) meant I was largely following templates I found on the German (lol) template sites, including their researched specialist stacks. At that point I wasn't really playing anymore, I was just following digital Lego instructions. I was also getting mildly tired of having to raze and re-design suboptimal islands repeatedly as I got better/learned how the game worked. I guess I could have continued to play blind and try to get to 1mil myself, but that would have taken so long, and required even more "raze and re-design" moments, so I got bored and stopped. Sucked a good couple hundred hours of me before I did though.
How do you feel in the midst of that mechanic:
Fucking incredible, it was the perfect level of challenge and the challenge level contributed to increase at a pace that allowed you to skill up perfectly in sync with it.
It was seriously so compelling and so fucking fun.
It was basically an instant drop into flow state on command, it was magical.
The sudden end was kind of surprising to me. I went from being so compelled to play it to basically 0 interest over night. Other games I adore (civilization, paradox games, battlefield) I have played for decades and will continue to play for decades. Anno was a whirlwind romance in comparison.
Highly recommend.
Which mods would you recommend for the first-time player?
Looking at my game files, I don't seem to have any(??). It doesn't even have a Steam workshop.
I can't remember why I bought the game, as you seem to be able to pirate the whole thing.
Maybe I wanted mods but never got around to it because I was enjoying vanilla.
Extended power plant range was on the list of mods I wanted though, kind of cheaty, but it gets tedious.
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