On my Geforce 7950GT, I experienced frame rate shifts from 60fps over the open sea to 30fps over undeveloped land, but once your city gets up to a reasonable heft, frames dropped into the teens or below, no matter how many effects or details I turned off. The base game is still as lovely to look at as it was a year ago, with its nice shading, normal mapping, lighting effects, and detailed building and ship models. Having to meet these needs forces you to engage in and make sense of virtually everything the game has to offer, from establishing (and often micromanaging) trade routes and maintaining diplomatic relations with your competitors, to setting out and creating new settlements on islands with more forgiving fertility in terms of what can be grown and produced there. They're always going to need things like tobacco and alcohol, lamp oil and education. For example, you can't simply opt out of certain "needs" for your citizens to simplify gameplay. I didn't really find the former to be true. It's billed as being as simple or complex as you want it to be. It has as much going for it as it has working against it, and while it brings some substantial gameplay and interaction to the table, the interface and objectives can range from fairly straightforward to completely illogical. An extensive reference tool has been built into the game, the ANNOpedia, which will answer many of your questions, but it really is a lot to get your head around.ฤก701 A.D. More time is lost trying to make sense of some of the objectives or unclarities, like why your citizenry won't progress despite having all of their needs met ages ago. Let's face it: You really can't get much done in this game without sinking about four or five hours per sitting. Colonizing the Caribbean (and now Asiatic territories) has rarely been so attractive and engaging. Gold Edition has finally arrived stateside, offering new content and challenges to fans of the original title, as well as new AI opposition and a powerful world creation suite. Not-so-hot on the heels of its European release in late 2007, German-developed 1701 A.D. Developer: Related Designs/Sunflowers Interactive