
It's just way too hard to figure out how things work and what form your base will need to take, before everything stalls out, starved of vital resources. OK, so, fair warning: it looks like there's no possible way you could 'win' with your first colony. The new Anno game in development takes place in the 1800's and they claimed they're going back to the old formula. The most recent Anno game made the mistake of trying to change the genre and then getting confused as to why their customer base has abandoned them. They completely changed that core gameplay. The most recent Anno game, 2205, is a dumpster fire. Its a charming sort of gameplay almost on par with Factorio, where you're always doing something, always expanding, always adjusting your supply routes to produce enough resources on time and on budget. One game might have you shipping whale oil, the other might have you shipping cheeseburgers, but its the same basic gameplay. Every game is basically the same thing in a slightly different time period. The entire game is about setting up networks of boats moving goods from one island to another as needed. They're all about logistics chains between islands. All of the prior Anno games, other than 2205, are fantastic.

You can't go wrong with any Anno game aside from 2205. I'm sure there's other stuff I've missed, so I'd love to hear about it. A lot of them lack a distinct art style, or are way too complex, or are still in Early Access, which mostly disqualify a lot of them to me. There are a lot of indie games too, but I'm leery about a lot of them. It looks a lot like Planetbase, but maybe with more complexity, which sounds cool. Surviving Mars is brand new and may be another good choice. I see the Anno series is on sale on Steam right now, and I'm considering buying it (2070 or 2205), but I'm not sure if it's quite what I'm looking for. I also recently played Planetbase, but it has the exact same problems that I mentioned for Banished.

I played Banished for a while, and I like it, but after you get past the initial difficulty hump (and mediocre UI), it becomes really easy, and there's not much variety or strategy after that. I like having a lot of different resources to manage, and little to no combat. I really like games like Settlers where the goal is to set up a resource chain to build increasingly-advanced stuff.
