I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
Man I love that game. I agree the length of the main campaign is way too long. I heard one of the DLCs adds an alternate campaign that is more like 10 hours long, which sounds like the sweet spot (that’s about how long DCSS takes). So I’m looking forward to getting that at some point.
Oh, also, if the unlocks bug you, there’s a workshop mod that just unlocks them for you, and doesn’t block achievements. I highly recommend it
I recently had my fastest DCSS (dungeon crawl stone soup) win at like 1h50m without even trying to speed run. The core game has been getting faster in recent releases.