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.
I got far enough that I had a freighter and a billion credits, and then trailed off. There wasn’t any more interesting conflict or goals that I could see. Combat had become trivial. Material needs were met.
Maybe I should have finished the main story but that just seemed like a lot of clicking the map.
I sort of made that mistake when I recently played it, but I decided at some point not quite to where you were to just go through the main story. I regretted not doing it far sooner as it actually introduced some of the game mechanics via missions and made them make more sense. The story was better than I expected (read: my expectations were really low).
If you don’t mind, I can spoil the story for you:
NMS story
As you try to help Artemis, you discover that they’re just a simulation of a different reality. Some time after you discover that, you have a choice to either keep a version of that simulation working or shut it off. I dunno what the text says if you shut it off, but if you keep it, Artemis isn’t happy because now they know they’re living in a simulation that they cannot escape. Advancing a bit further, you find out that you are also living in a simulation and that the galaxy you’re in is no different from Artemis’. Atlas is the source of the simulation, but it is faulty for unknown reasons.
Advance some more and you’re then given a choice to reset the galaxy into something “different” - mechanically, it only affects where you restart and how likely you are to find certain types of planets.
Oh, I guess I did get pretty far in the story, then. I think it wanted me to go to the center of the galaxy when I stopped. That’s probably your last paragraph there.