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.
not all of them - Guild Wars 2 operates on a buy-to-play basis for its yearly expansions - you buy it once and have access to that content as long as the game is alive
it does have a premium currency store, but it’s all stuff you can do without - mostly cosmetics and a few QoL tools, but the game also lets you convert ingame currency to the premium one (over 11 years of casual play I apparently bought almost 2k GBP worth of stuff without ever spending an actual penny on the store)