This game, like its two predecessors, is an empire-building simulation. For this installment, Related Designs bulked up its existing staff in order to create the most ambitious A.D./Anno title to date, with the team size having exceeded 100. The game sports a brand new 3D engine as well as a number of features intended to make the interface more intuitive and monitoring of the empire more manageable. Striving for accessibility along with the increased depth, Related Designs went so far as to do usability testing with friends, family members, and even random people off the street to ensure that the game's front end is as approachable as possible.

1701 A.D. features some essentially optional military elements, but the bulk of the gameplay is focused on growing and maintaining an island-spanning empire largely at the city to city level. Despite the title's reference to a specific moment in history and its general New World colonial setting, 1701 A.D. does not historically recreate any particular conflict or geographical location. Each new game features a randomly generated map containing various unique land masses. Depending on how you set up the options, the map will be either fully revealed from the start or will be obscured by fog through which you must travel to clear, much like the fog of war in other real-time strategy titles. At the beginning of a game, you have nothing but a ship, which you will use to discover your first island and set up a colony.

Here, the game plays out like a city builder, starting with habitats, various resources production and collection facilities, businesses, places of worship, and so on. In the early stages of the game, your colony's inhabitants are classified as pioneers, the first of five social levels you will eventually unlock. For your inhabitants to progress up the social ladder, you must acquire various resources or build particular structures. Pioneers eventually become settlers, who become citizens, then merchants, and finally aristocrats. Early social levels require basics such as education, tobacco, alcohol, and religion, while later progressions require more exotic wares such as whale oil. Along the way, you must ensure that there are appropriate channels for collecting and transporting resources, creating more advanced structures, and so on. The actual technological and social level of your colonies will progress automatically, provided you have acquired or built the requisite resources or structures. This is a gradual process, so if your current inhabitants are settlers and you achieve what is necessary for the progression to citizens, various settlers around the city will begin converting their homes and the rest of the city to citizen-level structures until the whole city has been upgraded.

Your inhabitants have a happiness level that corresponds to their standard of living in your empire. In addition to this being influenced by various indirect factors, you can exert a significant measure of control over it simply by raising or lowering taxes. While lowering taxes will give your residents a boost in happiness (and give you a boost in popularity), it reduces your income. There is a straightforward happiness indicator that can be checked at any time, but there are also more general visual cues that extend to various aspects of the game to portray the current state of your empire. An attractive and bustling city crawling with people is more productive than a deserted one which has fallen into disrepair. After reaching a certain point, your citizens can build a large imposing statue in your honor, which becomes something of an in-game avatar representing your status among the people. When you are well loved, the statue stands tall and looks virtuous and honorable. When you are despised, it becomes hunched over and attracts crows which circle above ominously.

Eventually, you'll want to expand out and explore other islands. Each island has its own indiginous resources, meaning you'll have to acquire goods from elsewhere, by way of either trade or conquest. Regardless of the random map layout, the middle of the ocean always contains a neutral trader with whom you can barter for resources from his own particular set. You can sail out to him to conduct a trade, or set up a regular interval at which he will sail to one of your islands to conduct trades. After discovering other empires, you may set up trades with them as well, providing you remain on good terms.

You're not likely to remain on good terms forever, though, as one of the goals of 1701 A.D. is to conquer the whole of the game world. This can be done through a variety of means: economic, military, or financial. Despite warfare not being a required part of the game, you can certainly build up defenses and a military if that's how you prefer to take on your foes. Combat is a fairly straightforward rock/paper/scissors type of affair, with a few different types of foot soldiers, cavalry, and artillery, as well as warships and defensive structures. You may encounter pirates while sailing the high seas, but you can also launch broad assaults on enemy colonies. If you manage to wipe out enough of an enemy's colony, you can take over the island, which will afford you greater flexibility in trade routes and and production.

For more devious players, there are alternate underhanded means of doing harm to your foes. Certain structures will give you access to "lodge" characters, highly specialized agents that will infiltrate rival empires and strike from within without having to formally declare war. A poisoner can sneak into an enemy city and contaminate the water supply, which can have gradual but devastating effects on the population. The demi-god is an agitator figure who preaches from a soapbox in a densely populated section of an enemy colony and causes political unrest among the citizenry. Pickpockets do more subtle economic harm. Of course, there's always the bomber, who will sneak into an enemy city and strike a critical architectural weak point for massive damage.

All the while, your enemies may be trying to use the same tactics on you. Rival empires are guided by a number of unique artificial intelligences, which you may select in the initial options if you so choose. These factions include India, China, the Aztecs, marauding pirates, and so on. Each civilization has its own unique abilities. For example, the Chinese are able to calm the seas, slowing enemy ships. Aztects can invoke Montezuma's Revenge, which disables enemy infantry. There are also any number of randomly occurring natural disasters which will may befall your civilization, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanos. Depending on where the disaster strikes and how intense it is, you may be slightly inconvenienced or find one of your colonies in ruin.

Just about all of these various aspects of the game are customizable before each game starts, if you so desire. You can choose the number (up to three) and identity of the opposing factions, whether you want natural disasters, size of the world, relative availability of resources, and other options. The game also has various selectable victory conditions. 1701 A.D.'s "main" mode is its sandbox mode, but you can also play shorter games by establishing the winner as the civilization that acquires a given sum of money or resources, achieves a given population, completes a certain number of trade missions, or other criteria. You may also choose to start the game with a character called the Queen, who serves as a benefactor and financier early in the game but becomes displeased and aggressive once you start to gain too much power yourself. Another optional victory condition is to achieve complete independence from the Queen. There are also multiplayer modes allowing you to cooperate with or conquer up to three friends via internet play.

1701 A.D. looks to be a substantial step up for the series. The game has had a dedicated following in Europe for years, but with this latest iteration, publisher Aspyr Media hopes to repeat that success in North America as well. Related Designs seems to have put obvious effort into making the game approachable and straightforward while allowing a good deal of depth and diversity as the map starts to open up. Fans of empire-building or fans of real-time strategy interesting in checking out a game with less of a focus on warfare should keep 1701 A.D. in mind when it ships later this month.

Aspyr Media plans to ship Sunflowers' and Related Designs' 1701 A.D. later this month. Sunflowers also has a Nintendo DS version of the game in development; a release date has not yet been announced.