For those you haven’t played them, it basically goes like this. You start with “farmers”, and they live in shitty hovels, and when you’ve managed to produced the handful of things they need to be Completely Happy (clothes and liquor basically), you can choose to upgrade them to “workers” who live in slightly less shitty brick houses, and those guys require accesses to sausages and (I shit you not) soap, and when you have that you can move on to artisans, and then engineers, and so forth.

On the surface, and to a non-polticized liberal subject, nothing about this is offensive. However it all seems built on the idea that some forms of labour are more advanced and valuable than others, and thus worthy of superior living conditions. Not only that, but it has a pretty clear idea of what that hierarchy is, notably placing menial work at the very bottom (in the category of people for whom fucking soap is optional) but also notably placing engineers above artisans, and investors above either.

Naturally when you interact with those NPCs (in Anno 1800 the farmer is a curly haired lady who weirdly resembles Jennifer Lawrence) they always refer to you as “master” and don’t seem to have any motives beyond consooming and outputting material resources but hey you can’t ask too much out of a video game.

I know I’m being fucking ridiculous but this was enough for me to basically lose interest in the franchise altogether and move on to something else.

edit: Also, I wouldn’t mind this progression system at all if the needs of your citizens just progressed universally, but the way the game works, you need to keep every tier of citizen active, because you just can’t have non-farmers work in farmer buildings and vice versa. So essentially class is totally codified in this simulation of society and that’s Totally Okay.