Anno 2205, while it has rather cool module addons so you don't need quite as much building spam for the same efficiency, is also afflicted by uplay and ubisoft/blue byte not realizing that while it is nice to be able to into space...there are also other city building games out there, and they focus on the building better than anno, because the people are not the point in the end in anno, your economy is. From what I've seen in videos you don't even have to bother keeping track of where your logistics is or where the house support buildings are close enough to the houses, the former just makes it cost less trucks and the latter is either fufilled or isn't island-wide it seems. You do however get to know exact proportions of production chains in the tooltip, which is quite convienient.
Anno 1404 is a game about trying to squeeze as much production as you can out of a map of generated islands, with the southern islands having special oriental goods your northern occidental fancypants population will want eventually. Everything must be within range of a warehouse, a city center, or a super monument. If a house is outside the influence zone of something it needs it will not upgrade to bigger, more taxable personship, even if the building could reasonably be seen over all the buildings in-between them and it. There are pirates if you enable them. The AI is sharing the map with you and will claim islands if you don't. It can also be traded with or beatup if you bother to build a military. Your flagship (and your trade ships, and your warships) can do more than fetch quests, although the quest variety is still crap. The neutral traders will do more than mooch off your monetary income when you need materials, and in fact have preferences on what they'd pay more to buy off you if its available for trade. Your trade routes do not spring into implied-existence perfectly safe and instantly changable, you need to build the boats. And then you need to setup the trade route, and maybe pay off the pirates temporarily while you're at it. Then the boats will shift your occident crap south and your sandy orient crap north, or your mined resources to your giant island full of production instead of leaving them on the tiny little source isle. Assuming the ships aren't attacked by your enemies (if any) and can actually hold all the cargo you want on the boat, of course. You do not get nagged by npcs to go play the combat mode because there is no seperate combat missions to go on.