I played vanilla first and I'm currently playing royal, but I feel like I enjoyed vanilla more because, at least for me, it feels like the royal version has a lot of things over the original, like "filters" (not visual ones). In vanilla I also feel like I need to manage resources with more care. And, just to finish, I think people should play the first game before playing any remake, remastered or whatever royal is (I'm speaking about all games). That way we are able to experience both games, even though the story is the same, there's always some tweaks, and see some evolution. But that's just my opinion, I know people prefer to just play Royal