Author: Bastian Thun

In most games, progression usually means acquiring new skills for your persona, raising stats and expanding your arsenal. In Anno, your residents are at the heart of gameplay progression, as levelling up your population gives you access to a growing catalogue of new buildings and opens up new and more complex production chains. Your city will advance through an era of change and wonders, while you improve your own management skills to become a masterful city-builder.

With this series of DevBlogs, we put the residential tiers and their gameplay role for Anno 1800 into the spotlight. Making the start are Game Designer Christian Schneider and Lead Artist Manuel Reinher, introducing the fundamental ideas behind Anno’s residents.

Residential Tiers, our progression system – Christian
Anno’s core gameplay idea is the concept of “fulfillments of needs”, where you have to provide the infrastructure and amenities for your citizens in order to advance. Residential tiers also work as a threshold, which determines how far you have progressed in the game, similar to the character’s levels in other games.
Reaching the next tier is a rewarding milestone, giving you access to a variety of new buildings to construct advanced production chains. Similarly to your production, your society will advance with each level and their demands will become harder to fulfill – a natural difficulty curve.
Your population serves also as an indicator of your skill as an Anno player. If you just advance in a new tier, only a few basic buildings will be available to kick off your new production but as the amount of residents in a specific class rises, more and more buildings will become available.

In Anno, every single building has not only a distinctive visual character; it also has its own gameplay aspect and interface elements. Buildings of each tier become a tool for environmental storytelling: you click on a tier home and the farmer tells a story from his daily life, and public buildings like the market become a stage for visual feedback.
From a gameplay perspective, public buildings play an especially important role, as they are the center of your attention. Their influence on your city district is an important gameplay indicator, which leads players to have a close eye on your pub and other public buildings. Because of their influence, city districts are often built around a center of public buildings and other eye-catching constructions.

There is also an important change for Anno veterans out there: every citizen tier has its own workforce type, which is required to run the specific production buildings of that tier. If you think about it, it makes sense: farmers take care of rural production, while the working class was born out of the demand from factories for specialized workers. That means that you have to make sure that sufficient workforce of a specific tier is available to run the production of said tier. This change provides a new layer of complexity when designing and managing your city and results in a way more interesting and natural cityscape.

An era of change and our artistic vision – Manuel
When cities grew to metropoles and workshops became factories, our society changed drastically. While aristocrats still fought over colonies in the backrooms of glamourous palaces, the new working class would go on to become the foundation of our modern society. For Anno 1800, the depiction of the century and especially the evolution of classes and society as a whole are important aspects of our artistic vision.

Every new match in Anno 1800 will be a romantic journey through history, starting with the beginning of the industrial age all the way to the end of the 19th century.

Every house, public and even production building for each tier should convey a certain character, and their design should be our way of telling the story of the people of that era. Every single tier is a specific snapshot of a different class and with that, shows how society advanced during the industrial age. A lot of thought went into the different buildings and subsequent events to represent their residential tier properly. Farmers and agriculture where still important during that time but they stood as a remnant of an old age. Their houses are not streamlined by modern pragmatic architecture, allowing them to have a personal touch while you will also able be able to notice that progress is coming to a halt for their production buildings. To support the working class on the other hand, cities needed to make accommodations quickly available and the modern city life changed personality and habits.

At first, your lower tier settlement has a more natural but less structured look and over time, as order and structure will find their way in the metropolis you are aspiring for.
That is the special rewarding feeling of an Anno game, when watching how through your hard work, a small farming village becomes a large city with beautiful higher tier districts, impressive factories and stunning cultural buildings.

Not only the 3D models, the right palette of color and material also defines look and feeling of a tier.

The Anno Puzzle – Manuel and Christian
During the industrial revolution, cities grew larger and architecture adapted in order to accommodate the masses of citizens who needed to work in the growing factories. Modern technologies like assembly conveyors pushed mass production, while steel beams allowed factories and other buildings to expand, and that changed the urban environment drastically.
Residential buildings take up space on your island and with that, compete with your production lines over available space. This creates the classic Anno puzzle: how much space is available and how do I allocate it? To represent the setting properly, we realized that things have to get bigger for a proper representation of that era. In Anno 2205, residential buildings where mostly 3×3, 5×5 or 6×6 depending on your citizen tier and region. While the 6×6 fields in Anno 2205 made it easier for us to create organic cityscapes, it limited the amount of buildings a player could place.
In Anno 1800, islands will be bigger and can hold more assets compared to previous titles. With all residential buildings now consuming only 3×3 tiles, it allows you to not only ramp up the amount buildings you can create significantly, it also enables us to make use of bigger production buildings. To fit the style of that era, we wanted these factories to be clearly bigger in size than other buildings; your modern production districts should be impressive feats of city design and modern architecture.

The beginning of a series of blogs
The residential tiers are a substantial part of Anno’s atmosphere, artistic design and gameplay created with passion and love for the franchise and setting. But we won’t just close the book on that topic, stay tuned as we get even more into detail and showcase the different tiers with their historical background, design and their production chains.

How important is the depiction of that era and the detail work, which goes into the different tiers, for you? We are curious how our take on that setting resonates with you and if you like the changes to the classic Anno formula to add challenge and give your city a more natural and realistic look.

From rags to riches – your industrial machine shall never rest when your soot-blackened empire rises into a glorious new era. Manufacturing the first goods is easy enough but soon, you will manage a complex logistical network to ensure a steady flow of resources for your hungry industry.

Today, our Game Designers Christian and Sebastian illuminate our lodes and fertility system, which are kicking off a series of posts focusing on the focal point of Anno 1800’s core gameplay: production chains.

In the first stages, Anno is dominated by simple production chains, such as establishing a basic food supply. Harvesting natural resources such as capturing fish at your coastline or chopping wood is enough to get things rolling. But soon enough, your small settlement will start to expand and production lines will become more complex. When your production will be evolving into a real industry, it will start to require harder to find resources.
Fishing and lumbering won’t be enough anymore, when advanced goods will require you to grow various crops or to tap into the mineral deposits on your island.
The growing complexity of the resource management is an important challenge when progressing through the game and soon, you might realize that the conditions on your main island are not enough to support your demanding society.

Reaping the harvest – Fertility
In the real world, every plant has certain requirements in order to grow properly. The right enrichment of minerals in the soil determines the fertility for certain crops and other plants. Additionally, there are other ground and weather conditions which might affect the fertility of the soil.
Agriculture makes up a big part of Anno’s production chains, but we simplified the complexity of Mother Nature and translated the concept into our fertility system.
In Anno 1800, not every plant will grow on any island and players have to seek out other isles with the right prerequisites. When progressing, you need to either settle on other islands or establish trading routes in order to improve your production. The scarcity of some resources drives the economic aspect of the game and fuels conflict between different factions that compete over the most interesting islands. Later in the game, we will give you options to have an impact on the fertility of your island. But that is bound to a different feature, which we will highlight in a future blog post.

Have a look on our hops production – the beer must flow!

Earth riches – lodes
In general, lodes work similarly to fertilities with a few additions. Lodes are mineral deposits on your island, with ores like iron found in mountain ranges, while some others, like clay, can be found in a pit rather than a mine. There is one major difference with the fertility system. While you can cultivate crops and other plants at any spot if the needed fertility is provided, you have to construct your mining buildings on fixed deposits, which will get randomly generated with each new game.
That means that you have to build your coal mine on an actual lode and cannot freely start mining anywhere. In difference with fertilities, you won’t be able to add or change existing lodes during a session. The location of the lodes on an island play a role in your strategy when designing your city, as they create a natural center for your production districts. Will you create your district effectively around your mining area or will you decide to make use of a clever supply line for your distant factories to avoid having your heavy industry close to the city center?
To account for the effort you put in to optimizing your city layout, lodes won’t deplete after time, unlike in Anno 2070. We don’t want to force the player to completely re-arrange an already complex supply line.

Coal for the thousand fires of the industrial revolution

Resource restrictions and their gameplay importance
The fertility and lodes system can have a major impact on the gameplay, as the players need to make important decisions based on the availability of the necessary resources:
When is the best moment to expand? Should I rush for other islands to dominate the fight for resources or choose a more laid back approach, where a small outpost or a trading network will do the job?

How you tackle on expansion, diplomacy, trade or even the size of your empire, depends on your approach, define your playstyle and let you set your own goals for a match.
We want to encourage different approaches and never take away your free will. You should not only decide how you want to play the game, we will also allow you to modify the difficulty of the game based on your preferences. Higher difficulty settings will make resources more rare while easy settings ensure that you don’t have to worry about fertility too much.

But that’s it for today, a good foundation for us to build upon in the upcoming weeks. Whether you are a veterans used to fertility and lodes systems or new to it, we are curious to read your feedback in the comments below.

Hi, my name is Sebastian and I am one of the Game Designers for Anno 1800. I have been part of the Anno Team since about two and a half years now and today I want to share some information with you on something we have been working on for a while now, the trade routes!

More than just a city builder, Anno 1800 is also a game about growing a small settlement to a real economic empire. Over the course of the game, the needs of your capital island will raise and you are in charge to fuel your hungry industry and fulfill the demands of your citizens.
Your main island can be a demanding beast and at some point, you have to expand to other islands to support your advancing metropole or to buy needed goods from other characters.
With trade routes, you can connect your islands with a transport network to ensure a steady flow of resources.

Here an example familiar to most Anno veterans:
“These pesky citizens! It seems whatever you do, they always ask for more and not exactly in a polite manner.” To fulfill their demand for beer, we could rely on trading but we decide to get our own production going. Unfortunately, the needed hops does not want to grow on our island so we have to establish our beer production line on our outpost, which is located on a nearby island. Of course, you do not want to order your ships back and forth manually, so you setup a trade route to ship the harvested hop or even the brewed beer over automatically. The beer will flow and hopefully make them happy for at least a while.

As you know, we want to bring back more complex features to the next title in the series. Instead of the more recent and simpler iteration of the trade routes, you will be able to make use of two different systems this time. One for the players who like to modify, tinker and optimize their routes for maximum efficiency and another one for simpler and faster but potentially less efficient routes.

Trade Routes
Let’s start with the more complex system. As this one is much closer to the ones from 1701, 1404 and 2070 you could call it the “classic trade route system”.
It allows you to transport goods between your islands or to trade with other parties automatically.

To give you an idea about the complexity of the system, here is an overview over most of the available options: You can freely set stations and define which goods should be loaded and unloaded by your ships. You will again be able to assign multiple ships to a route and each of them will be able to transport multiple goods. There is no limitation to the amount of routes you can create. Of course, you can name your routes for better overview and for those who do not like to come up with route names themselves we implemented an automatic naming system that should give you an idea of what this route is doing. The routes overview will also display the most common goods transported by a route.

Here a design study, or so called mockup of the trading route feature. Not representative of the final version in the game.

With several ships following one route, you might encounter the situation that one first ship is fully loaded with goods at a harbor but there is not enough left to load the second one. Instead of leaving with an almost empty storage, you can order the ship to wait until the full amount of goods is loaded. Additionally if a ship arrives at the destination and wants to unload its cargo, but the harbor has no space to load up your ships delivery, you can command your vessel to throw stuff over board in order to make space for the goods you would like to load. These two options called “Wait until full” and “Throw overboard” – very creative, I know – can be configured for every station separately.

Waypoints

When creating your trade route, you trust your ships’ captains to find their way across the sea on their own. With no further instructions, your ships will naturally take the shortest route, which might be problematic as this does not factor in hostile areas or wind direction.
It might be an option to guard your ships against loot hungry pirates but maybe avoiding their territory might be the wiser strategy in the first place.
To account for this we will also bring back waypoints for routes. When two consecutive stations are assigned, the route automatically draws a line between them and the player can add and move a waypoint to change the path of the ships.

Visibility and complexity go hand in hand. The UI elements shown are not final.

None of this is limited to islands on your current session; you will be able to expand your trade routes to other sessions as well.
What we are aiming for is a complex system, which favors the freedom of the player. It can also be seen as a challenge for seasoned Anno and strategy player, as it brings room for error and mismanagement back into the game. However, sometimes even the most seasoned logistics expert needs a fast and easy solution to get things done to take care of other, more pressing matters.

For that, we added a second system to the game.

Charter Routes
If you know the routes system from 2205, the charter routes will sound familiar.
They are a much lighter system that allows you to rent ships in order to transport goods between your own islands. Easier to handle but also more limited than their big brother, they can only transport one type of good in one direction between two of your islands. This is one ship per route. The chartered trading ship cannot be controlled manually but can be attacked by opponents or other AI characters. Chartered ships also have higher upkeep costs than your own trading vessels – in the end the captains need to pay their crew and want to make some profit too. As a result, players who spend time creating their own routes save money and players who are in a rush or don’t care so much about the money can save time.

Here an early version of the charter route menu. Amount of items and general loading capacities in this blog are also not representative.

It’s your time to share!
Supporting your ever-growing cities is part of the fun and with these two systems, we want to give you the tools to create an impressive and world-spanning economic empire.

And with this matter at hand, I would love to know what kind of player you are. Are you a transport tycoon who builds a highly efficient transport network with trade routes? Are you willing to invest a bit more in charter routes in order to concentrate fully on your city planning? Or will you mix and match the systems as you like?

Hi, my Name is Simon Wolf and I am a Level Artist on Anno 1800. I joined the team here in Mainz roughly a year ago and today, I would like to give you some insights into my job- both what motivates me and how us Level Artists shape the world of Anno, one island at a time.

At its heart, Anno is about vast cityscapes, ships on high waters or citizens roaming through narrow streets. But at one point in any discussion about the series, you will be able to hear players talking about another really important element of the game: the islands themselves.

Islands are both the playground to let your creative energy loose and the challenge which stands between your goals, such as expanding your city’s population by just a few thousands citizens.

The importance of your game world
Playing a game is more than progressing in the campaign or advancing your city. Becoming an explorer of the game worlds around me, always on the hunt for hidden secrets and stories, fueled my passion and creative investment in videogames since I was a kid. Questions like, “is there something hidden behind that mountain?” or “look at that landslide, is there a story why it collapsed?” was probably even the driving factor for me to become a level artist.

That enthusiasm allowed me to experience games beyond gaming. I started to play around with level editors to create my own levels and with that, to become the writer of my own environmental stories.

Anno 1800 is in fact the first strategy game I’ve worked on. In the game, islands are more than just a blank space, islands have personality, add to the feeling of the game and even create gameplay challenges, as players have to work within the given space.

It’s a creative puzzle you need to solve as you alter and shape the game world surround you.

Islands in Anno come in various shapes and sizes, some of them making it easy to expand and to grow your city while others have a higher difficulty, challenging the player to optimize and deal with the situation at hand. The specific features and difficulty level of an island has a strong impact on the gameplay. We call that “Creative Constraints”, where limitations result in solutions and interesting designs in order to overcome that challenge. Overcoming that limitations feels rewarding and often results in a more organic and beautiful city layout.

The creation of an island
Okay, let us see how our level team actually creates and shapes that playground for you.

It all starts with a shape!

It usually starts with a shape: Ideas for the look and form of an island come often from different sources, sometimes just creative brainstorming in the team full of crazy ideas but we also spend time researching satellite data or photos from real islands as an inspiration.
We are always on the hunt for the right middle ground between interesting shapes, a good challenge and gameplay freedom.It also depends on the type of island currently needed for the game. Do we need a few larger but easier islands or are we talking about a design which should test the skills of our veteran players? Beginner islands should not have overly complex structures, mountains or other obstructing details as these terrain elements can determine the difficulty level.

The first concepts for island shapes often include color-coding, where we block out construction areas, mountains and other obstacles. When defining these areas, we usually check back with the Game Design team for their requirements such as the size of a beach or mining resources, but how we implement that is usually up to us. We always have to keep one thing in mind: from the beaches to mountainsides, the layout will have an impact on your future city layout, such as having the choice of two beaches allows you to decide where to build your harbor and start your city.

Tools of an level artist
When our shape got a thumbs up from game design or other stakeholders, we can start to work on the actual 3D model. In our daily work, we make use of various tools fitting the needs of the different steps we are working on. While we spend a lot of time in our actual engine, handy tools such as World Machine, allow us to create a basic preset terrain based on various parameters (ground land mass, cliffs, plateaus, mountains, beaches, erosion etc.). The resulting model is a perfect foundation for the next steps.

When we are happy with the three dimensional form of the asset, we implement the island in our engine. In this first iteration of our future island, we will bring it to a playable state. That means basic texturing, defining construction and harbor areas, placing obstacles, mining slots, basic vegetation and more. The next step is a feedback process where we will decide if everyone is cool with the design or if we have to change something.
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And here the final work piece, you can see blocked out areas and basic level of terrain.

Environmental Storytelling and future steps
And now it’s time to bring some individual character to our island in the so-called “visual stage.”
In this stage, we take our time to make it look natural yet interesting by texturing, placing decorative objects, vegetation and sculpting. While our engine does offers some neat sculpting tools, we often take a piece of terrain to a sculpting tool called Mudbox to work on the fine details.

With the visual stage completed the island is about 80% done, with further polishing work to be done for the release version of the game.

On average, a large island takes roughly 80 working hours to complete. In the polishing phase, which usually comes a bit later in development, we will add the smallest visual details and include even some environmental stories, such as landslides or other unique things to discover. Keep that in mind when examining screenshots or discussing the footage seen during a stream, as the polishing phase will have an impact on the final visual fidelity of the islands.

It is all about ideas, inspiration and handicraft
I hope this blog about the daily work of a level artist on Anno 1800 gave you some interesting insights. The next time you play an Anno game, you may want to hunt down all the handcrafted details and secrets we love to hide in a level.

I know that you started many discussions about your favorite islands types already. To shake things up a bit, I would like to hear your ideas about small visual elements, remembered from previous titles that could make up for great environmental stories in Anno 1800. You can share your inspiring ideas with the level art team in the comments below.