Author: Ubi-Thorlof

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Modding Spotlight: Towards New Horizons

Posted on by Ubi-Thorlof

Hey Anno Community,

Today is a great day for Anno 1800, as it marks the release of the “New Horizons” mod! After 5 years of hard work and effort, we wanted to celebrate the release of this highly anticipated mod together with its creators and the Anno Community as a whole. The team behind this massive project includes Taubenangriff, jje1000 and Hier0nimus – well-known names in the Anno modding community.

Who can explain the content of the mod better than the people behind this big project? So, we asked them:

What can Anno 1800 fans expect in the New Horizons mod?

In Vanilla Anno 1800, there are four regions, the Old World, New World, Arctic and Enbesa, each with their own population and production. In New Horizons, we are adding a fifth region, Horai, which is inspired by East Asia, mostly Japan and China. Horai itself has two population tiers, as does each Colony region, and its residents want products like porcelain, tea, sake and koto instruments. On top of that, the session comes with its own challenges and mechanics: First of all, your farm production in Horai is going to be regularly interrupted by monsoons, something you might have already experienced in the Seasons of Silver scenario. If you need additional workforce and money, you can provide your Horaiese population with street food, and if you look to complete fancy architecture projects, you can rebuild the Wonders of Horai on your islands.

Not only does New Horizons contain an Asian-inspired session, it also adds a sixth population tier in the Old World at the end of the progression where Investors can now upgrade to Magnates, who turn the endgame economy on its head by providing little income for high efficiency, and it should come as little of a surprise that Magnates primarily want goods from the Horai session.

As with previous Modding Spotlights, we’ve prepared for you an extensive Q&A with the team behind the mod – both about their modding experience as well as about the mod itself. Without further ado, let’s dive into it!

Q&A, Part 1: Modding experience

What would you advise someone who wanted to get into modding Anno?

Discovering your creative side takes a lot of effort and time, and you will never find out about it if you do not start off just creating things. Creative skills can be learned, and ultimately you do not have to be the best in your discipline to create cool stuff and have fun with it. It takes a bit of stubbornness and persistence to transform your vision into reality.

But most importantly, do it for the fun, not for the result. And you will always have learned something valuable in the process.

 

Did you have any prior modding knowledge or specific skills (programming, 3D Art, UI Design, …) when starting to mod Anno?

We had and have a lot of talent on the team that was involved, and what we can do covers pretty much the entire palette that you might need when creating and modding games. That reached from being very capable at reverse engineering and programming to bringing 3D art skills or general knowledge of how to code mods for Anno 1800. But most importantly, no single person on the team could do everything, so it was very important to assign tasks based on who could do what. This collaboration was very important during development, because this way every task could be handled by someone who knew what they were doing.

 

The skillsets on the team could be very specific, we even had someone on the team who specialised in Sound Engine modding, which became very handy when porting and implementing resident voice lines from other Annos into 1800, because none of the others on the team could have done that. Some of us also used New Horizons to expand and practice their skillset, like learning and improving 3D art skills with and for the project, which was a great learning opportunity.

How did you get into modding? What prompted you to create Anno 1800 mods specifically?

Taubenangriff: I used to do record building on Anno 2070 a lot before 1800 came out. That was roughly the time where I learned general programming. Then 1800 came out and it all started at a white empty Plaza tile that was missing from the release, but which I wanted to build. So, I tried my luck on it, it worked, and through that I got to know a lot of awesome people that also tried their luck with modding Anno 1800. Mind you, that was even before there was a modloader for the game.

Well, in the midst of that pioneer era of modding, we started getting better and better and eventually went crazy with our ideas – that is when New Horizons was born out of pure hybris and megalomania. Well, and now 5 years later I’m here and it’s done.

 

Not too long ago we did an interview with Hier0nimus. You can check it out here.

Q&A Part 2: Behind-the-scenes of the “New Horizons” mod

For the second part of this spotlight, we were of course very curious how the team handled the development of the “New Horizons” mod.

 

Did you know what you were committing yourself to when starting the project?

No, absolutely not. This project is the result of the pure stubbornness to complete a vision that we came up with years ago. We knew that this project was not going to be easy, it was going to be a lot of work, but the scope kept on growing and growing – which primarily came down to increasing standards. When you compare the visual quality of the early Anno 1800 mods with mods that are more recent, there is a huge apparent upgrade, and that upgrade coincides with our skillset and toolstack growing.

So, not only did we create all of New Horizons, but we also updated old assets multiple times, because we just knew that we could do better than what we created earlier.

 

You’ve mentioned multiple times in reddit posts or videos the different contributors to the mod. How big of a team worked on this mammoth project? How did you collaborate?

We always had a core team, which for the first two years or so pretty much consisted of Taubenangriff doing art content by himself, but the core team expanded to 2-3 people, namely bringing in jje1000 to create and overhaul a lot of art assets and Hier0nimus for coding and item work. Moreover, a lot of people joined to contribute in the form of individual projects over time, where they would create a single part of the mod, i.e. a set of ornaments, a single wonder or the magnate houses. So, in total around 15 people worked on the project but they never did so at the same time.

 

To organize our effort, we set up half-yearly milestones where we would define tasks in advance and distribute the work among the team, and regularly shared our progress internally, as well as using version control to backup, manage and bring together our work.

But we also regularly stepped in to help each other complete our tasks, so that everyone could bring in their skillset where it was suited for best. This was perhaps the most important part in getting the mod to a reasonable quality level, being pragmatic about who should commit on doing what on often very limited time and resources.

Well, we know Anno 1800 doesn’t always make modding very… straightforward. What were your main challenges? How did you tackle them?

The main challenge during the development was that we could often not edit certain parts of the engine – like islands. Often, we then wrote our own tools to give us those possibilities for New Horizons, which were often then made public and have since become widely used in the modding community.

 

What is something players will have to get used to that they don’t know from the unmodded Anno 1800?

The regular seasons in Horai will certainly be a challenge for players, as storage space suddenly is a central resource. You will need to stockpile 30 minutes’ worth of farm production to get through a monsoon unimpeded, and that means you will need to invest extra space into building storages – but there is only so much building space to work with, and every tile that goes towards storage cannot be used for production buildings.

 

If you install the optional Item Rebalancing that comes alongside New Horizons, your items also suddenly will do different things – as an example, you cannot circumvent Steam Carriage production with Susannah Brightwoman anymore. But I want to stress the optionality of this, this is meant to be part of the mod, but ultimately up to your choice whether you care about better balancing or not.

If other players want to know more or have questions, where would you want them to go?

I reckon this is pretty much a standard answer by now, but you can always find us on the Anno 1800 modcorner discord. Don’t be shy, join and ask your questions there .

And you can visit the New Horizons modpage on mod.io: https://mod.io/g/anno-1800/m/new-horizons

 

 

A big thank you to the “New Horizons” team for taking the time for this modding spotlight and congratulations once more on the release of the mod!

We love seeing the Anno 1800 community still going strong and are sure this long-awaited mod will make many in the community very happy.

That brings us to the end of today’s blog. Make sure to check out “New Horizons” on mod.io and as usual: leave a nice comment over there for the mod creators if you enjoy their work.

DevBlog: Attributes & Building Buffs

Posted on by Ubi-Thorlof

Your population is always demanding something new: food, clothes, public buildings, … what do you get from it? Why fulfil all these demands?

Well, alright, because it’s part of the core gameplay-loop of course; but also cause each need you fulfil gives you something in return: citizens pay more taxes, have a lower chance of setting their own houses on fire or are simply happier and less prone to rebel against your glorious governorship.

These bonuses of needs and – as you’ll soon see – also buildings we call “Attributes”.

In today’s DevBlog we will take a look at how we handle these attributes in Anno 117: Pax Romana and how we spice it up with a new little puzzle system.

If you haven’t watched our livestream on the topic, we also recommend to check it out here.

Attributes General

Anno veterans know: attributes are nothing entirely new, things like income, happiness or population have already been a part of past Anno’s and picking which needs to fulfil first and which additional happiness needs (Anno 1800) to fulfil for bonuses are a part of progression strategy.

 

In Anno 117: Pax Romana, attributes are values provided by different buildings, but to large parts by residences and are primarily increased by fulfilling their needs. Let’s use an example and reference the topic of “Optional Needs” which we have discussed in the previous DevBlog.

Providing your Tier 1 residents with Fish (+1 Population, +1 Income), Tunics (+2 Income) and access to a Market (+1 Population, +1 Income) means all residences supplied this way give you +2 Population and +4 income total (and the residence is now upgradeable).

If you provide them with Porridge (+2 Population), Pileus (hats) (+1 Income, +1 Happiness) and access to a Tavern (+1 Population, +1 Happiness) on top, each residence will provide you with the total following attribute values: +5 Population, +5 Income, +2 Happiness.

(Please note: as we are still very much in development, these and any other balancing values mentioned throughout this blog might still change.)

You can check which kind of attributes each residence is currently providing for you and each respective island directly via the object menu of the building.

Let's look at a slightly more advanced example. It wouldn't be an Anno game inspired by ancient Rome if there was no wine! Alternatively, however, you could also fulfill the food need with cheese... but cheese is produced in Albion, requiring expansion to a new province and a trade route to import the sought-after product to Latium. Provide one? Provide both? The choice is yours. And what could those yet unannounced attributes be...?

It’s not just happiness, income and population, though: we also include fire safety, health and some others (that are related to features we haven’t talked about yet) in this attribute group. Having such a wide range of different attributes and linking them to the needs system means, that we have more options to work with for the needs – and you get a larger number of choices to fulfil the needs that make the most sense for your playstyle or the island’s current situation.

We also want to provide more overall visibility on your islands’ “values” , and therefore now list all these attributes and the source of e.g. the -100 fire safety points in detail in a dedicated bar at the top of the screen. This will make it much clearer to you what’s contributing to the positive or negative value and will help you address e.g. the low fire safety by moving buildings or adding new ones.

Let’s take a closer look at what has an impact on said attributes.

Attributes Details

Of course, needs are something we have already touched on in far more detail in our DevBlog on “Optional Needs”. We highly recommend checking out how needs are handled now in Anno 117: Pax Romana and how we increase your flexibility in regard to with which types of production chains you want to engage with, how fast and where you want to expand to and how this helps you setting your own level of game complexity.

Fulfilling needs plays the main role in how you make money and increase your population: all attribute values a residence provides are dependent on the needs they are supplied with. Higher-level needs also provide higher attribute values, both for fulfilled needs and as buffs (if they’re buildings – see the “Building Buffs” section below).

We always try to link the attributes of a need narratively to the object in question, so that soap – besides increasing your income – also increases the health attributes of the residences supplied.

 

We also differentiate between two major different layers for the attributes: island values and global values.

An island value impacts island-related features like incidents (fire safety, health, happiness) or workforce, while global values (like province-wide population) unlock new buildings and needs. Income of course also is a global value that can be accessed from any province or island.

 

Finally, on the topic of calculation, attributes are calculated with decimals and then summed up over the island (e.g. 10 houses with 10% fulfilment provide 10×0,1=1 income), so you’re not losing out on partial values. We’re only rounding numbers for displaying it in the UI, meaning, an income of 1,1 provides 66 money per hour, not 60.

While workforce is linked to your population (or rather: the population attribute of a residence), it’s calculated via a workforce factor that’s also displayed in-game: not every citizen is a worker.

There'll be 8 attributes in Anno 117: Pax Romana. Income, population, happiness, fire safety, health, and... three others which we'll talk about in the not-so-distant future.

Building Buffs

But wait, we basically only talked about the impact of needs on the attributes of your residences. However, those aren’t the only things that have an impact on your attributes. Let’s talk about “building buffs”.

At the core, this also isn’t something entirely new, since e.g. a fire station already existed in Anno 1800. It increases the fire safety in its vicinity and helps should any fires break out after all. This principle exists the same way in Anno 117: Pax Romana, but we’re now providing more visibility on the fire chance in your city: In the aforementioned attributes bar at the top, you can see how high the fire safety of your island is, which buildings have a positive and which have a negative impact.

The fire station (or Vigiles in Anno 117: Pax Romana), therefore is a buff building.

Similarly, a public service building essentially also provides a buff to residences within its area: if it’s a residence need, it counts towards its fulfilment and gives attributes. If it’s not a need, it still provides additional attributes to the affected residence (and other buildings in its radius)  in the form of a status effect.

What’s new in Anno 117: Pax Romana, however, is that production buildings now also provide buffs (and debuffs) to buildings in their vicinity.

Let’s use the bakery for this example: Within a certain radius around it, the bakery provides a buff of +2 income and a debuff of -2 fire safety to all buildings. This leaves you with the interesting choice of where you want to want to place it: somewhere outside where the reduced fire safety may only impact a few other production buildings? Or in the city to make the most of its income buff?

Other production buildings similarly come with a range of buffs and debuffs which can greatly impact your island attributes. The intention here is to give you something else to puzzle with within your cities and to further home in on the attributes that you need most.

This buff is always applied to all buildings within its radius, which you can already see while constructing the building in question:

Need more money? Well, you'll have to accept lowering the fire safety attribute as well.

As mentioned earlier already, we try to tie the attributes narratively to the object they’re originating from, and anything with an open fire naturally is a risk for any city. Please be careful.

These buffs are non-stackable, meaning that the hat maker, for example,  will only give residences +1 income, multiple hatmakers in the vicinity do not provide the income buffs multiple times

It’s also important to note that the building in questions needs to be functional (e.g. neither damaged/destroyed nor paused) to apply the buff – and production buildings have a productivity threshold which decides if the (de)buff is applied or not.

And finally, to answer a question from previous week’s livestream: Supplying the need to a residence (e.g. hats, to receive +1  income and +1 happiness) and the residence being in vicinity to the production building (+1 income) count as two separate buffs, meaning, the result here would be +2 income and +1 happiness.

Outro

This concludes our two blogs on the topic of Needs and Attributes, which essentially are an evolution of the systems our veterans know from previous Anno games. The Building Buffs are a new feature, which we hope has an impact on your city building strategies.

The Needs Attributes are also closely tied to for example incidents (fire safety, health, happiness) and ways to reduce the chance of them happening, workforce and its relationship to your military (ships require workforce to be built) and some more features which we will talk about in the coming months.

To summarise, our goals are more choice for you which needs to fulfil, greater transparency on the different island attributes and more ways to influence said attributes if you want to get the most out of your cities and production chains.

We’d love to read your comments on these changes and are also happy to answer any further questions you might have on the topic. Leave them in the comment section!

DevBlog: Fulfil Needs Your Way

Posted on by Ubi-Thorlof

Sometimes playing Anno feels like being a bird parent trying to fulfil the needs of the ever-demanding offspring: Your citizens want clothes, they want sausages, beer, carpets, pasta and energy drinks. Let’s also not forget the marketplace, tavern, laboratory or the concert hall.

Granted, your citizens pay taxes (usually) to make up for the hassle, but they really make you work for that.

In short: needs are a core aspect of Anno gameplay loop, you fulfil them to make money, to make your people happy and to level up residences in order to progress through the game.

 

Want to see us talk about today’s DevBlog subject? Then have a look at our past livestream from April 15th!

Needs in general

This hasn’t changed much in Anno 117: Pax Romana, on first glance: We still separate needs into two types: consumption needs and service needs.

The former require the player to produce goods (e.g. Porridge) in certain quantities which are then consumed by the residence. As long as enough goods are produced, the need fulfilment slowly rises to 100% and the need is considered fulfilled.

As in past Anno games, the consumption is always calculated for the whole island (“island demand”) and goods are consumed directly out of the island storage. Like in Anno 1800, you can also pause needs (which also pauses the consumption of the respective good).

Service needs are fulfilled via public service buildings. Accordingly, they are fulfilled by the residence simply being within the radius of the service building.

 

If you’ve played any of our previous games, all of this should feel familiar, just like the next part: Fulfilling needs is how you advance through the game. If you fulfilled enough needs, residences can be upgraded to unlock the next population tier, as well as new buildings and production chains.

The actual activation of a need (i.e. when the people demand for it and start consuming it) is tied to the amount of population of each tier of an island.

Making things optional

Alright, so, but what has changed?

A quick look into the object menu for any residence building will immediately make our Anno veterans stop: needs are ordered in categories! Let’s compare the needs of the Farmers from Anno 1800 with the needs of the Liberti from Anno 117: Pax Romana.

These changes in Anno 117: Pax Romana we sumarised under the feature name “optional needs”.

The different types of needs now all belong to one of multiple categories, for example food, fashion or public services. Higher population tiers have additional need categories that unlock as you progress.

Providing a residence with any kind of good will contribute to the overall supply value of a category. Reach the required supply threshold in all categories and the residence is ready to be upgraded.

 

Let’s dive a bit deeper into these supply values with two colleagues from the Game Design team: Christian, Senior Game Designer and Jan, Game Director.

Each need has a certain supply value for a category. For example, delivering porridge OR sardines to our residents is equal to a supply value of 1 each. Luckily, the supply threshold for food for the Liberti tier also is exactly 1, meaning we can already consider this category “done” by simply supplying one of the two food needs. If we now also fulfil the “fashion” and “public service” category, we can level-up this residence.

The food category of the Plebeians, however, has a supply threshold of 3. Even if we supplied both sardines and porridge, it wouldn’t be enough. We will have to set up at least one of the new food production chains to reach this threshold.

As a general rule, the supply threshold of a category is always lower than the sum of all supply values of a category – and it will increase with each upgrade of a residence. That means, you will not need to provide all the needs of a category and not setup all the production chains at your disposal, but you also can’t just stick to only providing the lowest (and easiest to produce) type of need in a category.

To visualize this a bit better, have a look at the object menus of a Libertus and Plebeian residence side-to-side. You can see:

  • Each needs category has a certain minimum threshold, split into multiple bars
  • Each need has a certain value, also represented by bars, which feeds into the category threshold
  • The food category of Plebeians has a higher threshold than the Libertus food category
  • Fulfilment is represented in green (regular) and golden (more than minimum)

As you might have guessed from the context already, however, upgraded population tiers keep the needs of all previous tiers. Your early game goods and public buildings will therefore continue to be useful, and you can decide if you want to reach the supply thresholds of the different categories by also fulfilling multiple lower-level goods or fewer higher-level ones that each provide higher supply values.

You can’t provide lower-level population tiers with higher-level goods or services, though.

 

What happens if you provide a residence with more than the required supply threshold, you might ask.

Well, let’s first take a closer look at the individual needs: Each need, no matter if a consumption need or a service need also provides certain attributes.

For example, providing your residents with sardines gives you +1 income and +1 population per residence, while providing them with porridge gives you +2 population for this particular residence. Garum (a need of the second population tier in Latium) gives you +2 income and +1 happiness for said residence, just to name another example.

Accordingly, assuring more than the minimum supply for a category means the respective residences also receive additional attributes – providing both sardines and porridge nets you +3 population and +1 income from the food category per residence.

When a consumption need is only partially fulfilled, you also only receive a part of the attribute bonus (e.g. only +1 population instead of +2 when fulfilling the porridge need only to 50%). At the same time, however, this also means you can reach the supply threshold of a category by combining several partially fulfilled needs.

 

These “needs attributes” in Anno 117: Pax Romana encompass more than just income, happiness and population and require some more explaining. Today, we’ll leave it at this since it’s enough to understand the basics of the “Optional Needs” feature – and go into more detail in a separate DevBlog soon.

Implications

So much for the “how”, let’s take a look at the impact of these changes on the game and the answer to the “why” question.

Firstly, something we have already alluded to earlier in this blog: choice and flexibility.

This was especially important since we wanted to let players choose the level of complexity for the game themselves. The goal here is to give enough choice that both veterans as well as newcomers can enjoy Anno 117: Pax Romana, and for the latter to slowly grow into their role as governor.

With a lucky combination of fertilities on your starting island, you might even be able to continue to progress through the population tiers there for longer, allowing you to stick to fewer islands and only expand later, if you so desire.

This focus on choice also impacts the type and complexity of production chains you can pick: how many complex needs do you fulfil? Will you go for fewer but more complex production chains or more but less complex ones? Which ones take up more space?

Another point of choice also related to the provinces: As already announced last year, you will be able to start in either of the two provinces at the start of a new game. With the optional needs system, you will be able to remain in a single province and still reach the highest population tier by solely relying on providing needs that you can produce locally.

Higher population tiers mean more needs – and more choice! Let’s compare the needs categories of a Libertus with that of a Plebeian. As mentioned earlier, there’s also a fourth category added now: household goods.

As mentioned, it was equally important to us to provide challenges and reward experienced players if they provide their citizens with more than the minimum of needs category. The additional attribute bonuses will help you sustain ever larger cities and militaries, compete more effectively against opponents and strategically grow your influence in both provinces by, e.g., taking key islands.

Making use of both provinces will therefore provide different rewards and options. As will Romanising your population in Albion – if you manage to provide them with goods imported from Latium – and following both the local and the Roman path at the same time.

 

Lastly, this system also gives us as developers more flexibility: new content and new needs can be integrated into the game much easier than it has been the case in Anno 1800. It gives you more choice and makes expanding the game easier for us, if we’re looking at the topic of “postlaunch”. And we already have more different needs in the basegame compared to Anno 1800!

Outro

We hope this has given you a good idea of the changes we have done to the needs system and how it gives you, the player, more flexibility in terms of how you want to set up your islands both in Latium as well as Albion and how you can scale the challenges of the game to a degree you feel the most comfortable with.

Additionally, there’s a cool new puzzle aspect to city building that will hopefully also motivate you to build more than the minimum required production chains. What that is? Well… that’s a topic for a future DevBlog.

Until then, leave all your questions and feedback below, we’re looking forward to your comments!

Union Update: Recapping a busy February

Posted on by Ubi-Thorlof

Hey Anno Community,

We have a packed Union Update with news for you today, so, grab some coffee or some posca and read on.

First: As some of you noticed, we currently have some issues here on the website with the login and comment feature specifically. We’re working on a resolution and hope to soon discuss Anno with you in the comment section again.

Beta sign-up and playtests

A few weeks ago we announced that we’ll be having beta tests later this year and opened registrations. You can still sign up for those playtests by following this link .

Since we have received some questions since: No, don’t worry, invites haven’t been sent yet. These beta playtests still lie a bit further in the future – you can be sure that we’ll let you know both here and across all our other channels as soon as invites have been sent (just so you know when to check your inbox).

 

Talking about playtests: As mentioned previously, we have already done multiple smaller scale focus tests and diary studies for Anno 117: Pax Romana in the past. These are organized in collaboration with the Ubisoft User Research Labs who are organising similar smaller-scale playtests for all Ubisoft games. We tend to look for a variety of player profiles for those tests and are organizing tests with different focuses. If this sounds like something you might be interested in, you can register here.
Important: This registration does not guarantee you access to any such future playtests but merely adds you to a “pool” of people that the User Research Lab may select candidates from for future playtests.

IGN Fan Fest

For those of you who missed, Anno 117: Pax Romana was at IGN Fan Fest last week! Manuel Reinher, our Creative Director, presented a new feature that’ll be part of Anno 117: Pax Romana – modular ships. We’ve already seen much conversation about this on Reddit and Discord, so feel free to share your speculations and thoughts about it there as well!

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Devblogs

After our very obvious hint about diagonal roads back in January, last week we published the first DevBlog dedicated to the road system in Anno 117: Pax Romana, in which we give an overview of what changed from Anno 1800 and what that means for your gameplay experience.

If you like the DevBlog, then we’ve got great news for you! In the next few weeks and months, more DevBlogs will be published here on the Anno Union: the second blog on the road system topic, where we’ll dive deeper into the technical details and the challenges of the new road system; a devblog fully dedicated to the new modular ships feature, to follow up on the IGN Fan Fest showcase; another devblog dedicated to game design, and much more! So, watch this space if you don’t want to miss out on super detailed blogs on what’s going on behind the scenes here at Ubisoft Mainz.

What about modding?

From Anno 1800, we already know very well: some of you love to create and use mods. In fact, the Anno 1800 modding community saw a fantastic increase over the years, creating some absolutely fantastic, creative mods as well as a bunch of useful quality-of-life pieces. We’re very much aware of their contribution to the Anno 1800 community as a whole, and it was therefore something that we were happy to support in 2023 with official mod support and the collaboration with mod.io.

For that reason, we also want to provide mod support for Anno 117: Pax Romana as early as possible.
For release, we can confirm that a mod loader will already be integrated into the game.

Additionally, our colleague Jakob is happy to help you with information to adjust community tools to changed data formats.

 

There are more ideas and things we want to do but that’s not something we are ready to discuss yet. For now, it was important to us to assure our (modding-)community that modding support is very much on our radar for Anno 117: Pax Romana.

Island Contest

Annoholics, we have a winner! As you may have already guessed from our social post: Congratulations to Logan!  Your design will now become an actual island in Anno 117: Pax Romana and we’re looking forward to sharing updates on its progress with you in the coming months.

As usual, we would of course also like to thank you all for participating in this contest – which quickly became the most popular one of the three, with more than 140 valid entries! The team, especially Level Art, was super impressed by your creativity during the selection process: selecting only 5 entries was a hard task. We’ve put together a collage with all your entries (if yours is missing, apologies: they were A LOT and some of them might have been accidentally missed from this image).

Governor Edition Voting

As you might have guessed from our latest social posts and news, there will be a Collector’s Edition for Anno 117: Pax Romana – the “Governor Edition”. A couple of weeks ago we’ve asked you to vote for your favourite design for the case and the artbook cover of the Governor Edition. The voting was a very close one – today, we share the results here on the Anno Union with you all:

DevBlog: All roads lead to Anno

Posted on by Ubi-Thorlof

“The Road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began.”

– Bilbo Baggins, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

Very few things in an Anno game would function without roads: they connect all the player’s buildings on an island, starting at the harbour and connecting lonely woodcutters, houses in the towns and every other little production outpost.

They enable the transportation of goods and visualize the delivery time and distance of said goods via transportation feedback units with carts or wagons. They play a key role in the city planning for players and help organize the different parts of an island.

And, lastly, all kinds of other feedback units (i.e. pedestrians, animals, etc.) spawn on them as well and make the world look livelier and more believable.

 

Importantly: They are sticking to the grid like everything else in the game. But… what if we expanded your options in the grid for Anno 117: Pax Romana?

In our two-part series on the Anno grid and roads, we first give you an overview of what changed and what that means for your gameplay experience. In the second blog we’ll dive deeper into the “how” and “why”, the technical details and challenges we faced in making this happen.

Roads in Anno 117: Pax Romana

To be perfectly honest with you, this was not the first time we thought about breaking up the usual 90° angle grid for Anno. Each time we ran into issues, felt that the solution would not quite live up to what we thought was important to Anno and/or decided that our time was better spent on other features, adding more value to the game and for our players. After all, one does not simply rework the Anno grid system.

Until now!

In Anno 117: Pax Romana the grid is reworked with additional functionality to allow for 45° angles of roads and buildings. This does help making both streets and anything connected to them look significantly more organic, and can certainly change up the look and feel of both building your cities and setting up your production chains.

 

We have also put work in making corners and street connections look smoother, creating automatically smooth curves instead of sharp corners. The streets also automatically adjust and straighten when buildings are placed near them (e.g. when players place a house directly in the corner in order to waste as little space as possible space) for a more appealing look.

As Anno 1800 veterans, you can otherwise expect similar behaviour as you’re used to: roads are adjusting to the terrain elevation, they’re creating bridges when you draw them over a river and change to a pier-style version when built on the coast. You can also expect different road types, with better versions costing more but providing some benefits.

A look under the hood

That was a VERY quick overview but how are roads working now, from a design point of view? Let’s get into the technical details with the support from Nicolas from Game Design, Christian and Johannes from Gameplay Programming, Tim from 3D Programming and David from Art.

The grid in Anno 117: Pax Romana is made of single tiles which are further divided into 4 sub-tiles, while Anno 1800 only had single tiles. This was a necessary change to allow for diagonal building, since we can now make any objects you place also correctly fit into the grid diagonally, see below:

Isn’t this now just much better looking than the zigzag from before? See below for a direct comparison when building a road from A to B:

Another change to support both diagonal roads and the improved visuals in terms of smooth curves: streets are now graphs, instead of being rendered tile by tile. This essentially allows us to render the entire section from one node to the next (see image below) which does make it look more coherent and takes any intersections into consideration.

One downside of this change is that it’s not possible anymore to build a road that covers exactly one grid tile. A road will always have to be at least two grid tiles long.

As a result of these changes and the increased number of ways roads can intersect, we couldn’t use the same way we handled road tiles on Art and rendering side in Anno 1800 where each possibility had its own complete version created by the Art team. Back then, we worked with sets of road tiles like this:

In 45° the number of possible intersections is drastically increased. Calculating that number is actually not trivial, because street intersections are not limited to one tile so they can overlap with other intersections creating something that can lovingly be described as a huge mess.

You remember the sub-tiles of each main tile? Based on them, we decided that Art would create a smaller subset of pieces which then would be assigned to the correct position (according to context) to form roads based on the code created by the 3D Programming team.

That doesn’t mean that this process is easy – this picture shows quite nicely what’s possible when building multiple pieces, curves and intersections close together – and all of that has to work and look pretty:

Building smoothly

Important for us was that players can switch between the “good old” 4 directions that served the Anno series so well over the last 25 years or all 8 directions we offer you now on the fly: you can enable and disable the option at any time.

This also meant that intuitiveness played an important role when we designed the update to the grid and road system: Despite these new options, our focus was to still make building roads as straightforward and simple as before, where a few clicks connect two points on the island no matter how they are orientated in the grid.

Accordingly, all buildings also automatically align themselves to the placed roads next to them, no matter if they are built in 45° or 90°. You can still manually rotate them to your liking, of course

On that note we’re sure you’ll appreciate another quality-of-life feature that made its way into Anno 117: Pax Romana from Anno 1800’s console version. Hovering with a road in build mode over any building allows you to build a road that surrounds the whole building with just a single click. This way you can quickly have a block of residences surrounded by a road – or a warehouse, like in the example below. Have a look!

And finally, the important question: How does the team prefer to build their cities in Anno 117: Pax Romana? And which approach would they recommend players as default option – using all 8 directions or only the “traditional” 4?

 

Nicolas: “I personally like having different neighbourhoods (different cluster of residences, production) and each one can have different orientation.

I also like to orientate element based on the shape of mountains, coasts and rivers. It creates very dense and optimal clusters and still feel very organic.

One of my favourite aspects is have farm field with various shape. Bye-bye angular farm fields!”

 

Johannes: “I usually play in a manner, where I want to reach my next goal as efficiently as possible – and for me that works best when fully sticking to a 90° angle.

However, it’s a totally different thing when playing multiplayer. My focus then switches away from building efficiently towards building more interestingly looking districts. This takes more time and space but also feels rewarding when I can delight / surprise my multiplayer-partner with the more organic look.”

Outro

As you see: While Anno 117: Pax Romana stays true to the grid (that has become central to the series and makes everyone happy who loves building as efficiently as possible) we did introduce more flexibility on top of what you’re used to. Those came with their own set of challenges during design and development but also new opportunities to change up the visual style of your cities and islands, more freedom to build your islands the way you want. Despite the added complexity through the diagonal option, building roads in this expanded grid feels as intuitive as before.

Other features in the game use a similar functionality to the roads… more on that later. Completely unrelated: Did you know that the historical Romans built a ton of aqueducts?

 

We did mention “challenges” a few times throughout this blog, as well as implications for other parts of the game – more on this in the second part of this DevBlog in the coming weeks.

So, for today: We hope you got a good first idea of what to expect in Anno 117: Pax Romana. If you have any questions on the grid or the topic of roads, don’t hesitate to share them with us!

Union Update: Vote for your favourite Island Design

Posted on by Ubi-Thorlof

Hey Anno Community,

It’s time for the last phase of our third and final Community Contest dedicated to Anno 117: Pax Romana – voting for your favourite island design!

Back in January, we challenged you to design your very own Latium island and submit your creation for a chance of your design becoming an actual island in Anno 117: Pax Romana. Well, you clearly understood the assignment and sent us SO MANY amazing designs!

We would like to take this moment to thank each and one of you who submitted an entry for the contest, your creativity and attention to details always amazes us. We had an incredibly hard time to only select a handful of them for the voting, there were so many fun designs!

So, after diligently going through all your submissions, the Level Art team has chosen 5 finalists for this contest.

PLEASE NOTE: Entries have been annonymised for the voting. The content has not yet been adjusted to fit the exact realities of the game. That means that any landscape elements, features, buildings etc. mentioned in these designs that have not been confirmed by us are pure speculation by these authors. The winning entry will be adjusted afterwards if necessary.

Click on any of these images to open them in a separate tab if you want to take a closer look.

We know – it’s hard to choose! Once you feel ready, cast your vote by clicking on the button below! Your vote is completely annonymous.

You will have time to vote until March 2nd end-of-day. We cannot wait to see the results of the voting and celebrate the winner.

Thank you all once again for participating in this contest, it’s been amazing to see your engagement and excitement for the game, throughout this.

Anno 117: Pax Romana at the IGN Fan Fest

And, at the very end of this blog, we want to direct attention to Thursday: As part of the IGN Fan Fest, our Creative Director Manuel will also talk about Anno 117 and reveal a new feature.

Tune in on Thursday at 7PM CET/10AM PT for the IGN Fan Fest. The Anno 117: Pax Romana segment will likely start around 8:30PM CET/11:30 AM PT.

Union Update: Beta Registration & Collector’s Edition

Posted on by Ubi-Thorlof

Hey Anno Community,

let us quickly update you on two recent pieces of news!

Register now for beta tests

You can now officially sign up for upcoming beta tests later this year via this website!

We’ll have more information on the exact dates of these tests in the coming months. From all registered players we will randomly draw a certain number of people based on the goals of the tests.

These tests serve to both collect your feedback on the game and its features as well as test performance and stability on all platforms and different kinds of hardware configuration.

The Anno 117: Pax Romana Collectors Edition

Just last week we confirmed with a teaser a question that many of you have already been asking: yes, Anno 117: Pax Romana will receive a Collectors Edition: the “Governor Edition”!

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You can register now via this link to not miss any future news on the Governor Edition. We’ll reveal more on the content of the edition later this year…

 

… but wait, we actually have a little sneak-peak already! In fact, we even need your input!

Right now, until February 21st, you can vote on your favourite design for the Governor Edition’s box, as well as the artbook that’s going to be included in the edition. Follow this link to the poll!

We’re very curious which designs you prefer!

Community Contest – Design an island for Latium

Posted on by Ubi-Thorlof

Hello Anno Community,

It is time for the third and final Community quest dedicated to Anno 117: Pax Romana – where we ask you to use your creativity and imagination to create something that will make its way into the game.

Your third and final quest

From statue designing to quest writing, you have had quite some fun in the past few months! And we have loved seeing your creativity and imagination being applied to Anno 117: Pax Romana. This time, we challenge you to design an island for Latium, one of the twin provinces under your stewardship. Latium is close to the heart of the empire, a place of luxury and tranquility, covered in wheat and lavender fields. Cypress trees adorn paths and provide much-needed shade during the warm summers. With its beaches, open fields and breathtaking views, this province makes the perfect retreat for the wealthy.

  • General rules:
    • You have time until 9th February to submit your entry
    • Only 1 entry per person is allowed
    • Entries must be submitted to this e-mail address: anno-community@ubisoft.com using the subject “Community Contest: Island”
    • Entries must be digital, i.e. if you did a paper drawing, you will need to scan or photograph it and attach it to your email
    • Entries must not infringe on any copyrights of third parties
    • Entries that have been created using AI tools will be excluded from the contest
    • Two or more people can work together on a single submission

 

  • Island-creation rules:
    • Design a single island for Latium, the Roman-inspired province
    • You can design your island on any medium you prefer (paper drawing, MS Paint scribble, 3D model, etc.,) and anything from a quick sketch to a detailed model is fine
    • Your island should be clearly visible, and its shape must be clearly defined in top-down view
    • The shape of the island should strike a balance between being interesting to plan and build a city in while looking visually appealing. A balance of a central, cohesive space together with more fractured or narrow spaces. Try to use natural elements like the coastline shape, rivers or cliff lines as your tools to define the space.
    • The island should feature at least one large, cohesive space that is suitable to start building a city in. That space should have a connection to a beach.
    • It should feature at least 3 mountainous elements that could believably host mines.
    • The island should have at least 1 river and up to 3 in total. Rivers may branch.
    • The island should use elevation in large, smooth gradients rather than a high frequency of hills. Mountains should believably support this elevation.
    • Forests should be well distributed across the island – in both smaller and larger formations.
    • Clearly mark all these terrain elements such as mountains, hills, as well as beaches and rivers; keep in mind that if something is not marked as a beach, it will be counted as a cliff-side

If you feel the need to add notes, descriptions, gameplay ideas behind your concept – feel free to do so.  

Here is an example of how such an island design could look like, created by one of our Level Artists back in the days for Anno 1800: 

Once the submission time is over, we will review your entries and select our favourite island designs with the help of the Level Art team. The finalists will then be published in the Anno Union, and it will be your turn to decide the winner of the contest by voting for the island that will make its way into the game. Voting will start in late February.

We hope you are as excited as we are for the last Anno 117: Pax Romana contest! Have fun designing your own Anno island – we cannot wait to see what you create this time! In the meantime, for any question feel free to comment or reach out on our social channels listed below.

*We reserve the right to make adjustments to the winning island design for it to fit the Anno 117: Pax Romana level design and balancing.

Union Update: The Anno 1800 Saga

Posted on by Ubi-Thorlof

Hey Anno Community!

Last week we released the “End of an Era” Pack, and we didn’t choose the name as a joke: With this Cosmetic DLC ends the postlaunch phase for Anno 1800 – about five and a half years after the initial release in April 2019.

What a ride it has been!

Announced in August 2017, Anno 1800 was at the center of everything we were doing for many years: from the big exciting announcement and the launch of the Anno Union over many, many DevBlogs, fan meetings at gamescom, playtests and livestreams to the release, over four seasons of postlaunch gameplay DLC and then two more years of support with Cosmetic DLC and updates. It’s certainly been quite a journey!

We were also happy to ultimately add mod support to the game (and see the modding community flourish), successfully launch Anno 1800 on consoles and celebrate both the Anno series 25th, as well as Anno 1800th 5th birthday with you all.

Sure, there were, no doubt, some hick-ups along the way:

Veterans might remember an incident with an armada of ghost ships in Season 1 or issues around the release of the “Eden Burning” scenario, which left the game in a rough state for the holidays.
For quite a while, the Influence mechanic remained a hotly debated topic – as were items and their balancing. Some of these topics even make a return now in discussions about Anno 117: Pax Romana.

However, ultimately, this didn’t overshadow the fantastic success that Anno 1800 had become or the incredibly appreciation we have seen from all of you, motivating us to continue working on the game throughout all these years.

Certainly, we did not plan for Anno 1800 to have such a long post-launch life, or to see so many smaller and bigger expansions. Looking back, we’re incredibly proud of our work over the last years – even while we are at the same time also happy to close this chapter of our history and start writing a new one. Now in ancient Rome instead of in the time of the Industrial Revolution.

We’re also incredibly proud of having had YOU all with us on this journey! We couldn’t be luckier with this awesome community we have – that is (even when something goes wrong) polite and patient, welcoming to new players, incredibly inventive and has created some of the best memories of our careers as devs.

You’re playing a huge role in what we’re doing, in many decisions we take and in why we can work in jobs that bring us joy.

Thank you!

Team Anecdotes & Messages

Therefore, to round things off, we think it’s only appropriate to finish today’s blog with some messages and memories from the team:

Let’s start with two easter eggs that we think haven’t been found yet!

We’re not going to reveal the full details but… let’s imagine there’s a first-person mode that lets you use one of the swan boats from the “Pedestrian Zone” pack. Now, let’s assume there’s a button that lets you… do some acrobatics with the boat. Wouldn’t that be fun?

Johannes, Senior Gameplay Programmer

If you’ve really messed up the water quality in the “Eden Burning” scenario, nature is protesting. Vehemently. At the beach.

Nico, Lead Programmer

 

Then there are of course some development stories…

 

Did you know we, for a while, seriously considered a scenario involving aliens in Season 4? It was supposed to draw on some 19th century science-fiction works and involve a defense against non-human invaders.

Dominik, Game Designer

 

Did you know that when the team first introduced cats and dogs to the game, they assigned them the regular “pedestrian kid” behaviour since we didn’t have a specific “pedestrian animal” behaviour yet? The result was… interesting, with gangs of cats and dogs heading to the zoo to watch the other animals there.

Jan, Gameplay Programmer

The time we forgot to remove the “strange idol” item from a cancelled questline in DLC 12. We hoped you wouldn’t notice but… of course you all did. And not just that, this even resulted in some elaborate conspiracy theories about secret messages and teasers (and we never do teasers, as you know).

Jannika, Game Writer

Wow, End of an Era is here, and my memories from working on 1800 are flowing in, everything from starting my first job for a big game publisher on Anno 1800 in 2021 till my last work on 1800 – the Eldritch pack.
 Anno 1800 has given me so much joy and experience in working with game development, people and crafting great content for you, the player.

A couple of highlights are:

  • Introducing New World Rising in our Season 4 Trailer.
  • Being in charge of the Seasonal Decorations pack on the QA side (still annoyed it got released with the wrong icon, the placeholder was just that good hahah).
  • Working on the creative mode with Dominik, coming up with a lot of suggestions of what to add, like that every resident tier can be built directly, that every zoo and museum module could be built as an ornament – and just so so many ornaments!
  • And then, close to the end, when we added the mod support to Anno 1800, the great collaboration between the few of us that were still working on 1800 back then.

All in all, I want to say thank you to all of you – the fans – for supporting the game and our team these years. It’s been amazing and I can’t wait for you to see what Anno 117: Pax Romana has to offer!

Sic Parvis Magna
Jan, Development Tester

 

Thank you so much for every minute you played at Anno. Your support, your having fun while creating your own little world is the biggest joy and gratification a designer could ask for <3
Thank you for being the most wholesome community I ever joined! Nothing warms my heart like joining the twitch lives and reading your comments on Reddit.

The end of 1800 is just the beginning of a new chapter and the beginning of your new empire!
See you in Rome!

Elisabetta, UI Designer

 

There’s no doubt that we have one of the most wholesome communities in gaming. Both in the interactions with each other as well in interactions with us from the dev team, the calm, friendly and constructive manner in which you engaged with others made the lives of players and devs (especially mine <3) of Anno 1800 just so much better.

Never change, please, and we’ll all continue to have a great time with Anno.

Oliver, Community Developer

 

Union Update: It’s the “End of an Era” Pack Release Day

Posted on by Ubi-Thorlof

It’s the End of an Era! – The release day of the “End of an Era” Pack that is. Our newest Cosmetic DLC is available now!

As the name very subtly hints at: This is the very last Cosmetic DLC for Anno 1800, and the very last piece of content we have planned for the game.

Accordingly, the “End of an Era” Pack is all about celebrating Anno 1800, its citizens and you and your achievements: decorate houses with colourful lights, hold festivals of light on your public plazas and invite your people to a show they have never seen before.

Oh, and don’t forget the fireworks!

If you want to have a closer look at the contents of this final Cosmetic DLC, check out last week’s Twitch livestream with Laura and Jannika.

You can also get a detailed look at all the new skins and ornaments and learn about the inspirations for this cosmetic pack in our DevBlog.

 

The “End of an Era” Pack Cosmetic DLC is now available on all platforms for 4,99€ or your regional equivalent.

Creative Festival

Finally, let’s not forget the “Creative Festival” is still ongoing until December 8th! Join other Anno 1800 fans in sharing your best, favourite or simply wildest screenshots of the game using the DLC and CDLC that were released since 2019.

Which ones are your favourites? Share them on any platform (Twitter, Reddit, Discord, Instagram, …) – we’re looking forward to seeing your creations!

Anno 117: Pax Romana Updates

We’ve also published a few updates and news on Anno 117: Pax Romana very recently!

Check out this blog for news on Steam as well as some first screenshots of the regions Latium and Albion! In addition, in the same blog we’re also sharing a more general development update for the game including some of the topics we have been and currently are working on.

Community Spotlight – Advent Calendar

A very short Community Spotlight for today: On Reddit, user announced their video advent calendar for Anno 1800. Every day, you can expect a chill video with some Anno 1800 beauty building footage on their YouTube channel.

We love the idea! Why not head over to their channel and check it out?