Dear Madame,
Ever since you arrived in the New World, your name has become a synonym for exquisite taste.
It is no secret that you deal in some of our greatest treasures. While this practise is perfectly legal, we regret that our people were unable to place a bid for what is rightfully theirs.
We, the Artista Collective, want to encourage the repatriation of these objects and hope to enlist your help in this matter.
Rather than intrude on your time uninvited, we have an offer to make, one that is well-suited to your talents as a trader.
We await your presence at the Atelier Insólito, graciously hosted by the Yaosca Research Centre.
Respectfully,
The Artista Collective

Another challenge awaits you, Annoholics, in Season 4’s third scenario: Pride & Peddlers.

As you may have already deduced from the intro, this time you will be taking on the role of Madame Kahina, a trader dealing in exotic artefacts, spices and more. Hired for just these talents, Pride & Peddlers is all about producing and trading goods and amassing significant sums of money.

The goal: Buy back three valuable artefacts from three Old World traders and exhibit them in your still-to-be-constructed museum.

Check out our video below to get a quick overview:

Gameplay

You’ll be starting off with a small fleet of four ships and are free to settle any island you want. The production chains and needs largely follow the regular ones in the New World, with only a few modifications. Building a first settlement and – importantly – getting your production started to have goods to export should be your first objective.

There is a twist, however: Since all your workers are volunteers in this mission, you will not be able to tax them. Accordingly, your only source of income is trade. We’ve adjusted the balance calculation to show you if you’re making a plus or not in this scenario. For this, you will either have to set up trade routes or approach a trader manually. Possible trading partners are both the already mentioned three traders (Margaret Hunt, Vicente Silva, Carl Leonard von Malching) or some familiar faces from the New World (Yaosca, Isabel Sarmento, Paloma Valente).

The Old World traders also offer goods your residents might be willing to pay you for (Black Market goods), but those are expensive, and you’ll have to think twice if you can afford them.

Some other changes to your regular gameplay sessions include the randomization of the map, meaning mines and fertilities are not consistent on restart. Additionally, mines are finite and cannot be “refilled”, and there’s no military component to the scenario.

You can and will need to settle multiple islands to produce the large variety of goods and stay prepared for all eventualities – but expansion is expensive. Make sure you can compensate the costs via your trading.

Additionally, there are some optional story events around Madame Kahina herself – and you’ll occasionally find valuable goods in the wreckages or less fortunate trading vessels.

The Market

After this general overview over the scenario, let’s dive into one of the core features: The Market.

Similar to the “Seasons of Silver” scenario, the market situation changes in irregular intervals (meaning not all events have the same duration), providing you with modifiers to your production, population and trade. The market is rather unregulated – which can be a great way to turn a big profit, if you manage to get ahold of the products affected by the market trends. Events can be positive or negative, see these two examples:

• “A fishy business”: fish oil can be sold at 250% its normal price.
• “The fields lie barren” | Negative event: Farmer protests that affect all crop farms, all new world orchards and all animal farms. Farmers everywhere have decided to protest harsh conditions and falling prices –> -50% productivity, +75% chance of riots

You’re provided with a forecast as to what the next market event will be, allowing you prepare. It might not be profitable forever to focus on agricultural goods, but you might want to branch out and also get some more advanced factories going.

The market trends are randomized to a degree, and there are quest-related special events with their own effects. Additionally, the market trends are both influenced by with whom you are trading (Old World traders or New World traders) and how far you have progressed in the scenario.

Victory Conditions

As mentioned previously, your goal is to repatriate the three artefacts in question and then exhibit them in your museum. This grants you the Bronze Medal.

Silver and Gold will additionally challenge you to end the scenario with a certain amount of money for the “heritage fund” and Gold requires you to be a real export master (which actually was our internal name for the scenario) by selling a total of 500.000 tons of goods during your playthrough.

This time around, there is no timer attached to any of the objectives, which means that in theory you have as much time as you want.

Practically, due to the changing market situations described above, you will still want to tackle your goals in a timely manner

The rewards for finishing the scenario are new skins for your museum modules.

As introduced with DLC 11 and Game Update 15, Pride & Peddlers is also coming with its own set of badges. These extra challenges grant you additional Golden Tickets for the Grand Gallery if fulfilled during a playthrough. There are three in total:

• Win the scenario with 180t of scooters in storage.
• Win the scenario with 100K coins in stock.
• Win the game with a population of at least 3.000 after surviving one hour in volatile markets.

An update for the Grand Gallery

Finally, we’re also updating the Grand Gallery with Game Update 16. For your Golden Tickets earned through the scenarios you can unlock several additional items, the selection is a mix of specific feedback you provided us with as well as a general community favourites. For example, you can now find Ermenegilda di Mercante, the Mole Master and Master Craftsman Franke in the Grand Gallery.

Additionally, you unlock the Artista portraits for your profile as well as a variety of cemetery-themed ornaments like graves, a crypt or an angel statue.

And that’s all for “Pride & Peddlers”, the new scenario coming with the “New World Rising DLC”. How will you fare without taxes as primary income source?

Development of Anno 1800 – Season 4 is supported by the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action within the framework of computer games funding.

Hey Anno Community,

In this second DevBlog for “New World Rising” we will take a closer look at what we only briefly mentioned before: The expansion of the New World region and the new islands that are getting added.

While Anno games tend to give players relatively large freedoms to build as much and how they want, there are still a few limiting factors. One main factor, of course, is space. There are only so many islands in a region and the islands have only so many tiles.

While some of you have proven over the years, that one can squeeze many more people on those islands than we originally thought, eventually a ceiling is hit, and either space for residences or space for production runs out. Space management therefore also is a key challenge of the Anno games – even more so if you’re playing with opponents.

In Anno 1800, the New World itself also acted as a limiting factor to a certain degree, considering the goods that other regions, primarily the Old World, needed. Season 4’s focus on the New World therefore meant a) to provide engaging new mechanics and b) simultaneously offer additional ways to increase efficiency and save space (e.g. Hacienda farms or workforce commute via the Airship Platform).

A larger New World

New World Rising is adding an additional population tier as well as several new production chains, as we detailed in the previous blog, and the Lifestyle Needs may also require additional production capacities in this southern region. It accordingly made sense to take an additional step to address the above-mentioned space topic, a “simple” one, actually: Giving you more building space!

And that’s what we’re doing with this last DLC of Season 4: The New World region expands on its two northern borders, adding another strip of space for more islands. That’s an increase of about 30%, making the map now larger than the Old World. There are of course still some general limiting factors for map size, first and foremost it’s performance.

New islands to settle

To increase island variety, especially now that the New World is quite a bit bigger than before, our Level Art team also created several new islands that are getting added to the overall map pool for the region. You can expect 3 new small islands, 4 new medium islands and 3 new large islands.

By popular demand, we added additional riv… no, just kidding, we reduced the number of rivers on these new islands. Plus, we’re also adding riverless variants of the existing islands to the overall map pool.

In existing savegames, these new islands will be placed in the expanded area in the north, giving you fresh building challenges to face. The exact number of islands (5 to 7) depends on your chosen region size for your savegame. Therefore, some of the new islands you may only see if you start a new game.

When you start a new game, the islands will be randomly placed together with the already existing New World islands. There is one twist, though: While only owners of DLC 12 will profit from the expanded region, the new islands and riverless island variants will be added to the general map pool, and therefore be available for all players, regardless of which DLC you own.

Our process for creating islands has not changed drastically from what we described a looong time ago back in 2018 in a blog before Anno 1800’s release. We recommend checking out the mentioned DevBlog by our Level Artist Simon if you want some more insights in our processes.

Space for your New World capital

But wait, we talked about new islands, but haven’t mentioned Mānola yet! In addition to the new regular islands that we talked about in the previous section, New World Rising is also adding a larger landmass in the very North of the map. Similar to Crown Falls in Cape Trelawney, it offers you more building space on a single island as well as some unique details – but it also comes with its own monument! This monument gets its own section below, so, let’s first talk about the island itself.

First, the name: As you can see on the screenshot above, Mānola is an island with many waterfalls! The name then was inspired by the Manoa Falls on the Hawaiian island of Honolulu, an impressive 46m waterfall surrounded by rain forest. There were additional inspirations for some of the island’s geographical features, of course: We have long beaches framed by mountain peaks (inspired by Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and many, many waterfalls (inspired by the Iguazu Falls, Argentina/Brazil).

Considering this is the finale of Season 4, we wanted to give you a similar place to create your capital city as we did back in 2019 with Crown Falls – especially since the New World also is one of the regions that are part of the base game.

Aside from the waterfalls, you of course get plenty of building space on this island – making it a great candidate for your New World capital. While there’s a large mountain chain further inland, the area near the coast is split by a large river and slightly rises on several levels up to the mountain region. Several beaches provide space for your industry and harbour area, but also for the new beach module that we introduced in our previous DevBlog.

Several large rocks dot both the landmass itself as well as the coastal area, and a part of the island on the left is semi-detached from the mainland but can be connected via bridges. In addition to coasts and building space, Mānola offers multiple mine, clay and oil deposits to suit your needs.

Our Level Artists also added a few environmental details (and secrets?) as well as stories into this island, we heavily recommend taking the time to take a closer look yourselves.

Note, that this continental island is (in contrast to the other new islands) only available for owners of “New World Rising” with the expanded New World map.

Green Energy – The Dam

The monument you can construct on Mānola is a giant dam, that you might be familiar with when you played the “Eden Burning” scenario. Since the island has plenty of water(-falls), as you’ve seen, you can use this dam to harness the water’s energy to provide electricity to your people on the island.

First, you will have to construct the dam in multiple phases – as you’re used to from other monuments – which will require you to import some goods from the Old World, namely: concrete. Upon completion, the dam provides electricity on the island just like a Power Plant does – but without needing any input goods and with significantly higher range: all of Mānola profits from the electricity generated. No need for power plants and intricate railroad networks.

Additionally, there’s no pollution penalty, making the dam a decidedly more environmentally friendly solution. And it just looks really cool!

That’s it on the topic of New World expansion that’s part of “New World Rising” and the new islands that are getting added alongside it. Next week you can expect a DevBlog for DLC 12’s scenario: Pride and Peddlers – it’s gonna be all about trading!

Do you have any additional questions on the topic of islands and world creation? Leave them in the comments!

Development of Anno 1800 – Season 4 is supported by the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action within the framework of computer games funding.

Dear Miss Paloma Valente,

We are delighted to invite you to the first Grand Postal Derby. This special competition – organised and exclusively covered by the Daily Courier – promises to be the greatest competitive event in the history of humankind – surpassing even the 1806 Sausage-Making Championship.

Victory will require a dedication to deliveries, a mastery of mail-routes, and pre-eminent postal prowess! We at the Daily Courier have no doubt that your airships will thrill the public and provide stiff competition for even the slickest of mail delivery operations.

We eagerly await your arrival.
Yours sincerely,
The editorial board of the Daily Courier

Hard to pass up such an opportunity, wouldn’t you agree? – Obviously Paloma took this opportunity head-on. Both to prove the qualities of her new airship as well as cause the premise of a challenge built around stamps sounded just too intriguing.

Collecting stamps? Oh yes, since “Clash of Couriers” is sponsored by the Royal Philatelic Society, stamps will be at the center of the competition.
If you want to learn a bit more about Paloma, we have a neat little character introduction in our previous DevBlog.

You can get a quick overview of the scenario via the video below:

Getting Started

We know you’re eager to get right into the mail business, but let’s first survey the situation you’re starting in.

This time around, you’re given a starting island (Grassy Point) with a reasonable starting town – including a hangar and landing platform. While you will certainly have to expand this settlement over the course of the scenario as well as expand to new islands – to support your growing postal empire – this way you can almost immediately dive into the quests of the scenario.

You also start with an airship: The “Landroval”, Paloma’s flagship. This way you can quickly survey the map, find traders, islands to settle and whatever else there might be.

As with all our scenarios, expect some changes to the regular mechanics – especially when it comes to the needs of your residents. They’re less demanding than usual, meaning you can fully focus on the tasks ahead.

Mail & Stamps

At the center of the scenario and almost all its challenges is the distribution of mail. This works very similar to the mail system in the main game which we have talked about previously – with the difference, that there’s no “Overseas Mail”, and that “Regional Mail” (mail sent between two islands) has been renamed to “Airmail”. Additionally, fulfilling the mail need will result in you receiving stamps from the delivered mail: two types of stamps for two types of mail. While it can be sold to traders, you will certainly need it for the challenges to come, so we’d recommend holding on to them for a while longer.

Make sure to set up a functional mail system on your starting island, then it’s time to join the Grand Postal Derby!

Goals & Challenges

Alright then, let’s dive into the details of your scenario objective: How do you win the Grand Postal Derby?

Similar to any other type of tournament, you will proceed through several brackets, facing competitors in order to win the derby. Winning two out of three challenges in each bracket will promote you to the next one – but of course, the competitors in each subsequent group will also be significantly stronger.

You can freely pick any of the 3 competitors to challenge but be aware: Each challenge comes with its own tasks for you to fulfil (and a time limit).  These tasks will involve selling previously acquired stamps, and various other objectives like fulfilling needs to a certain percentage, finding people, increasing your population or decreasing your people’s happiness.

There are also individual debuffs connected to each of them. Because… your competitors might not always play fair. For example, the “New World Express” will simply switch around all your workforce requirements while another competitor reduces the bonuses you receive by providing your people with mail. There are more effects, of course – we’ve been very creative!

Throughout the competition, radio messages will comment on all events while remaining extremely professional in their coverage, of course.

The World & Discovery

What we haven’t touched on yet is the world all this is taking place in.

As usual, the scenario map is a specifically created world with its own rules and challenges. For example, only your starting island has some coastal area, all other islands are plateaus with steep cliffs.

That means, that you’ll have to settle them by air, adding an additional logistical challenge since you will need to resupply them by air from your main island with regular deliveries. To settle new islands, you first need an official island charter; you gain those by advancing in the competition, allowing you to slowly expand your postal empire across the whole session.

There also is lots to discover on the map and we heavily recommend you to explore! You will meet some familiar faces to trade or make business with. You will find treasures and previously lost mail shipments. And you may stumble upon some pirates! (Okay, maybe you should be a bit careful while exploring.)

Some of the people you meet might become relevant in quests later on while some of the objects you find may help you with certain tasks or improve your finances. Have a look around when you got some time in between the derby’s challenges.

Similar to the previous scenarios, there’s a certain element of persistency when you restart the scenario: If you have settled on some of the plateaus, the Airship Platform will stay when you decide to restart to, for example, go for higher medal.

Winning the scenario will not only make you and your airships world famous but also give you new skins for the Pegasus Class cargo airship!

And coming with Game Update 15, there’s another reason to play the new scenario…

The Grand Gallery

… introducing: The Grand Gallery!

In the Grand Gallery, you will be able to trade Golden Tickets for various ornaments, items and more. But wait, Golden Tickets?

This is the scenario connection we mentioned: Playing the scenarios and fulfilling certain scenario-related achievements will give you Golden Tickets. Anno 1404 veterans might remember such a mechanic: Back then you received Gems for certain achievements with which you could then unlock ornaments, portraits and more. For you, the Grand Gallery should feel very familiar.

All previous and upcoming scenarios will award you with Golden Tickets for:

• Finishing a scenario for the first time
• Finishing a scenario with a specific medal
• Completing any of the “badges”, special scenario-related achievements

And before you ask: We tracked your progress since Eden Burning, meaning you will already start with a certain number of Golden Tickets if you finished the scenarios and fulfilled some of their achievements prior to this update.

Completing a scenario multiple times will reward you with Golden Tickets each time based on your performance.

Let’s talk about what you can unlock with those Golden Tickets!

Currently there are four categories: Ornaments, Character Portraits, Skins and Items. That means, on September 20^th you will be able to get various kinds of ornaments related to Nate’s scrapyard or use the Paloma as your new portrait.  If you own DLC 11 or DLC 3, there are airship skins (for the for the Zephyr and Boreas Class) you can unlock, too.

And finally, we added a few items we think are popular with our players, for example the Fjordbuster MK VI. or the Gritty Gas Extractor.

All content is available account-wide, meaning it can be used in all your savegames simultaneously.

It’s also important to note that this feature is part of the Free Game Update, meaning you can receive Golden Tickets via the free “Eden Burning” scenario, even if you don’t own any of Season 4’s DLC (and therefore scenarios). We are planning to expand the Grand Gallery with more content in the future.

After unlocking something via Golden Tickets, how do you get access to your new content?

If you played Anno 2070 and loved having the Ark, you will like this: At any time during playing, you can call on Paloma to deliver your unlocked items to your island. She will always deliver all items you unlocked. And maybe this inspires you to start a fresh game: Construct your Trading Post and immediately get your unlocked items delivered for a quicker start!

These item deliveries are only available in singleplayer. Portraits, ornaments and ship skins are immediately unlocked for you, without Paloma’s help.

We hope you find this new feature useful.

That’s it for our DevBlog about the “Clash of Courier” scenario as well as the scenario system overall with the introduction of the Grand Gallery.

We’re not only curious what you think but also can’t wait for you to try your luck with winning the Grand Postal Derby yourself!

Until the release of DLC 11 on September 20^th, you can, as usual, expect the full Release Notes for Game Update 15 as well as details about the Twitch Drops event and early access phase. So, keep an eye on our channels!

Development of Anno 1800 – Season 4 is supported by the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action within the framework of computer games funding.