We are the fire bringers. The sixth age of man approaches. All must bow to the flames. You will be our fuel.
The fire will burn forever.
Anno 1800 will offer builders a wide range of features, from time-honored proven favorites to all new additions to the series. One thing that is unchanged, however, is the ability to sink hundreds of hours into the game, and a big part of that is the ability for the players to set up their very own customized sessions, which has always been a cornerstone of the experience. We know that Anno fans love to be able to tailor the game’s challenges to their own (or their friend’s, of course) specifications and needs. So today, we want to give those veterans and newcomers like the first look at some of the customization options you will get to enjoy in Anno 1800.
Create your own island paradise, or meet a brutal challenge!
We have three basic difficulty levels in Anno 1800, ranging from Normal to Expert; they do not only affect the difficulty of your AI opponents but also include a set of predetermined rules regulating everything from the income you generate to the cost of relocating buildings. While we hope that the Expert setting should pose a challenge for even the most experienced players, we also allow you to tailor your own rule set and to select which (if any) AI characters you want to share your virtual world with. So if you want to create an unrelentingly brutal map with aggressive enemies and sparse resources- be our guest 😉
Similar to some previous Anno games, a dynamic difficulty bar that will give you a better feeling for how big of an impact your rule adjustments will have on the overall challenge.
Let’s start with the settings that will directly affect your game world:
Start World Size – A small archipelago for a quick match or a huge sandbox to play around in? This setting determines the actual size of your session.
Island Difficulty – A pancake will not provide a proper challenge for a true Anno veteran! Harder islands will challenge your city planning with a higher density of mountains, smaller beaches, and rivers.
Island Size – Some players might prefer many small islands for outposts or large-scale landmasses to give their cities enough space to grow.
Raw Materials – You said there isn’t enough copper on your island? A high amount of raw materials will not force you to expand as quickly and will, therefore, make the game easier.
Fertilities – Dictates how much of a factor the various fertilities your island can (not) have.
Next up are the various starting conditions, which can have a big impact on the speed and overall challenge of your game:
Starting ships – Is your flagship enough or would you prefer a small fleet of trading vessels? Or how about a fleet of warships? After all, there is nothing wrong with a good naval rush among friends!
Starting Capital – Money makes the world go round. The more money you have at the start of a game, the easier it is to establish your economy before getting into financial trouble.
Starting Harbor -> Do you want to start with an already settled island (maybe even fully stocked with some starting construction materials), or do you prefer to establish your first Imperial Harbor on an island of your choice?
Revealed Map – Being able to follow the moves of your enemies or friends in multiplayer can speed up things quite a bit.
After setting world and starting conditions, you also have some options to change the game’s rules:
Income – Defines the ratio of how much money your residents generate.
Refund of Construction Costs – If you destroy buildings to make space for your new leisure park area, do you want to get some previously used materials?
Building relocation – Decide whether you want to be allowed to freely move buildings around, or if there should be an attached cost.
Trading Post Restocking – Influences how quickly third-party characters will restock their trade goods on offer.
City Incidents – Some people want to see the world burn while others prefer a peaceful building experience without disturbing fires or riots.
Inactive Upkeep – Turning off building upkeep costs will make the game significantly easier.
Quest Frequency – If quests tickle your fancy, you can boost the rate of quests generated by AI opponents or neutral factions for you to undertake.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a proper Anno game without a distinctive cast of characters and the freedom to decide if you would rather compete with the visionary (albeit slightly megalomaniac) architect Gasparov or would prefer for some easier going fellas to join your beauty building extravaganza match. As always, you will be able to choose up to three second-party AI characters as well as neutral factions such as traders or even those pesky pirates. Keep in mind that each character comes with their own personality, which also gives them their own difficulty rating.
And if you really like the world you find yourself in and want to share it with your friends, make sure that you note down the unique match seed code to recreate your experience at any time. You will of course also be able to have the game generate a random seed for you to get the proper feeling of venturing out into the unknown.
With custom game rules being a time-honored tradition of the Anno series, we’d love to hear from you. Do you have a set of standard rules you always go for or do you change the setup based on your current mood? And do you have any great war stories or tips for newcomers to share with the class? Take to the comments to let us know!
In today’s Union Update blog, we want to give you a brief Anno 1800 production update and provide some additional answers to questions inspired by some of our recent blogs. Later this week, you can look forward to a DevBlog on some of the game’s customization options for sandbox games. Let’s get to it, shall we?
Production Update
As our February 26 release date looms large and inches ever so closer, we have been busy little bees and made some great progress. We recently finished another milestone, so let us check in with our Production Team to get an update on was has been happening these past few weeks. Keep in mind that these are just two notable highlights, but by no means a comprehensive list of everything we have worked on, as all the disciplines and teams (like Art, Game Design, Game Programming etc.) have their own separate goals for each milestone.
We are also analyzing the feedback from the recently concluded playtest to see which items need to be addressed. Given this late stage of development, we have to always consider what changes are feasible, and how they may affect development of other features to make sure that we make the best use of our remaining time. With that said, the feedback from our play testers is still highly valuable for us, especially as we will focus more and more on nailing the game’s balancing. This is also where the data from our upcoming larger-scale test will come in handy to give us insights from a big group of players.
Reminder: Our Expedition Contest ends next week
A reminder for all you writers and expedition event designer out there: the expedition contest submission deadline ends next week on October 22.10 so make sure that you hand in your event ideas until next Monday. And if you have any questions regarding the contest, we will try to answer them in the comment section of today’s update.
You can find the contest details here.
Vienna calling: Play Anno 1800 at Game City Vienna
For any of you who live in or visit Vienna this week, our game will be playable at the Game City event in the city hall. You can find all (German language) information here: https://www.game-city.at/
Community Questions and Answers
Hexagon19
I like that products from the old world will be required in the new world, so my ships won’t have to make the return trip with empty loading bays. Talking of which, the production chains shown in the blog include wood. Could this also be imported from the old world?
Answer: Yes, you will be able to just import goods from your Old World to use them in your production chains in the second session and vice versa.
Phyllus1
Will it be possible to save blueprints for future use, for example to save entire production chains as templates, which could then be quickly placed in the future?
Answer: It won’t be possible to save whole layouts as this would require a lot of work on UI and UX, as we would need to develop a whole interface for that feature including menus, possibilities to save and to sort your layouts. However, we like that feature and closely watch how players will make use of the blueprint mode and how much feedback we get regarding that feature after launch.
Mr.Beko80
You mentioned a botanical garden in the blog. I already suggested this when you first revealed the zoo, so I was wondering if there is still a chance to see such a garden in the game?
Answer: At release, Anno 1800 will come with the Zoo and the Museum as large building projects supporting the new city attractiveness feature. Both projects come with a huge amount of assets, from modules, animations and dozens of items each. As always, we will watch feedback closely and see what the post-release future may hold for Anno 1800.
BlueBreath
So the small stuff in your exhibition you can only see as icons, isn’t there some form of a magnifying glass to show you what is inside? Like when you click the building , the roof get’s stripped off and you could see what’s inside but magnified a bit?
Answer: Small items will all have their own artwork for their actual icon but with the huge amount of museum items alone in mind, this would mean that we would have to model 80 3D assets just for the museum alone and also find ways to display small pieces like a necklace inside a building. We just implemented a nice overview window accessible from the zoo or museum entrance that will allow you to check how many items from which set you own.
The museum wing buildings in combination with the amount of huge open-air exhibition pieces will nonetheless offer a lot of visual variety to express your inner museum curator to your heart’s content.
Viper_R.K.O
Will I always get the same results when I do an expedition again and pick the same option, or is there a random numbers generator at work behind the scenes that will allow for different results? And will there be rewards for nice and beneficial decisions, or only if you act mercilessly and reckless?
Answer: Every decision you make has a chance of success based on a general difficulty and the skill ratings of the items and characters you brought along. In addition, some items will offer unique additional decision options on specific events and some combinations even guarantee a success. If an event fails, there are various outcomes for the story to progress. As you might have seen during the various instances of our Love Island presentations (RIP Captain, Comedian and Bishop).
The type of decisions you make won’t have an influence on the final reward pool of items during an expedition, even though special decisions and events can reward you with items from the event pool.
Today, we want to present you our first Union Talk, where we sit together to talk about Anno Union relevant community topics.
With our big reveal in 2017, we invited Anno fans around the world to share feedback to help us developing Anno 1800. Thousands of comments and 120 blogs later, how has the community actually changed the game for the better?
Our Creative Director Dirk “Karrenschieber” Riegert will give you some insights how your comments and participation helped to shape the New World and other important game content.
Let us know if you liked the idea of our Union Talk, is that something you would love to see more in future and topics you would like to see tackled in the next episode?
We are knee-deep in the de… the final development phase of Anno 1800, and while the big event season with the likes of gamescom and EGX lies behind us, there is still plenty happening in the Anno Union world. Another Union focus test round just concluded and we are working to finalize our content roadmap for those all-important last few months prior to the release of the game. Due to that workload, it can happen that some content might suffer a slight delay, as some of you might have already noticed, but we are working hard to ensure you are well entertained leading up to the big launch date.
To give you a glimpse at our upcoming content: We plan to host Livestreams more frequently, will provide fan material such as wallpapers, highlight your community projects and will tackle important outstanding topics such as naval combat or multiplayer in detail. And not to forget, we will also open the floodgates of our focus playtesting to allow more Union members than ever before to test the game.
While we are on the playtest subject: we need to talk!
The players of the latest focus test provided us once again with a large amount of incredibly helpful feedback and we are still going through the extensive test reports. But we are confident to say that the latest results show that Anno 1800 is on the right track to deliver a game Anno fans can get excited about, even though there is still a lot of work to do prior to the release in February.
In order to make sure that we get as much feedback and data as possible, we want to invite a significantly higher amount of Union members for the next phase of the focus test. This huge test will happen as early as this year and will be exclusive to members of the Anno Union. So if you are just a reader on our page, make sure that you register on the Anno Union page with your Uplay account as soon as possible to secure your chance at being invited.
And to give you some visual impressions from the latest test, here are a few screenshots from our testers (we won’t publish the names as the test is still covered by an NDA).
Keyword feedback: We have not missed your comments regarding the Ship Design Contest in last weeks Union Update. Because of that feedback, we will make sure that for future votes, we give you a chance to vote on a final selection on entries to determine the winner. When talking about the skill regarding the execution of these submissions, the idea behind an entry is as important for us as the actual craftsmanship of the community member, be it a drawing, writing or any other submission (even though we are often amazed by the true display of skills in some of your work).
When we are talking about content that is supposed to be added to the game, keep in mind that we also have to check if an idea is feasible within our production pipeline.
Notwithstanding the above, we want to honor exceptional creative takes and creations with a proper showcase on our Anno Union channels.
And with that, we are already at the end of today’s Union Update. Don’t forget to share your thoughts, suggestions and feedback in the comments below. Moreover, we are always eager to get your ideas for the Anno Union and the Union Updates.
Today, we will wrap up our deep dive debrief of the new features unveiled at gamescom 2018 with a trip to the museum, and a look at the new blueprint mode.
The Museum – Curiosity in an age of adventure and science
Franklin, Livingstone, von Humboldt… the 19th century was an age of intrepid explorers setting out to discover unknown frontiers and to uncover the mysteries of the world’s most remote locations. For the vast majority of people however, such travel was impossible, leaving them to satisfy their curiosity with travel reports or newspaper articles. Soon however, all this talk of travel and far-away lands lead to a hunger for “the real thing”, with people flocking to zoos, museums and botanical gardens to catch a first-hand glimpse of all the wonders they had read about. In keeping in this spirit of curiosity, you will be able to build your very own extensive museum in Anno 1800, offering you a second major tourist attraction to build alongside your zoo.
At first glance, the museum works quite similarly to the zoo. Unlocked at residential tier 3 (the Artisans), you start your project by constructing the main entrance/ building of the museum, after which you can start placing modules to slot your various exhibits into. Modules only need to be connected by a single tile, which gives you a lot of freedom when it comes to finding your perfect layout for the museum. During this time, it was not uncommon to display priceless antique statues in playful pleasure gardens. We try to embrace this mindset, so all the larger artifacts you can acquire will be displayed as actual 3d models in the open air, allowing you the best possible view of your collected treasures.
While the eye-catching elements of the zoo make heavy use of animated animals, the museum will have a large set of structures, such as temple ruins, antique mosaics or even dinosaur skeletons. Lower tier items such as amulets, old swords or other smaller artifacts will be displayed in special houses, which vary thematically, while still having their own unique 2d artwork. At launch, we hope to have around 80 possible artifacts to display in your museum, which will be organized into thematic sets like “dinosaur skeletons” or “proto-historical”.
Blueprint Mode – Plan your architectural masterpiece
Working on a layout for a new industrial district or a nice artisan quarter is one thing, but if you start large scale projects such as the zoo or want to create a stunning avenue around your world fair, things can get complicated. The new blueprint mode is the perfect tool for aspiring architects, as it allows you to plan street layouts, districts or even whole cities in advance before laying down the first stones.
The blueprint mode is a rather simple but nevertheless extremely powerful tool. Once activated via your toolbar, all buildings placed will only show as ghostly silhouettes, indicating the spot for your future residence or factory. You can now take your time to work on a small layout for a few new production buildings or continue to work on your large park around the city center you always dreamed of. As soon as you are happy with your layout, or if you managed to gather the previously missing material, you can just go ahead and start constructing.
But you don’t have to click on each silhouette manually; the new upgrade tool comes in handy as it allows you to construct every single blueprint building with one click or even via drag and drop. Especially in the early game or in resource-constrained times, it can happen that you want to place a building but realize that you do not have the needed materials. In that case, the blueprint mode will automatically place a silhouette indicating that you are currently short on resources.
Placing buildings in blueprint mode will not cost you any resources or money and they will not start operating before you complete their actual construction.
What do you think about the large-scale projects like the museum and the zoo as well as new city building tools such as the blueprint mode? Are you someone who can sink hundreds of hours to create the most stunning city or is efficiency key when establishing a real power economy?
Our team had to fight their way through a flood of incredible ship designs coming from our creative Union community, and as such, it certainly was not easy to select just one winner. While not every entry met the criteria of creating a variation of the “Imperial Pride” ship, but the general level of creativity and skill on display was highly impressive to us.
And while we can only immortalize the winning entry in the game, we will try to showcase some other creations on our various Anno union channels in the future.
So without further ado, let’s cut to the chase- the winner of our Anno Union ship design contest is (please imagine a sufficiently industrialized drum roll)…
While we liked many of the ideas for mighty warships or utilitarian barges, we fell in love with the idea of the touristic “musical steamer” „Haydn“ by Union member redtoasty. Conceptualized as a “top of the line” luxury ship, we could immediately imagine a crafty investor using lots of paint and decorations to turn a decommissioned steamer into the perfect ship to lure in the ladies and gentleman of high society.
Our team will now get to work to turn the „Haydn“ into an actual in-game model for you all to play with. In addition to seeing his creation immortalized in the game, redtoasty will receive an Anno Union shirt as well as our highly limited bronze pins.
We also want to say a big “thank you” – and ask you for a hearty round of applause – for all other community members and their submitted designs. Make sure to keep an eye on all of our Union channels to see some of them in the future.
Our „Design your own Expedition“ contest starts NOW
Ever since we first unveiled our new expeditions feature at gamescom 2018, we kept receiving the same question over and over- and no, it was not “why does your crew seem to die horrible deaths on love island during all of your live streams” 😉
Instead, many of you wanted to know if there was the possibility of running a contest where Union members could try to design their own expeditions. And since we love nothing more than to try and please our players wherever possible, this very contest starts… right this moment! We want to see your ideas and concepts for an expedition that you would love to see implemented in Anno 1800.
Some rules to keep in mind:
The submission deadline for this contest is October 22nd.
You can post your creative ideas and submissions in this forum thread: >>CLICK ME<<
A continent carved by rivers, dominated by lush jungle forests and dotted with ancient mountains. Your Kontor just established on a white sand beach, the first residents settle in your newly founded city and you take a moment to watch the Tobacco leaves grow in the ardent sun.
The New World will leave a strong and vibrant impression and it was important for us that the new residents and their buildings invite the player to sink deep into the atmosphere of that beautiful continent.
Inspired by 19th century Latin America, Anno 1800’s New World residents are bound to their country but other than the dawn of the industrial age in the old world, their story is a tale of building a strong prospering society fueled by the dream of independence.
Beside a set of strong third party characters populating the second session, your settlements will have visual feedback representing residents local to the continent, including models, portraits for residential tiers and new production chains.
Residential Tier I – Jornaleros
Jornaleros are the farmers of the New World, devout and hardworking people who are driven by the dream of independence at a dawn of a new era.
Similar to your first session, the first residential tier in the New World will represent the ways of old, farmers cultivating cotton and cocoa but also participating in traditional crafts such as pearl diving. However, it is also important for us to show respect to their roots and heritage as the Jornaleros are not to color them with the same brush as the Farmers. Working on the fields is hard labor, but by the middle of the 19th century for the first time, they could call the soil they cultivate their own. When the sun sets after a long day, Jornaleros find community and harmony in cultural buildings such as the chapel.
The Jornaleros are the hard working and devout farmers of the New World
Their farm houses are rather simple but also a pragmatic fit for the hot and stifling climate of their continent. We wanted that their residential buildings convey that they are slowly adapting to a new life and are not built as a long-standing family heirloom. However, not many of them can call a farm their own and it is not easy to build a lasting foundation for a small home on the jungle soil outside of paved cities or large haciendas.
This concept art gives you a good idea about the flair of the Jornaleros homes.
Cocoa, Bananas or Pearls, which seem almost ordinary to the Jornaleros, fetch a high price to fulfill the craving for anything new and rare in the high society of the Old World. But while they call even common plants like sugar-cane “exotic”, the life of the New World residents also changed when goods from across the ocean became an integral part of their life. Centuries of influence brought new goods to their continent, some of them now cultivated on their own land while others are in high demand as imported luxury goods.
Rum export is big business in the 19th century, as there is a high demand for the drink in the Old world.
Residential Tier II – Obreros
When the power monopoly of the Old Worlds monarchy crumbled, the Orebros managed to take advantage of the new trading deals and connections to the rising class of financial entrepreneurs. Their new prosperity allows them to import expensive crafted goods such as sewing machines and they value a distinctive lifestyle based on old traditions, which grows confidently into a promising future.
Their settled city lifestyle also offers amenities for their society, from healthcare provided by the local hospital to entertainment during a visit at the boxing ring.
The Obreros are the residents of the new worlds who found their way from the farmlands into the cities, where they found wealth as tradespeople.
Some of their residential buildings have a long history but over time, the Obreros gave them their own character. As many of the Obreros grow accustom to the city lifestyle, their houses were built with lasting stone and they are more likely to spend their new wealth on their homes for the generations to come.
The residential buildings of the Obreros depict an urban lifestyle still fitted to the climate.
The lounging investors and engineers in your metropolis cannot get enough of their imported cigars and chocolate but the real driver for the economy lies in precious gold and oil. Almost all goods you export into the Old World serve luxury needs and making your money aristocracy happy will challenge your smart management skills and require an elaborate trade network.
Goods produced in the New World will serve as luxury goods in the Old World and vice versa.
Gold is hard to get by, which results in a heavy demand in workforce for prospecting the luxurious metal in several mines in order to ensure a profitable output.
But oil was the real game changer to bring progress and a thriving economy to the New World. While some few oil fields will be available in the old world to cover the need for basic electrical supply, you will need to tap into the rich oil resources of the New World if you want to support your power economy and make your investors happy. The oil towers surrounded by jungle provide quite a vista, but the fossil fuel not only wants to be pumped out of the ground but also conveyed to the oil harbor and then distributed in large tanks to your Old World’s metropolis.
A lush continent with a vibrant society
The New World will carry you away with its details, offer new and challenging production chains and invite you to meet a rich set of new third party characters and to explore it’s story in the campaign. But Anno 1800’s campaign is a story for another day and with that brief look over the two production chains, we bet you have many questions about the New World session.
By the dawn of the 19th century, the majority of the globe had been accessed by various trade conglomerates and empires, but there were still curious adventurers willing to conquer our world’s final frontiers and history’s last big secrets. From the journeys of Charles Darwin and Alexander Humboldt to various novellas and tales about curiosity, bravery, and hardship – we had plenty of material to inspire Anno 1800’s new Expedition feature.
Expeditions allow us to experience the world of Anno from a completely different perspective from our usual view through the lens of an architect. From dangerous scientific expeditions to the arctic regions, exploring the heritage of old civilizations hidden in dense jungles or the hunt for infamous freebooters, playing through these exciting stories will reward you with precious and rare items. These can be anything ranging from exotic animals for your zoo or artifacts to be displayed in your newly opened museum to specialists who can boost your productivity, accompany you on future expeditions or even lead your flagships as seasoned naval veterans.
However, these undertakings were never without risk, and many scientists and explorers paid the ultimate price to follow their dreams; similarly, some of these dangerous ventures may pose a grave threat to your ship and crew.
Let me take you on an adventure
The new Expedition feature adds “choose your own adventure” style quests to Anno 1800, where you send a ship and it’s crew on a journey with an uncertain outcome. During that adventure, your crew will encounter scenarios based on the type of expedition, and you have to choose wisely how to tackle these events to guarantee a safe and rewarding outcome. There will be a variety of expedition types, such as archeological, zoological, rescue missions or even bounty hunting pirates.
Available at the third residential tier, these adventures will become available in your expedition menu and as a marker on your world map. Here, you can also see the title, type and difficulty indicator for each expedition. Naturally, lengthier and more dangerous expeditions will offer higher rewards for the risks you have to undertake. There will be many different stories with a variety of events to play through and you will be able to run several expeditions at the same time. Once you have decided which journey you want to undergo, you first have to prepare your ship.
The moral bar of your expedition serves as a health bar during the long journey into uncharted waters. The moral bar is a combination of the ship’s basic morale rating as well as the various items on your ship, including rations, goods that provide special abilities and any specialists who join your crew. The general rule: the higher the morale, the more likely it is that your expedition will be successful.
Your seasoned naval advisor provides you with information about an expedition, such as potential rewards and the types of encounters you may face. And there will be plenty of those- from foreign cultures which require diplomatic tactfulness, to diseases which can befall your crew to superstitious rumors about stranger things which befell the last unlucky souls who sailed through that mysterious passage, our expeditions can get pretty eventful. If items are a good fit for the challenges you can expect on an expedition, they will provide a significant boost to your morale bar.
Specialists with diplomatic experience might help you out with foreign encounters, canons or an experienced cannoneer will help against hostile ships and extra rations will help to endure the month long trips on the high seas.
As soon as you loaded up your ship with specialists and other items based on the Captains recommendation, you are ready to send the brave crew on to their journey and your ship will leave your session in real-time until entering the world map. There, it will travel to the expedition’s destination, indicated by a marker and a line showing the ship’s course.
Events – Captain, there is land on the horizon!
During their journey, which will take time based on the distance to the destination, events will happen, which are more frequently and challenging based on the expedition’s difficulty rating. These events will each have their own story and different stages, based on the decisions you make and their outcome. The key here is that almost every encounter has multiple possible outcomes, both joyful and negative. The decisions you make and even the items you brought with you can have an impact on the said outcome. The chance of success is affected by the quality of your items, as your specialists, the ship itself and other items and goods have their own skills and modifiers.
Let’s look at the example. Your ship took serious damage during a gruesome storm, but a carpenter might be able to repair it with his skills and some wooden planks. You have neither the needed material nor the craftsman to fix the damage? It might be worth taking the risk to ask for help on the mysterious island on the horizon. You may even boldly decide to ignore the damage altogether and just venture forth, even if your crew’s morale will take a heavy hit from travelling on a damaged ship.
As mentioned, Characters can have special traits, such as an anthropologist who can help you when encountering foreign cultures, which might lead to unique decision options based on the traits of said specialist.
Example: We have an event in which your crew makes landfall on an island in search of potable water and while doing so, meets a native tribe who currently performs a sacred ritual. A tricky situation as you don’t want to antagonize the inhabitants of the islands. Luckily, as your Anthropologist spent years studying foreign customs, he can show respect for the tribe by joining their ritual, which will reward you with a special item if successful.
Sometimes, you might have the perfect item to solve a tricky situation, which will enable a special decision with a guaranteed chance of success. But even some basic goods can help you through certain scenarios; for example, soap gives a bonus to medicine, wooden planks help if you need to repair your ship during an event and the trusty parrot gives you a bonus on faith when “pining for the fjords”.
Risks? There are always risks
In the spirit of the great scientific journeys of the 19th century, there is always something at stake but a higher skill rating can weight the odds dds when making decisions. Failing events or ignoring them when you are missing needed materials and skills will cause a hit to the morale of your expedition.
On our “Love Island” expedition shown at gamescom, an encounter with a tribe’s chieftain could lead to various outcomes: if you are lucky (or well prepared), one of the tribesmen might join your crew as a specialist but if Lady Luck is not smiling upon you that day, an ill-timed “knock knock joke” could even cost your comedian her life. Space is also precious on your ship, as you might need to leave someone behind or throw goods overboard in order to make space for that rare reward which you managed to catch during an event.
Going through events during an expedition costs morale (even during events with positive outcomes). All food and drink related goods you have on your ship count as rations, and after every event, you will be able to spend extra rations to lose less morale. The morale will sink over time or even suffer greatly when facing grim circumstances. If the morale bar falls to zero before you finish your adventure, the expedition is lost – including your ship, your crew, the precious schnapps, and even any trusty parrots you had with you.
But you are at the helm of your ship and if you feel that the risk is too high or that an expedition may take an unfortunate turn, you can always recall your ship from an active expedition.
Fortune favors the bold- and so do the rewards
When finishing an expedition, you will be rewarded with several rare or even legendary items. Every expedition has its own loot table based on the difficulty and the type of the venture, such as archaeological expeditions giving you a guaranteed cultural artifact if you succeed. Furthermore, individual encounters can also have their own loot tables or grant fixed items for specific outcomes, which are separate from the rewards for finishing the overall expedition. The rewards for finishing an expedition can be rich and plentiful, and we are looking forward to reports on your adventures and players comparing their rare items.
Besides items you can get from the event encounters themselves, expedition loot will not take up any space on your ship to make sure that you receive the deserved loot for the efforts you went through. After finishing the expedition, your ship will return to your main island and dutifully unload your spoils into your imperial harbor.
And so our story ends… for now
Expeditions are an exciting new feature that allows you to enhance your city-building experience with opportunities to get deeper immersed in the world of Anno 1800, while being able to snag some helpful items and specialists along the way. As a team, we can’t wait to hear your thoughts, and to read the first tall tales of players relay their expedition (mis)fortunes and what spoils they managed to bring back home to their islands!
What do you think of the expeditions? What stories and adventures do you want to see? And what kind of rations are the best for long expeditions? Let us know in the comments what you think.
A new week has arrived and that, of course, means that a new Union Update chock full with Anno wisdom is here. Before we start the promised elaborate Q&A Session, let us first make you aware of two possibilities to see Anno 1800- live and in glorious color! Also, as a heads-up, in this week’s DevBlog we will dive into the world of Expeditions.
We’re at the EGXs – Plural!
As announced, this Thursday on the 20th at 1PM BST / 8AM EDT, we’ll be streaming a panel with Anno 1800 from EGX in Birmingham which you can view live at https://www.twitch.tv/egx
But wait, there’s more: We’re also happy to stop by the first EGX in Berlin! Our presentation where will be on Sunday, the 29th of September and it’ll be live at 5PM on Twitch, so mark your calendars – or even better: Visit us!
Enough with the prelude – you have questions and we’ll try to give you answers!
Sir_Obelexxus
There were a few Anno T-Shirts at gamescom. As I didn’t have an opportunity to get one, I’m asking myself if it’ll be possible to get merch at some point, especially T-shirts?
Answer: The number of our gamescom shirts was very limited and the demand was huge, so we don’t have any shirts left. We’ll keep the interest for the shirts in mind for the future, however.
Grieswurst
Will there be visible ship crews?
Answer: We often hear the request for crews being visible at work on their ships, due to our love for detail and visual feedback in the cities, similar to how you are able to see your citizens doing their daily work. While visual feedback taking the form of crewmembers is technically possible, the implementation would be very time-intensive and require us to overcome a few technical hurdles.
One of the reasons for this is the size ratio. As you might be aware, the citizens of our Anno world need to have a good mix between visibility and realism, so there won’t be realistic size ratios all the time. And while the ships in Anno 1800 are bigger than ever, the ratios are not necessarily the same ones as with buildings and streets.
In short: The characters on the ships would have a different size as the ones in the city, as they would otherwise look out of place – especially when your ship lies in the harbor.
But there are other points, which made us decide against the visible crew. We wanted a big list of varied ships and ship types and having the crew would’ve possibly been at the expensive of ship variety. Visual feedback of the units you move around in fleets can also be taxing on the eye and make the game seem visually restless, even chaotic. And the further visual feedback that needs to be calculated would also be a strain on performance – and these are just a few points, that we have to take into account when thinking about these decisions.
As you can see, in production we always have to evaluate if the benefits of a feature outweigh the disadvantage or justify the expected effort at the expense of other content (which we could work on instead).
BlueCommander_
Is it now not possible anymore to play a game without switching sectors?
Answer: We played around with various ideas and feedback from the Union focus groups. Many goods that you can import from the New World to your original session are luxury goods for higher resident tiers. With the implementation of separate residential and luxury needs, this means that the rise of your citizens is not dependent on luxury goods, and opting not to use the second session will only partially slow you down. However, the New World will also be the main source of oil, so if you plan to supply your metropolis with electricity at a large scale, we recommend securing an independent influx of the fossil fuel. Trading with AI players, neutral factions and other players in multiplayer are other means with which to get your hands on imported goods. on higher difficulty levels, where other characters will be more aggressive and directly engage with you for economic and even military dominance, a beachhead in the new world can be more meaningful than in a relaxed game on a lower difficulty setting. With that said, we are already very curious to see videos of players, who will push through the highest difficulty without traveling to the New World at all. J
Mr.Beko80
How is it looking with moving buildings around, can you move them anytime or just for a short time after building them?
Will this option have any impact on the difficulty, like the reimbursement of building material in 1404?
Answer: There will be no limits as to when you can move a building. And while the moving of a building is going to be free on lower difficulties, on the higher difficulty settings there will be a cost in building materials.
BfVorsteher
I’m happy that aside from the Darwin Temple, we will also get an altar for the achievements of the „two-legged burrowing mouse“ to expand the cultural diversity of our city. The only question, will space be enough for that? Or will there be revolts due to lack of living space and resulting higher rent?
Answer: Juggling available building space with the needs of your city is one of the core challenges of Anno and of course this won’t change with Anno 1800. Depending on difficulty (which can also influence the size of islands), it can be a challenge to get all the necessary buildings on one island. Ambition plays a role here too, such as deciding whether you want to just have a small “alibi zoo” or push the module system to its limits. In the latter case, you can build museums and zoos that could cover smaller island all by themselves- provided of course that you manage to find enough attractions to fill them with. We leave the worries about ever rising renting costs to the grey reality, however.
roka71
Will there be an Open Beta before release or a Closed Beta for pre-orders?
Answer: We can’t share any concrete details yet, but we plan to have bigger testing phases with a lot more players prior to launch. However, these will be independent of your pre-order status. If we had to speculate, we would recommend all Anno Fans who wish to play the game before launch to register right here on the Anno Union…
pritam87
Is day night cycle present in the time of release?
Answer: We know that the day/night-Cycle is a beloved feature that also has a lot of fans here on the team. However, we won’t have a day/ night cycle in the game at launch.
SirKju
What really bugs me is the hustle and bustle in the trailer. The graphics are breathtaking, but more people on the street would be nice! Is there going to be a change there?
Answer: Our work around „Visual Feedback“ is not yet done, so don’t consider anything you have seen final. Additionally, when we create a trailer (which have so far all showed actual game graphics), we often have to change the settings of the feedback units, so it can sometimes happen that the trailers show fewer units than you would see during gameplay.
Cilitbangbang
The question that burns inside of me is if we (the Union) will be involved with future DLC? Those could be planned already with some feedback.
Answer: That is the case already! As we are only now starting to throw around ideas and plans for more content for the time beyond the launch for Anno 1800, we will definitely keep close tabs on Union and community feedback – as was the case with our recently announced Anarchist DLC. Here, the fan feedback in combination with the character’s gameplay potential made it an easy choice to include in the game down the road. We want to stress however that it will not be a “Day 1 DLC” – work on the Anarchist will start once the main game is done and we plan to launch it a few months after launch in spring 2019.
chris02918
How can I react quickly if something happens in the world, where I’m not looking at at the moment? An attack? Are resources missing in a settlement?
Answer: With two sessions with one or more settled islands each, it is indeed sometimes possible to somewhat lose track – especially if you also want to keep an eye on various ships and running expeditions. That’s why we put a lot of effort into our notification system which will keep you up to date on important or critical information and developments. With one click, you’ll immediately hop to the place that’s in need of your attention.
Chris9990306
I think that you should reconsider the settling of the new world. I don’t think that having the AI wait for the player to settle before they move in is the right way.
Answer: Our train of thought here was that we didn’t want to pressure players or give you the feeling that you have to explore the New World as soon as possible if you don’t want to lag behind the AI. However, after seeing the largely unanimous feedback on this matter we sat down again to discuss it, and have decided to change this slightly. Whether the AI characters will wait for the player before exploring the New World is now based on the difficulty level.
