Category: DevBlog

Anno is a strategy series that asks its players to manage complex economies and to build vast cities. Since its the beginning, the franchise has always occupied a special place in the hearts of players who love spending hours creating stunning city dioramas from different eras, be It futuristic or historic.

While past Anno games have offered a variety of aesthetic buildings and ornaments to support that playstyle, the focus of the core gameplay always favored efficient city layouts and optimized production chains. With Anno 1800, we finally want to give those players with an eye for beauty the option to turn their beauty building into a valid and rewarding playstyle.

City Attractiveness – Power to the beauty builders
With Anno 1800, we are introducing a new system called “City Attractiveness”, which assigns every island its own attractiveness rating, which will affect various aspects of the gameplay.
Six different criteria will have a positive or negative effect on the overall attractiveness level of your island. Three positive aspects will raise your level when reaching a certain threshold of points, while the three opposing negative ones can cause a downgrade of your city rating.
This will elevate beauty building to an engaging endgame activity where reaching the highest attractiveness level becomes a challenge in itself. Reaping the harvest of your efforts will be quite rewarding, as it gives you access to special benefits such as unique visitors, among them specialist which can boost certain aspects of your city.
Let’s talk about the three different positive criteria first, as they give a good overview how you can actually influence the beauty of your island:

Culture: The cultural rating consist of all the cultural elements you have placed on your island, such as ornaments and cultural buildings. With that, you can not only boost your rating significantly with a well-planned park area, but can also benefit from transforming otherwise wasted spaces between production buildings with small ornaments and decals. Large projects like the world fair or special attractions like the zoo will not only be popular destinations for your own residents, but will as also attract generous visitors to your metropolis.

Nature: The industrial revolution changed not only our society, but also the surrounding environment significantly. With the expansion of modern industry, untouched and serene nature increasingly became a rarity. Every bit of natural landscape left on your island will benefit the nature rating which will naturally go down as your expanding city takes its toll. We will go more into detail about the nature feature at a future point, but we are planning that the player can have a direct impact on that rating by deciding to make room for Mother Nature by removing industry and other buildings.

Festivity: You remember how we emphasized that you are the writer of your own story and that your actions will decide if your people will see you as their progressive savior or as a robber baron? If you care about the happiness of your residents, supporting all their needs and providing them worthwhile distractions and attractions, your people will show their gratitude. Celebrations held by your happy citizen or from events such as the grand opening of the world fair will boost the attractiveness of your city greatly and impress tourists on your island. Similar to city incidents such as the Riot, celebrations will get a lavish visual representation.

The three positive criteria cover a variety of ways how maintaining a pleasant look-and-feel of your city will attract visitors. But rather than just adding attractiveness points in a linear manner, there are also three criteria which will have a negative influence and could even downgrade the attractiveness level of your island:

Inelegance: Certain buildings are simply not a good looker. A strolling pedestrian might not be very font of the scent of a pig farm and the remnants of ruined buildings will damage the scenic look of your city. The system calculates the amount of unpleasant, noise producing and even smelly buildings- the odor of a 19th century soap factory is something for the faint of heart, or stomach.

Pollution: Every production building has a certain pollution factor, indicated by a variety of visual feedback. While some smaller production and manufacturing buildings might only blow a small amount of white smoke out of their chimneys, the black clouds coming from full-blown industrial districts are not kind to the lungs of your residents.

Instability: City incidents such as groups of demonstrators rioting through the streets are a rather unsettling experience. From civil unrest to blazing fires, every kind of incident will have a negative impact on the attractiveness of your city, albeit a (hopefully!) temporary one.

Find your own playstyle
Influencing criteria creates a balancing act, in which every positive aspect has its own counterpart. You can imagine them as three axis: culture against inelegance, nature against pollution and festivity against instability. Here are a few example how this can encourage a certain playstyle:

Culture versus Inelegance: Will you spend time to beautify your city with ornaments and cultural buildings or do you not care about that, leaving ruins or dirty buildings on your island. The fundamental question: are you a beauty builder at heart or someone who does not care about the aesthetic look of your city?

Natural Landscape versus Pollution: While humankind was always interfering with Mother Nature for its own needs, it was the industrial age where exploitation began at a previously unimaginable scale. Do you want to be the magnate, repressing nature for your steaming industrial machine, or an idealist who wants to preserve the slowly dwindling natural landscape as much as possible?

Festivity versus Instability: Are you a progressive thinker, who roots with his residents like a father who takes care of his children or the robber baron who dominates everyone for power and profit. It’s up to you how your residents will remember you.

While every positive criteria has its own counterpart, it does not mean that you have to strictly counter one element with another. Your city can be a true sanctum for culture and architectural wonders while an ocean of industrial chimneys belches black clouds into the sunny sky. As the attractiveness level is an accumulated value, you don’t have to reduce the amount of factories to benefit your cultural buildings; your marvelous parks can also be supported by the natural habitat of a nearby mountain range or by happy citizen celebration their benevolent governor.

You tell your own story – you create your own playstyle in Anno 1800
With our new feature, classic endgame activities such as controlling the worlds economy or military domination get additional company and with that, expand Anno’s gameplay quite significantly. 
We want to create a meaningful gameplay feature for every Anno player, where keeping your city at a high attractiveness level is a challenge with different rewarding outcomes. Moreover, as we always like to emphasize how the world of Anno shall remember your actions, the attractiveness level will affect your reputation and standing with other second party characters.
We briefly mentioned visitors and large-scale projects like the zoo. Only two of the many features, which are not only new to the world of Anno, but are also intricately connected to the city attractiveness of your island. With our next DevBlog, we want to talk about another fundamental, albeit more familiar feature in Anno 1800 but we will come back to you with the second part of the beauty-building highlight in the very near future.

While you probably picture visitors strolling around your parks, leaving a small fortune in your cities treasury, we are curious about your comments on the new feature. As you might see, it is a significant addition to the gameplay and such your comments can become a valuable pool of ideas and feedback for our team. We are looking forward to your comments!

Today, we want to give you an update on the status of military gameplay and land-based combat in Anno 1800.

Last Fall, we kicked off the topic of military gameplay in Anno 1800 with two blogs here on the Union (The Art of War Part One and Two), where we examined the history of combat and its various incarnations in the series over the years. We also announced that we had decided to focus on a great city-building and economic experience, as well as on expanded and more in-depth naval combat, while not adding land-based combat to Anno 1800. However, as a result of the passionate community feedback to this announcement on the Anno Union, we promised that we would revisit this decision and to explore possible ways to add land-based combat.

Since then, we spent a lot of time discussing your reactions while also inviting Anno veterans from the Union to the studio to discuss the military aspects of the Anno series. Based on the extensive feedback from our communities, we worked on possible game design approaches that would allow us to add land-based combat that would meet the expectations of our fans, while not having a negative impact on the quality and scope of our other planned content and features.

Given the community feedback to Anno 2205, our main priority for 1800 is to deliver a great city-building game that offers fans all the gameplay depth and replayability that they have come to expect from the Anno brand over the past 20 years. At the same time, we also need to ensure that everything that is added to the game meets the high quality standards that we as a development team pride ourselves on. Sadly, none of the possible scenarios and game designs we have worked on over the past months would meet the quality bar we are aiming for without negatively affecting other features. At the same time, cutting back on the gameplay depth of the core economic aspects of Anno in favor of a military system that we know many of our players do not use would be a disservice to our mission to deliver a stand-out city-building game. Therefore, as a team we have decided to stick to our initial plan of focusing on improved naval combat, and will not add land-based combat to Anno 1800 for its launch.

We understand that this is not what some of you in the community were hoping for, but with the Anno Union, we are big believers in transparency and being upfront with our players, even when delivering news that we know some of you will find disappointing. We look forward to sharing much more information about all aspects of Anno 1800, including the improved naval combat and how island take-overs will work, with you all in the coming months, as we get closer to the game’s release.

The Anno 1800 Team

Head into your local coffee shop, the one with the vapers and twee chalkboards outside, and you might see a stressed-looking fellow dancing between customers, trying not to let his meticulously-managed coiffure and beard slip a pixel. Ask him for “just-any-tea”, and you may expect a look of disbelief, for this fellow is an Artisan, a perfectionist, and a romantic.

So indeed are Anno 1800’s Artisans. Flitting between on-the-knees despair and giddy delirium in the blink of an eye, they are the embodiment of romanticism in the 19^th Century. It is distant dream-like idylls, wood nymphs, cherubs and the livid demons of purgatory from which they take their inspiration. Their work is art. More than the product of an education and practiced technique. So bound are they to their craft, they feel there is no choice but to pursue it, even if it means living in abject poverty.

And yet they have, for the moment, escaped that net. They have crawled up from the abyss – the world of cramped factories and back-breaking labour – and found some sense of dignity and freedom of expression. As a consequence, they are living out a contradiction – being eternally grateful while maintaining unreasonably high standards (for themselves as much as anything).

They are the middle class, the in-betweeners, those tugged in two directions. Mistreat them and they shall throw themselves into spiny thickets, please them, and they shall celebrate you like the god of a classical pantheon.

And for goodness` sake don’t let them recite any of their dreadful poetry…

A design for the beautiful minds of the 19^th century
Adept Craftsmen. Swinging middle-class. That sweet glimpse of prosperity for a commonality driven by their creativity. Artisans are aesthetes, their mind enabled by all the new possibilities at the dawn of a new age. But they are also aware that their success is built upon hard developed skills and techniques, not to forget their often underestimated capabilities of running a smart business. Their crafted goods are a marvel of modern techniques and materials, paired with their love for art and an incredible eye for detail. And as the new good middle-class, they build a bridge between the simple country-folk, working people and the aloof elite in their marble towers.

While the look on their face might appear presumptuous, their lifestyle does not come from an aristocratic legacy and their self-esteem surely not just from lucky inheritance. We wanted that the artful folk transmit that feeling of hard-earned skill and prestige, while still being rooted in the common folk rather than an elite build on aristocracy.

Their various crafts was on high demand in the modernizing society, and observing their portrait and other concepts of their character designs should tell that they are aware of that demand.
They demonstrate confidence but have also that skeptical look, wearing an apron during the day and a sassy jacket in the long nights, exploring exotic specialties or being on their quest for inspiration in the newly opened cabaret.

Artisans are expressive, playful and interested in anything exotic and new. They are intellectual and eccentric, but share a grounded nature – this all should show in their residential buildings. If you so will, their houses full of excitement for everything new in this century of wonder. After you spent the last tier creating your industrial backbone, reaching the third tier should feel like a reward for your eyes and represent all the new things awaiting the player.

Gameplay, a bouquet of possibilities
You can say that the first two tiers are still the early game portion of Anno 1800, as you establish the core infrastructure for your city. Unlocking the Artisans as the third residential tier starts the venture through the mid-game, where growing your city to a true metropolis will put your previously developed skills to the test and give you access to new features, which add complexity but also further strategic options.
The Artisans are an educated middle-class with a hunger for the wide world which results in more sophisticated and harder to fulfil needs. Goods become modern and exotic and we want to challenge the skill of the player with more intricate production chains.

The invention of steel beams allowed modern architecture to develop and strive but it was use of mass fabricated glass and ornate windows, which resulted in modern and visionary cityscapes. When reaching the third tier, glass windows get introduced as the new construction material and producing them will be a joint effort of all your workforce types.

With three different workforce tiers, which intertwine on complex production chains, you can now start to use the workforce system to its full potential. Boosting the output of specific productions can make the difference between an optimized industry and spacious production districts. Especially players who want to focus on trading can boost their workforce on specific parts of their production, in order to trade overhead while still giving your city the needed room to grow.  
As more Artisans settle in your city, you will get access to more modern production and public buildings. That added complexity comes with new features and options, new tools to develop and support your own playstyle. Special buildings, items and other technical marvels will be able to boost your production, influencing your residence or raising the attractiveness of your city.

As the third tier is called Artisans for a reason, it surely cannot all revolve around industry and economy. It is the third tier where you can start to make a profit from the attractiveness of your city.
The beautiful minds among your residents will gladly share their craft to making your metropole more appealing and as a result, attracting visitors who gladly spend their dime on the attractions you provide. From ornamental decals or tackling impressive projects like the zoo, you start to have a significant impact on the look and feel of your city.

Plenty of new features on the horizon
Items to customize your playstyle or attracting visitors with big projects like the zoo is only a small teaser on many new features, which will have a significant impact on the gameplay. From planning, construction, modifying and acquiring the needed items, every one of them provides enough material for its own dedicated Devblog. With the introduction of the artisans, we opened the door to the wonders of a new and changing world and with upcoming articles; we will open more and more showrooms to cover the features in detail.
From all the mentioned new gameplay elements, what tickles you fancy? Do you want to know more about how beauty building and attractions create empower new playstyles, or how the modernization of your society provide new technology and ways to customize and boost your economy?

Across the long rows, your employees are a picture of focus. They are shuddering, and their breath condenses against the metal, for it is February and the pipes have frozen. The shed is so vast that they may as well be outside.

Then a whisper develops – they say you are visiting in person. Will this be the much-hoped-for closure?

The warehouse door is swung open for you. Tentatively you poke the long silver-tip of your cane over the threshold, then your white spats follow. You take your position on the prescribed rostrum.

“Fifteen percent, production has dropped. Fifteen!” you rap your cane sharply against the thin tin wall. “It is cold every winter, that’s the season! Get used to it. You will work night-after-night until the work is done, or I will tear this worthless shack down!”

With a crack of the whip, your black cab is gone again. Yes. You are a scumbag.

Workforce in detail
We briefly talked about it before in our residential introduction and this time, we want to share some more details about our workforce feature. As you already know, every residential tier in Anno 1800 provides its own workforce type. However, workforce tiers are not just allocated to production lines of said tier; instead, labor of your different residential tiers will be used for specific types of production buildings.
Agricultural buildings as an example will always require farmers to get their production going but you will unlock more of that type of production buildings in later tiers. As every workforce tier is dedicated to a specific type of production, you won’t be able to use your higher tier workforce, such as workers, in a lower tier agricultural buildings.

Every workforce tier supports a specific type of production building, which are not limited to the residential tier of your workforce.

With our new system, lower tier workforce never becomes obsolete and that increases the challenge and complexity when advancing through the tiers.
Your workforce is calculated for each isle separately, which leaves you with the option to either build small settlements to support your production, or to transfer workforce from one isle to another.
If you don’t have sufficient workforce of a given type available to keep your factories going, productivity will get partially reduced based on the percentage of workers missing.
Getting rid of the old way of progressing linearly through the tiers adds complexity and believability while it also provides more strategic freedom for the player.
But there is more to it than just providing the required amount of workforce- we also give you the option to impact the working conditions of your residents in order to influence your productivity.

Here an example for a level two production chain, including not only two types of workforce as also two types of production buildings from two tiers.

You hold the whip, working conditions
Steel beams, mass fabricated glass and modern manufacturing progresses such as the conveyer belt allowed cities to massively expand in size and height. However, while modern factories pushed productions to a level never seen before, the era became also known for its working conditions: days often longer than 12 hours under (for our modern understanding) harshest conditions.
We want to give you the freedom of choice regarding the working conditions in your company, if it is a temporary boost of your steel factories to keep up in an arms race, becoming a modern socialist rewarding your residents with short working days or even pushing your industry and your workforce to its absolute limit. Just like your manufactured modern steel, everything has its own breaking point.
We give you the tools to affect the working conditions on each of your islands. Simply speaking, you can decide to let your residents work longer and harder to compensate workforce shortage by increasing productivity or boosting your economy in general. We do not only enable you to change the working conditions for each type of workforce, you will also be able to change the conditions for each type of production building. You have a shortage of iron ore, which slows down your weapon manufacturing? Just push the working conditions of your iron miners, which will only increase the productivity of all your iron mines on that island.

Workers became a prideful new class of citizen, welded together by hard labor and a sense of community.
Pushing your working conditions at the cost of your residents has consequences, as it affects the happiness of your people negatively. It has a negative impact on the morale of the affected workforce type, while the system will also take into account if you change the conditions only for a specific production building. In the case of the boosted iron mines, it will have an impact on the happiness of all your workers based on the percentage of your workforce working in your mineshafts.
Always keep an eye on your people and interpret the signs of times early enough if you want to take appropriate actions. Your working folks will bend only that much and if you pass that mark, they might put down their tools and mobilize for a strike.

On the contrary, if you are a modernist implementing good working conditions in your factories or on your farms, your residents will show you their gratitude.
The working conditions are only one factor which impacts the happiness of your residents. The happier your residents, the better the mood in the city. A clever economist can find the right balance between bending your working conditions while pleasing your residents with other concessions while a ruthless or desperate ruler can rely on their police forces to keep things in order.

Happiness and player freedom
There are many ways how you can have an impact on the happiness of your residents and how their mood affects the gameplay. While a topic on it’s own for a future blog, we are curious to know how you see the new possibilities playing around with the working conditions. Are you already thinking about all the ways to micromanage your power economy? Are you an altruist who likes to give something back and keep your folk happy or do you just love the freedom of choice and all the small stories, which the system might tell?

The 19^th century worker. Downtrodden, disillusioned and outspoken. Each a dormant volcano ready to spout its hot lava of protest, to unite a single luminous trickle with the molten flow – a flow of discontent that threatens to devour all in its path until it becomes the nigh-unstoppable fire-tide of revolution!

However, thankfully in ANNO 1800, it doesn’t always have to be like that.

The industrial revolution brought horrific working conditions – endless days (and nights), clogged lungs and limb-inhaling machines – woes enough to make anyone violent. But perhaps you happen to be the one employer enlightened enough to lift the burden, to be the humanitarian, the progressive.

Or perhaps, preferring to play the role of an unscrupulous taskmaster, you will indulge the worker’s proclivity for vice. Feed their demon, and they’re likely to forget any complaint right there and then. A greasy bit of grub unwrapped, a bottle unstoppered – anything to numb them to the miseries of the working day. Your reward for conferring such iniquitous mercies? The kind of loyalty not easily come by, your name celebrated by market hawkers and urchins alike.

Depiction of the working class
Previous historical Anno games had their distinctive art style but it was the advent of the working class which changed the urban life drastically. While the hard work in modern factories was demanding and exhausting, it also enabled families a safe income.
There was also a need to accommodate the thousands of new workers in your city and so new suburbs were born. On the one hand, you had small and crowded flats in large apartment buildings as a reality of that time. On the other hand, suburban worker districts attracted country folk to the city, giving the second residential tier a distinctive look and feel.

As you can see in the picture, the housing plots allow us to add many small details to tell their inhabitants stories, from various objects, textures up to animations and visual feedback. Compared to the romantic cottages of the countryside, these buildings are full of pep and fighting spirit, much like the workers themselves.

And hard labour it was, working long days in steel factories while being exposed to the heat from glowing smelters, we should not forget that it was their commitment and dedication which would form our modern society. While their fuliginous clothes are functional, the workers should still transmit that sense of solidarity and pride. Workers have a chirpy and fun-loving nature – they are an outgoing and outspoken bunch, with a sense of solidarity, pride and dignity that is truly remarkable given the circumstances.

A future forged out of thousand fires
With the first workers moving into your settlement, you will get access to numerous new production chains. Ring the bell of the industrial revolution, when you dig deep into the earth to excavate needed resources to build your first factories. Reaching residential tier II will feel like the push into a new century, as the first rather simple productions unfold more and more to complex chains. This groundwork, such as from molten iron manufactured steel-beams, will be an important material for many other future production chains from higher residential tiers. That way, no matter how much you advance, workers will stay as important to supply your industry as farmers providing food and other rural goods.

While factories forge modern marvels, their size and smoking chimneys might not be the beautiful vista for visitors and residents who want to enjoy the beauty of your city. It marks also the turning point of your first city expansion when you have to decide where to construct your production districts and where you want to place your worker suburbs. Just placing a few factories for your basic needs won’t be enough anymore, when you thrive for a bigger city and start to engage other factions in trade contracts or conquer new territory.

Here the Anno 1800 gameplay will open up: alongside factories, further production chains and expanding demands will add complexity and the shipyard will allow you to explore, expand and engage the world around you. Naturally fitting with growing needs and the capability to expand your territory, fertilities will start to have an impact on your overall strategy. Workers will always play an important part during that expansion and it will be up to you to decide how your world will remember you: are you willing to exploit your people to leave the competition behind or do you refuse to build an empire on the back of your workers?

You decide how your society evolves
However you decide to run your empire, we want that you have all strategic options at hand while the world should react to your actions. Changing your working conditions selfishly or even to your residents favour will have different benefits and drawbacks. As an important part in the history of the working class, we will explore the working conditions in the next part of this DevBlog series, when we show you how your decisions can elevate your empire or push your people to the limit.

Are you looking forward to build huge industrial districts in the outskirts or do you see smelting furnaces and factories as a part of your cityscape which grows together with your living quarters and economy?

We have been farmers for more than 10,000 years. We think of rice terraces, cereals and livestock, of Nile irrigation, cabbages and beekeeping. If we are here in 10,000 years, there will still be farmers. After all, they endured the century that arguably saw most change.

A typical farmer in 1800 had similar tools at their disposal, as two-hundred years previous. But the new century brought iron ploughs, fertiliser, seed drills, and threshing machines. Though the new yields were huge, life and work were no less hard.
In Anno 1800, farmers epitomise rustic life. The simple things. To work the soil, tend the animals, and breathe fresh air away from the burgeoning smog. After a long day in the fields, a farmer wants to sit by the fire with family, and speak of their strange neighbours in hushed tones.
They don’t have a lot – or need a lot – and quick as hare, they’ll tell you so. Speaking their mind comes ‘natural’, and honesty is important, when you need to gauge feeling.
Yet they are also sympathetic. This business of yours, vast and sprawling as it is, goes far beyond their powers of cognition. Problems are to be expected – heaven forbids a farmer telling you how things ought to be run. And yet, while they are just the foundation on which the vainer elements of your society stack, you will achieve nothing without their love.

Depiction of a rural lifestyle
When you draw a picture of the industrial revolution, the rural population is probably not the first thing that comes to your mind. As the first residential tier, farmers serve as a throwback to old times, you could even say to the other historical titles of the series.
While the tier should depict a lifestyle that defined our society for thousands of years, the life of the farming people changed with the dawning age of technical marvels and urban life.
As workforce is now a factor in Anno 1800, they should have a distinguishable charm and character but also need to fit in a cityscape dominated by other residential tiers, especially in the later stages of the game. When setting the art direction for a residential tier, you always have to think about how their design will work together with all the other elements of the game.

A recent Concept-Art for the farmer residential buildings. During production, many buildings going to several reworks until we find the right look and feel.

Farmers are self-supported, used to their independence from most of the modern amenities. From their clothing, portraits up to their buildings, they are proud and hard-working residents, often overlooked by the evolving society. While architects plan modern housing space, farmer’s property should feel self-build rather than a product of a construction company. Their residential buildings resemble country houses, with wooden boards and small individual decals.
If you watch their buildings closely, they should feel like a postcard from a more calm time, where people minded their own business but also enjoyed a hard but probably simpler life. Naturally, that style should also fit their production buildings.

Backbone of your future empire
If you do some research on the history of any influential city in the 19^th century, you notice that there is a significant spike in population. Nevertheless, the rural population had still an important role in society and economy, as farm products supported the growing needs for foods and basic goods for the rising world population.
Most players tend to construct their first buildings near the coastline in order to establish the basic food supply and lay the groundwork for future production. This also creates almost its own small village to support your expansion, as you probably plan the city centre of your future metropolis more land inwards of your island.

The main gameplay purpose of the farmer tier is to produce two kinds of wares: the first goods to fulfil the demands of your residence in order to advance and secondly, the foundation for some of the future production chains in higher tiers. So you not only have to account for the current state of your small settlement, it makes sense to account for the later growth and size of your city. While advancing through the first tier should be easy to achieve, farmers will stay an important part of your population.

You decide if you either go for a big farm village to support your whole island, let the modern city grow around your cottages or if you just create a new tier one residential and production buildings when they are needed. Imagine the picturesque scene when landing at the harbour and taking a ride through beautiful rural outskirts, while your eyes slowly focus on the impressive skyline covered in smoking chimneys on the horizon.
While Schnaps is an early and more simple production chain, the potato farms take part in refining the rural look of your outskirts.

Help us to fill the blanks!
With the next DevBlog in our big residential tier series, we will take you on a trip to the sooth-blackened worker districts, a new class of citizens, which should change our society forever. But before we end today’s blog, we have a special request to all Anno Union members.

We are currently missing a public building, which fits the rural lifestyle of our farmer tier. While we have some interesting ideas, we are curious what ideas the Union could bring to the table.
What do farmers actually do after a hard day working on the field and what would help them to advance to the next level? Maybe there is a specific infrastructure, which every farming village should have? We are looking forward to your suggestions for the missing tier 1 public building!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coal for the thousand fires of the industrial revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waypoints

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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