Once again we want to share a community update with you, showcase some great Anno 1800 impressions from our community and let you know about our streaming plans. Let’s go!

 

Anno Afternoon Stream – Retro Edition

This Friday, we’re changing things up with the Anno Afternoon. After noticing that Ubi-Thorlof has never played Ubi-Trenchcoat’s favourite game of the series – Anno 1701 –  they spontaneously decided to do a retro stream! Tune in on the 8th at 4PM UTC (5PM CET) when they’ll be diving into the The Sunken Dragon campaign.

 

Playtest und Game Update 6.0

The Game Update 6.0 playtest has started last week and is going very well. A big thank you to everyone who already provided their feedback in the dedicated forums. If you haven’t already – let us know your thoughts!

And if you have signed up for the playtest but haven’t received an invite yet: Do not worry. We will send another wave of invites in the coming week.

Parallel to the test our team continues their work on the Update including the third DLC, coming out in December. We will share more information regarding all the features and a precise date closer to release.

 

Community Spotlight

Let’s again round things up by featuring some the cities you built and the experiences you shared.

ClassicReddltor is extremely happy about finally getting the Extravaganza Steamer, posing in front of his massive city. How many of you already managed to get hold of this proud ship?

 

For friends of grapes and champagne, a visit to Conschbourg – the Green City – might be a good idea. Spacer176 also provides you with a tourist guide and a history lesson of this town.

 

If you’re more of a fan cities, you should probably plan a trip to DerGrindelwutz’s and RegalSeagull’s versions of Crown Falls. With plenty of parks, promenades along the river islands and bridges in front of the waterfall panorama, these cities simply invite you to take a long walk.

 

 

As a stark contrast to these peaceful views, cjnewson88 seems to have a few issues with his rioting populace.

 

But he later explains his city setup and the strategy behind his success – well worth a read.

That’s already it for this week’s Union Update!

Feel free to share your adventures and achievements with us on social or reddit and don’t forget to tune in to tomorrow’s stream.

We’re back once more with a community update and some info on what to expect from us in the near future.

 

Anno Afternoon Stream

This Friday, Seraxia and Thorlof will put their creative hats on (most likely not literally) in another Anno Afternoon and try something completely different. You want to know more? Then don’t miss out this special livestream episode and tune on the 25^th at 4PM UTC+1 (5PM CEST).

And if you got any cool or funny ideas for future streams, what better opportunity to share them with us than this Friday?

 

Playtest beginning next week!

As you all know the next playtest is just around the corner and as we work together with the community to get a jam-packed Game Update 6 ready for December, we will take a short break from Union blogs in the upcoming week. But worry not, we will be back soon with community news and new game information.

And we already got some exciting news this week! Keep an eye on your inbox, cause for a first wave of players the the playtest will already start next week – more invite-waves will follow.

We’re very much looking forward to your feedback. So, when we’re already talking about GU6 and The Passage, why not hop over to Reddit. Some of you already started a discussion about the content of the DLC there. We might have some theories ourselves but it’s far more exciting to read your predictions. Which features and production chains do YOU think will be added with The Passage?

 

Community Content

Something that impressed all of us quite a bit was jasperwillem not only managing to get this settlement to house Engineers without ever visiting the New World but shortly after also luring Investors into ‘Golden City’.

 

How many of us spent long nights outsourcing production chains and setting up new trade routes. Or planting hedge rows for hours for that perfect inner-city park or the world’s best botanical garden. We bet there are some quirky challenges or legendary achievements you set yourself in the past or future. So, share them with us in the comments below!

Fitting to last week’s blog about the Day & Night Cycle, we also want to use this blog to share some impressions from the community.
Apparently some of you have a weird fascination with exploding factories…but admittedly, fires look very cool at night:

 

 

WolArn, however, proves, that calm images also have their charm – sunsets usually have:

 

And bergveld shares a video of his whole city at night with us.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5rJBeVWD-k

And then, when the sun rises and everyone has to go to work, you’re stuck in a traffic jam. Not much has changed to today.

 

That’s it for this Community Update. Did you already share your favourite moments with us? Be it day or night, dusk or dawn, we always love to see what fantastic scenes you manage to capture.

While we work on the upcoming game update 3.2 as well as the next content drop, which will enrich Anno 1800’s game world quite significantly, we have a few things in today’s Union Update to endure the waiting time until we lift the curtain on the content and when it lands.

Anarchist Propa….promotional video contest ends this Friday!
Our creative contest, in which you can submit your own promotional video for your empire, ends this Friday. Still two night shifts worth of time to let your empire shine! Remember: We have not only great gaming gear from Corsair for the top three winners, we will also give you a spot in the limelight, sharing your creative works on the Anno Union, social media and during live-streams.

 

Fansite Kit 1.0 has landed.
We released our first teaser of our Anno 1800 fansite kit a while ago and today, we want to share the first release version of our kit with the Anno Union. With the first release version, we added all of our detailed key-arts as wallpapers for various devices, including an anniversary wallpaper as well as a set of emoticons free to use on your platform of choice.

Get the Anno Union fansite kit 1.0 right here.

Is there something directly missing in our fansite kit which you would love to see in future or even something useful or just awesome the community created which we should add?

 

With the latest Game Update 3.1, we continue to work on various game improvements as well as upcoming gameplay content. Throughout the year, Anno 1800 will receive several further game updates and various DLC additions not only from our Season Pass content but also free content updates such as a coop mode, statistic building and more. We know that you are waiting for details when you will be able to start the hunt for lost treasures or to team up with your friends to create your mega-empire. With the Anno Union, we are committed to work with your feedback but that also means that our team spends time to analyze the tons of data you provide with your reports and your discussion on the forums and on other community platforms. The journey just started and a vast and feature rich game like Anno 1800 deserves the time and care to grow based on your feedback.

We also want to tackle reports about a few players still having issues with progressing through campaign quests or multiplayer desynchs. We will share the exact update notes about Game Update 3.2 and the release date pretty-soon. After 3.2, we will fully focus on the next larger content drop: game Update 4.

 

But until we share some dates for upcoming content, we want to ramp up conversations with all of you. And to get us all on the table, we invite you to share your most pressing questions in the comments below for the next two episodes of our community corner live-streams.

To give every one of you a chance to get your questions answered, we decided to not only rely on our live-stream chat but also gather questions for the stream here in the Union. This way, you might be able see the response to your personal question in the recorded broadcast if you cannot make it to watch the show live.

Save the date for our next Anno 1800 stream on twitch.tv/ubisoftbluebyte
Community Corner German: Tuesday June 25th 4.30pm CEST
Community Corner English: Wednesday July 3rd 4.30pm CEST

We are looking forward to the show and your questions in the comments below.

Welcome to another week in the Anno Union, this time with an introduction to the cast of Anno 1800 second party characters as well as an update to the streaming schedule.

Meet your rivals!
Originally planned for the end of last week, we prepared a video for you showcasing the variety of AI opponents which will be able to choose as your dire enemy or future to be ally.

Every single rival will have their own character, which will not only define their general difficulty rating but also influence their playstyle.
Since the Closed Beta, we improved their behaviour in many ways and while old chap  Willy will remain let’s say, a slow and simple fella, the AI’s capabilities of defending islands or deciding on various tactics fitting to the situation has improved a lot. As an example, especially war savvy characters will make decisions such as attacking your Harbour directly, engaging your war fleet or launching attacks on your trading routes based on the current situation.

Are you looking forward to testing your skills in naval warfare against the Psychopath Graves or are you more interested in Tea parties with Bente Jorgensen? We are curious to know how important the second party opponents are for you and if you are more the player who likes to challenge themselves with the most fierce of opponents?

Streaming Schedule – 2 streams on the horizon!
As promised during our special German episode of our Community Corner last week, we will have another English episode this week Wednesday at 5pm CET.
While we won’t have a special guest this time, our Community Developer Bastian will not only give you further insights into the fourth tier but also answering your chat questions.

And as one stream is not enough, our Anno Afternoon community crew will return this Friday 5pm CET – Not only Guddy is back on board, we will also jump from the trusty old Closed Beta ship to a newer development version of the game!

We plan to bring you more live-streams in future, from development insights with our AnnoCasts to community focused shows like CommunityCorner and AnnoAfternoon.
If you do not want to miss a show, make sure to follow out twitch channel to receive notifications as soon as we are online.

As the release date of Anno 1800 draws closer, we are in the final sprints to polish and balance the game. Creating the DevBlog takes a lot of time and much of the games content has been highlighted in some shape or form already, the game developer insights will take a short break this week. We brought you dozens of DevBlogs since launch of the Anno Union in 2017 and we still have some articles in our pocket leading up to the launch of the game.

But we won’t be lazy as we will ramp up the amount of Anno 1800 live-streams on our twitch channel with the AnnoAfternoon stream returning this week and the Community Corner coming back in the week ahead with a German episode including a special guest.

Livestream: AnnoAfternoon
It’s time once more for our Community team takes you on another Anno 1800 Twitch adventure! In the next episode of our AnnoAfternoon community stream, we will venture forth into the new world together, when we listen to your suggestions as to how we should build and name our cities.

When: March 8th, 4pm GMT
Where: twitch.tv/ubisoftbluebyte

Annoverse Roundtable recordings
Last week’s Annoverse roundtable was an absolute blast! Over the course of two hours, we made a challenge out of answering as many questions as possible and thanks to the Annoverse team and community member Domo, you can listen to the recorded German and English session here:
Annoverse Anno 1800 Roundtable German
Annoverse Anno 1800 Roundtable English

Last but not least, we have prepared some answers to your most burning multiplayer questions in today’s community Q&A.

FerudaFarstaria
When we add friends from our friends list. Does this include the Steam friend list and Uplay? Or do you have to find your friends in the game, and add them to your friends list? I’d really like to know if this does link to friends lists in Steam, and Uplay.
Answer: Anno lists steam friends as well as your Uplay friends. In case you invite someone from you friend list, Anno does automatically select the right backend (Steam or UPlay) for the invitation and also receive and handle the invitations from both systems.

Mattly
We did find that once we had expanded into the new world we had to give up due to constant desync’s. As we are all on fibre and all in the same country (New Zealand) could this have been caused by the need to communicate with the host server where ever that is located or was it a known issue that has been worked out in these final weeks?
Answer: We identified and fixed many reasons for de-synchs thanks to the great participation of Closed Beta. This also includes many de-syncs related to the South America session. It is not very likely, that your desynch problems as described where caused by network issues, as because Anno tries to keep the connections “as local” as possible. Only if the NATs of the participants are not compatible, we are forced to route the traffic over Ubisoft servers to enable the players to join. But this also can be resolved by players by adding Anno to the exception list of your router.

elmoh1one
I would be interested in a whole Devblog about the topic synchronization. Which kind of data is exactly synchronized? How is the system checking if there are disparities between the different computers and how does that coherent with the simulation of the game?
Answer: Simply speaking, every single player action will get recorded and synchronized before the system shares all input data of for the simulation with every other participating player (every PC in the session calculates all steps of the simulation for every player in the match).

Drake-1503
Does that mean that saved multiplayer matched can be continued with different players? That would mean it would be possible to create a staged savegame with already established cities instead of an empty map.
Answer: You are able to continue mutliplayer savegames even if the original players are not available anymore. When new players join, they can “overtake” an empire and continue to progress and expand with that game state. While it is technically possible to create scenarios that way, you would need to have a dedicated player for every single party as you cannot take control over two or more empires.

The_Waith_Lord
I would love to see that you could also do a search for players based on language and region to make it easier to communicate with the other players.
Answer: When looking for a player, our matchmaking takes the region as well as language into account. Should the system be unable to find a player after a while, it will expand the search for players with the same language across the globe. If the system is still unable to match you with someone, it will also widen the search to global players with any language.