Bente Jorgensen appears to have set a precedent. Young men and women all over the world are setting out on travels of their own— ravenous for art, culture and some proper grub— only the most exquisite of destinations will do!

Fresh off the boat they hit the Hotels, springing open their cases, before jollying on down to the riverside for an Éclair, hoping to advance their broad-brims into all the most bijoux pockets of the Old World. Street mimes, artists, sophisticated-looking backgammon players drinking Montmartre 75s.

And then they see it… through the heaving crowds… a glimmer high, high above— a tower of iron, so wild and audacious, it could only be here, right here…

Tourists and Hotels

Tourists are a new Resident Tier in the Old World who stay in your city over night – in contrast to Visitors who only arrive for a day trip to see the most exciting cultural spots of your city.

First, you need to attract them and the basis for this is upgrading your Public Mooring. This can be done when reaching 500 Engineers.

Which means, that the next thing to do is building Hotels. These are imposing, elegant establishments which are expensive in construction and take up quite some space with their size of 9 by 7 tiles, but make up for it not only with their impressive looks but also with a capacity of up to 500 Tourists each.

In order to attract more Tourists and fill your Hotels to the brim, you will need to fulfil their exquisite needs. These are again split into Basic Needs and Happiness Needs and are a mix of existing and new products, the new food and drink venues, as well as cultural buildings like the Variety Theatre, the Zoo, or the Museum.

While you can easily spot the status of each need via the Hotel’s UI, there’s a change on how happiness impacts your new Tourist population:

The fulfilment of a need can be limited by their happiness. This is marked with an unhappy red icon next to the respective need and the info, to which percentage a need can be currently fulfilled. Possible causes for limits can be low island attractiveness or a lack of variety when it comes to Hot Spots like Museums. Solve these issues to make sure Tourists are willing to visit your island and to maximise the number of potential Tourists in your city.

Happy Tourists spend more money in your city – and since the pockets of these wealthy individuals are well-filled, it’s definitely worth fulfilling their demanding needs.

We said above that Tourists are a new Resident Tier. As part of that mechanic, they’re also providing a sort of “workforce” which we called “Customers”. These are essential for your Restaurants, Bars and Cafés which thrive on tourism. For them to work at 100% capacity, a certain number of Customers is required. If a venue lacks Customers, the buff to the surrounding residences is decreased – more on that in the next paragraph.

Lastly, we need to warn you that Tourists are a spoiled, demanding bunch (let’s not say “lazy”) and absolutely no fans of long walks. So, in order to fulfil their needs, you will need to set up a complete bus network on your island with Bus Stops next to all important places. We’ll go into detail on the bus system later in this DevBlog.

Restaurants, Cafés and Bars

So, we created a place to stay for our Tourists. But as mentioned above, they’re rather more demanding than your regular Visitors, and having an attractive island with a Zoo or a Museum is not enough.

When staying for several days, culinary needs naturally become a matter of great import, which makes the Tourist’s request for Restaurants, Cafés and Bars quite understandable.

All three buildings function in a similar way to Public Service buildings but in a more challenging way since they use the new recipe system and therefore combine production and public service. Based on the recipe you choose, the building will prepare a dish, dessert or drink and fulfil the Tourists’ needs while also providing a boost to regular residences in a certain area. Let’s take a closer look:

“We had Flour, Sugar and Chocolate but could not bake a cake – that always floated around in our heads when thinking about new content. The recipe system solves this and allows us to combine goods to new products that would otherwise be too specific for our normal needs system.”

– Dominik, Game Designer

As you can see, each recipe requires certain ingredients – so make sure you got a Warehouse not too far away. Some recipes might require ingredients from different sessions, while others have ingredients that are easier to obtain. Since we’re always looking for a) new systems to try out and b) ways to spice up your gameplay with new features, we came up with the recipe system as a new challenge.

All recipes fulfil the Tourists’ need for Restaurants, Cafés or Bars in the same way – they will enjoy any of the delicious dishes you can present them with. However, the aforementioned boost to the surrounding residents varies: If your Restaurant, for example, serves the “Archduke’s Schnitzel” then your surrounding residents will receive a +3 boost to their happiness while consuming less Bread, Fish and Chocolate. If you choose the “Stroggof Goulash”, nearby residents receive a +2 happiness boost and consume less Fish, Sausage and Canned Food.

Restaurant placement as well as choosing recipes based on the required ingredients and the surrounding residences (with their respective needs) should provide you with a nice puzzle challenge if you love optimization.

Selecting any of these three types of buildings will display their influence radius with a circle, while the affected residences are additionally highlighted.

More recipes are unlocked either via quests from the Tourist or by fulfilling certain conditions: Have a look at the recipe book for details.

Orchards and Chemical Plant

Of course, using only existing goods to fulfil the needs of your Tourists and for the creation of delicious new dishes would be… boring? So, let us introduce you to two new production buildings: The Orchard and the Chemical Plant.

Orchards produce new agricultural goods which are either directly fulfilling the Tourists’ needs (Jam) or are functioning as input goods for recipes. They function similarly to your Lumberjack’s Huts by planting trees in an area around them. You do not have to build fields like you do for a Red Pepper Farm or a Vineyard, which would have required a rework of the existing system so that modules or farm fields can be upgraded or would automatically change. Lumberjack huts already had such a system in place where they modify their surroundings by growing trees, the new goods all required trees, and so using this system was the much more fitting way.

Not all the special new ingredients can be grown in the Old World, though, so you will have to make some space in the New World to also build Orchards there. Only then can you produce goods like Cinnamon, Camphor Wax or Citrus Fruits for new products like Shampoo or Lemonade. More on that in a second.

Similar to Restaurants, Orchards are also using a recipe system, where you can select the seed you want the respective Orchard to grow from a catalogue. However, Orchards don’t need any input goods.

Also using the recipe system is the Chemical Plant. Patents for three new consumer goods are available to you, all three products are highly requested by your Tourists. Produce fruity Lemonade (using Saltpetre, Sugar and Citrus Fruits), soapy Shampoo (using Soap, Cinnamon and Coconut Butter) and Souvenirs (using Glass, Camphor Wax and Cotton) to make your Tourists happy.

Both the Orchards as well as the Chemical Plant need a Warehouse nearby to gather input goods and deliver their finished products.

Bus System

As mentioned at the beginning of this blog, it’s not enough to simply have a great Zoo or a five-star restaurant: Tourists are demanding and don’t want to travel too far on foot. This is where the bus system comes into play.

Bus Stops have to be placed at all important places in your city which Tourists want to visit. This starts with your Public Mooring and Hotels and extends to places like Variety Theatres, Restaurants, Bars and your Museum. When placing a Bus Stop, you will have to pay attention to two influence radiuses: For a building to be reachable by the Tourists, it has to be in the circle radius. This means, if your Zoo is outside this circle, it’s not part of your Bus Network and the Zoo need for your Tourists will not be fulfilled.

The second indicator you have to keep an eye on is the green street overlay: This marks the overall reach of your Bus Network. For a Bus Stop to be connected to the network, its green overlay has to overlap with the existing network.

Since tourists aren’t fans of long travels when seeing all your city’s marvels, a need’s fulfilment level can be reduced if the distance between Hotel and the respective venue is too far. Keep an eye on the needs overview of each hotel to spot these kinds of problems.

We have covered the bus system in detail in last week’s blog. So, if you want to get some additional insights, make sure to check it out!

The Iron Tower

Nothing impresses your Tourists more than monuments (except maybe for an Archduke’s Schnitzel), so it’s only logical to give you a completely new monument to build: The Iron Tower. Like other monuments, it’s constructed in three stages and, when finished, not only increases your island’s attractiveness but also provides another option to buff surrounding residences. “La Reine”, the finest restaurant in the land, offers three unique recipes to choose from, each providing a strong buff and reducing the consumption of specific goods, but requiring four ingredients each instead of the usual three. Who could say no to the “Trifle Tower”, the probably most majestic of all desserts?

There’s one more special feature about the Iron Tower: By assigning additional Tourist Customers to it, you can greatly increase the influence radius of its buff. When placed at a central location, it might even cover your whole city…

And let’s not forget that such an extravagant monument might indeed attract royal attention.

Last but not least…

As it is now tradition, “Tourist Season” will also come with a beautiful bunch of themed ornaments fitting to the setting. Build a Souvenir Shop, Lookout Point, Signposts, Flowerbeds, and more to turn your cities into authentic tourist hot spots.

And as usual, we will release a free Game Update alongside the “Tourist Season” DLC featuring several quality-of-life improvements as well as bug fixes. We’ll have the full Release Notes for you next week, so stay tuned for more details on that.

Finally, for your chance to get some first-hand info from the devs, you should not miss our live stream on the “Tourist Season” release day, May 25^th, from 5 to 6 PM CEST (11 AM – 12 PM EDT). Mark it in your calendars!

Hey Anno Community,

Today we want to give you some first insights into the upcoming DLC “Tourist Season”, specifically: the bus system.

When we presented Season 3 in February of this year, we already gave you a first overview as to what you can expect, we mentioned restaurants, recipes and the aforementioned buses. We want to dedicate a separate blog to this specific feature and give you some development insights since it’s the mechanic connecting all other parts of this DLC.

Buses are a new mechanic which is needed to connect your guests, the Tourists, with their Hotels and all amenities of the city: Restaurants, Bars, Variety Theatres, the Zoo and more.

“The Tourists should not feel like a new working class, they demand more services and need to be more pampered, they won’t walk to the Museum: they expect a transit in style.”

Specifically, you will need to free up some space to build Bus Stops, a 2 by 3 building, on various points of your city in addition to the other new buildings.
Each Bus Stop has a certain radius, displayed by a circle, indicating which public buildings are in reach of each bus stop. Only when a building like a Restaurant or a Zoo is inside this radius does the game consider it being part of your bus network. Your Tourists are not willing to walk too far from the Bus Stop to the Zoo, after all.

Let’s just visualize this with a simple screenshot, showing the upgraded Public Mooring with a Bus Stop to the left and the Hotel with its dedicated Bus Stop on the right:

Connecting your Hotels on one end of the island to a Museum on the other, however, isn’t optimal, since your Tourists aren’t fans of long bus rides. So, if the distance is too long, the fulfilment of the “Museum need” (in this example) for the respective Hotel can be reduced. More on the topic of needs in the next DevBlog.

By clicking on a Bus Stop, you can see which public buildings are part of your island’s bus network and how good the connection is. Our UI Team made sure to provide you with the necessary information at first glance:  A new icon above buildings will inform you when they are missing a bus connection. Buildings that are frequented by Tourists (for example a restaurant or a theatre) received a little bus marker inside the construction bar.

For improvements like these, the feedback from the testers of the last Diary Study organized by the User Research Lab in Düsseldorf has been a great help.

Additionally, like for “Docklands”, we implemented a Tutorial Panel directly in the game that explains the underlying mechanics for all new “Tourist Season” mechanics – including the bus system. Just select one of the new buildings and click on the “?” icon in the building’s menu.

What made you choose buses over trams, you might ask. Well, as with so many things in game development, it comes down to prioritization.

Cause a first check made it clear for us that creating a second railway system would require a very high development effort combined with an increased risk for issues. Two separate railway systems but both using the same general rules are tricky and can lead to problems – take something as “simple” as crossings for example. Another approach, a street/railway hybrid, on the other hand, has also not been done by us before and would need a lot of initial effort.

So, in this case, the questions were: How many work hours would developing this new feature take? Is it worth spending several weeks on a completely new feature that will only make up a portion of the new DLC? Is there a different solution that provides a similar logistical challenge and fulfils the same gameplay requirements? All the while, of course, there’re still plenty of other features being designed and developed for “Tourist Season” to create the “complete package” that our team has in mind for the DLC.

The decision to not have buses use fuel, however, was an aesthetic one: While requiring you as players to supply your buses with fuel – like the tractors – would be a nice additional challenge, having polluting buildings inside your cities would not quite fit the tourist fantasy we want to present.

Dealing with this new logistical layer adds a new challenge for your city planning skills considering the already packed inner cities. Making sure your Tourists can reach all important spots in your city is a key component to “Tourist Season” next to satisfying your Tourists’ needs with extravagant new products.

“The logistical challenge would have been interesting, of course, but the resulting Fuel Stations next to the parks and Museums did not fit the theme of the DLC.”

Finally, we are happy to announce that “Tourist Season” is already releasing in a little bit more than two weeks – on May 25^th at 6PM CEST (12PM EDT). Expect more news, a detailed DevBlog and the full Release Notes in the weeks leading up to the release.

Until then: Stay safe and keep an eye on our channels to not miss any news.

The Anno Team

Export/Import Contracts

Now, we have mentioned these “Contracts” often enough, time to explain one of the core new features of the “Docklands” DLC.

Captain Tobias not only serves as your guide, but primarily is a traveling merchant by trade. Via the Docklands you can make use of a new trade mechanic that lets you exchange one good for another. Instead of selling or purchasing goods using money, you can create Export/Import Contracts by selecting one good to export and one good to import.

The exchange ratio partly depends on the “value” of the good (calculated via the complexity of the production chain and the amount of building space it requires), meaning, for example, that a single ton of sewing machines is worth several tons of raw fish. This opens up completely new strategies and, for example, allows you to specialise in certain goods based on local fertilities or deposits and trade them in for other goods you don’t produce enough of. Or even substitute whole production chains with imports – the choice is yours.

If you own “The Passage” or “Land of Lions”, you can also set up contracts with goods from those DLC.

By building Exports Office modules, you can increase the number of  Export/Import Contracts you can have active at the same time and the Captain will do his best to fulfill them all – based on how many goods (or how much free storage) you have left.

Tobias will enter your region at regular intervals and fulfill current contracts at each of your Docklands. His ship is a massive vessel and its stocks basically unlimited.

The second factor to impact the exchange ratio is your export volume. When you produce and export large numbers of a specific good, you will establish yourself as a serious business partner in this product and see it gain an “exporter level”. That means that this good becomes one of your export “specialties” and its exchange ratio against other goods improves— you will now receive more tons of other goods in exchange! Take a look at these specialty goods in the pyramid below— the higher the total export volume of a certain good, the higher the good will rise in the pyramid, and the better its exchange ratio will become. You can move and even remove goods from this pyramid to fill the limited bonus slots to your preference.

Even if all slots are filled, you can still export other kinds of goods of course, but you won’t profit from an improvement to the exchange ratio.

Better ratios are not the only advantages of mass-exports, though:

The more your reputation as a respectable trader grows, either via the number of active trade contracts or your exporter level, the more goods will unlock for you to import. You can see the requirements you need to meet to unlock a good in the overview on the right of the Export/Import screen.

Furthermore, you will also increase the building limit of each module by unlocking more “specialty” slots in the pyramid, allowing you to add more and more modules to your Docklands and create a massive trading district.

It’s worth keeping in mind that you can build a complete Docklands on every single island, allowing for potentially vast amounts of imports and exports of goods that you can then still transport within your empire via normal trade routes.

Don’t want to produce soap but prefer to have a clean population? Then Import soap in exchange for that beer you’re producing and make your citizens (and most likely Tobias’ crew) very happy!

Since we know this new feature might need some getting used to, we’ve developed a completely new type of in-game help. Clicking on the “question mark” icon at the top of the Export/Import Menu will open a tutorial screen with explanations of all steps involved in setting up Export/Import Contracts.

Ornaments

Now, we all know how much you all love ornaments and we may have seen one or two comments about having a lighthouse in your own city – maybe…

The “Docklands” DLC is a great opportunity to combine both, so we’re happy to announce that you can look forward to not just one, but two types of lighthouse and a sea of additional ornaments for your harbour – both in the Old as well as in the New World!

We’re excited to see your new harbour layouts with Docklands and its new ornaments!

As announced in our Season 3 live stream as well as the Season 3 Pass trailer (you should re-watch them, just in case), all DLC releases will be accompanied by a Free Game Update. Game Update 10, which is going to release alongside “Docklands”, will for example make changes to your trade route menu and allow you to build streets onto the water in your harbour area.

We’ll go into detail on all these topics later this week.

This leaves only two questions, right, “when” and “how much”?

Well, the “Docklands” DLC will release on February 23^rd at 6PM CET / 12 PM EST in the Ubisoft Store, the Epic Store and Steam for 6,99€ and is also included in the Season 3 Pass which is available for 19,99€.

Make sure to check out our blog with an overview to the Season 3 Pass and last week’s live stream where you can already see some gameplay from the DLC.

Stay safe, take care – and keep an eye on the Anno Union for the latest news.

*Please be aware all screenshots of the Export/Import UI are taken from a development-in-progress version of the game and may contain unfinished elements and placeholders.