Category: Union Update

The year is ending and this will be our last blog of 2018. To send you off into the New Year appropriately – and bring you a bit closer to the launch of Anno 1800 – we prepared something special for you.

Video is available in german with english subtitles.

The Anno Team wishes you Happy Holidays and a fantastic 2019!

We are sorry for last week’s interruption; we found the culprit and made sure that he is under custody for his disruptive behavior, at least for the time being. We will ensure that we keep a close eye on him in the future, but we have a bad feeling that we have not seen the last of our dear friend, the Acolyte.

With only two months until the end of the year and four months up to launch, what is going on in the world of Anno 1800 and the Union?
As mentioned in a previous blog, game production is keeping our team very busy right now. We are currently working on our big Beta milestone, which means that by January, the game will officially reach Beta state, with all game elements and content fully playable. During this busy time, we are working on many aspects of the game, from polishing up buildings, balancing quests and checking thousands of voice lines to be recorded in a variety of languages:

We are also oiling the cannons and waxing the planks in order to bring you an exciting and insightful naval warfare blog before the end of the year. To get you in the right mood for your tense naval battles, this week’s DevBlog will shine a light on the pirates of Anno 1800, who cling on to tales and legends from a time long gone. They say the age of piracy, but their last stand is yet to come…
We are also busy laying the groundwork for our previously announced large-scale technical test with many more Union members (sign up!) and reviewing your contributions to the Expeditions contest.

The next episode of our AnnoCast is on the horizon!
The AnnoCast will make its (hopefully much anticipated) return next week Thursday, November 8. We heard many of you say that you want to see some proper gameplay and therefore decided to settle on a new island to show you the Farmer and Worker lifestyle. Let us see how far we ca get during our stream! As always, we are happy to answer questions both from the chat as well as from the Union, so leave us anything you want to see answered in the comments!

Save the date and join us next week Thursday, 8th of November for the next episode of our AnnoCast show on: twitch.tv/ubisoftbluebyte

Let’s wrap up this week’s community update with another Community Q&A:

Fightfor3dom
Will you be able to enable/disable the pirates or set a game difficulty for a pirate difficulty? Or will it be just another enemy? Which city incidents will happen on the three different difficulty levels?
Answer: Second-Party characters all have their own difficulty rating, which in many ways reflects their personality and behavior. As third parties don’t directly compete with the player in military or economic warfare, they won’t affect the difficulty of your session. However, pirates are an exception, as they work actively against the player and even other AI. You will be able to choose the pirate characters for your session or even exclude the pirate characters from your match. For now, the two pirates have a set difficulty although both characters have different personalities and therefore, react differently on your actions.
When it comes to city incidents, fire, strikes and illness will haunt your metropolis while their frequency is based on the difficulty setting of your match. We will show you that system in detail in a future DevBlog, as especially strikes are an exciting new feature in Anno 1800.

kuskram
I like that you have so many options to create your custom session. I am also happy to see that the random generator in combination with the seed codes makes a comeback. But there is one question for me: in vein of older titles such as 1701, will the game have a world editor which allows us to place our own islands, fertilities, resources or starting position?
Answer: We focus on the core features on the game, as we want to deliver true quality for old and new fans of the series. Therefore, there are currently no plans to develop a World Editor for Anno 1800. replayability is one of our top priorities, the game will release with over 50 handcrafted islands, and many of them come additionally with their own island variations.

mige0410
Where are the female characters in the old world – or will I be forced to only deal with men as long as I manage to escape to the New World in order to meet the female cast?
Answer: The world of Anno 1800 will be populated by a diverse cast of characters, among them Women and Men with their own special personality, which will mirror in their behavior when building cities or their reactions in our diplomacy system. You will also be able to choose your own player portrait, where you can decide, among other things, to choose a female or male portrait.

AyroV
Will we be able to set the map small/medium if we want to play multiplayer with multiple people? Anno 1404 does not allow us to choose map size accept huge when we try to play with 4 players.
Answer: Yes, you will be able to play on small maps with 4 players or non-player characters. But beware, on a small and densely populated map, there will be a lot of competition about the control of the more precious resources if players want to reach the fifth residential tier.

dAprillion
I like it when I have 2-4 options (easy, med?, hard, insane?) with useful defaults for the main mission?
Answer: You won’t need to dive into the custom match settings and can also choose one of the three pre-defined difficulty options:
Normal Mode: Will provide you a large world and island space, rich mineral deposits, challenging but not too hard opponents and free relocation and full construction refunds.
Advanced: Less money, harder opponents and an average world and island size. Many smaller options such as relocation of buildings won’t be free anymore.
Expert: This one will get you on your toes, only a few coins in your pocket while fighting for every single yard against the most cruel and efficient enemies on small and everything else than fertile islands.

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.

• All Guns blazing
  We know that many of you are very curious – or should I say burning – to learn more about our naval combat. Which is why we want to make sure that when we show it to you, it will all be live and in action inside the game, rather than with a lot of text and mock-up images. Which is why you will be happy to hear that we have made great progress with the polishing of the naval battles during the last milestone, laying the foundation we need for an in-depth look in the future.
• Sights, meet the sounds
  We are also right in the middle of our localization and audio efforts for the game. During the month of September, we recorded all the English voice acting for the various AI characters and the cast of our story-based campaign. At the same time, with all the game text now largely finalized, we are also busy working with the respective teams to translate it into all the other languages we will support (some of which will have localized voice recordings as well). We are happy to say that we will be supporting localized text in more languages than ever before in an Anno game, giving all new audiences the opportunity to immerse themselves in the 19^th century in the language of their choice.

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.

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 29^th 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.