Dear Miss Paloma Valente,

We are delighted to invite you to the first Grand Postal Derby. This special competition – organised and exclusively covered by the Daily Courier – promises to be the greatest competitive event in the history of humankind – surpassing even the 1806 Sausage-Making Championship.

Victory will require a dedication to deliveries, a mastery of mail-routes, and pre-eminent postal prowess! We at the Daily Courier have no doubt that your airships will thrill the public and provide stiff competition for even the slickest of mail delivery operations.

We eagerly await your arrival.
Yours sincerely,
The editorial board of the Daily Courier

Hard to pass up such an opportunity, wouldn’t you agree? – Obviously Paloma took this opportunity head-on. Both to prove the qualities of her new airship as well as cause the premise of a challenge built around stamps sounded just too intriguing.

Collecting stamps? Oh yes, since “Clash of Couriers” is sponsored by the Royal Philatelic Society, stamps will be at the center of the competition.
If you want to learn a bit more about Paloma, we have a neat little character introduction in our previous DevBlog.

You can get a quick overview of the scenario via the video below:

Getting Started

We know you’re eager to get right into the mail business, but let’s first survey the situation you’re starting in.

This time around, you’re given a starting island (Grassy Point) with a reasonable starting town – including a hangar and landing platform. While you will certainly have to expand this settlement over the course of the scenario as well as expand to new islands – to support your growing postal empire – this way you can almost immediately dive into the quests of the scenario.

You also start with an airship: The “Landroval”, Paloma’s flagship. This way you can quickly survey the map, find traders, islands to settle and whatever else there might be.

As with all our scenarios, expect some changes to the regular mechanics – especially when it comes to the needs of your residents. They’re less demanding than usual, meaning you can fully focus on the tasks ahead.

Mail & Stamps

At the center of the scenario and almost all its challenges is the distribution of mail. This works very similar to the mail system in the main game which we have talked about previously – with the difference, that there’s no “Overseas Mail”, and that “Regional Mail” (mail sent between two islands) has been renamed to “Airmail”. Additionally, fulfilling the mail need will result in you receiving stamps from the delivered mail: two types of stamps for two types of mail. While it can be sold to traders, you will certainly need it for the challenges to come, so we’d recommend holding on to them for a while longer.

Make sure to set up a functional mail system on your starting island, then it’s time to join the Grand Postal Derby!

Goals & Challenges

Alright then, let’s dive into the details of your scenario objective: How do you win the Grand Postal Derby?

Similar to any other type of tournament, you will proceed through several brackets, facing competitors in order to win the derby. Winning two out of three challenges in each bracket will promote you to the next one – but of course, the competitors in each subsequent group will also be significantly stronger.

You can freely pick any of the 3 competitors to challenge but be aware: Each challenge comes with its own tasks for you to fulfil (and a time limit).  These tasks will involve selling previously acquired stamps, and various other objectives like fulfilling needs to a certain percentage, finding people, increasing your population or decreasing your people’s happiness.

There are also individual debuffs connected to each of them. Because… your competitors might not always play fair. For example, the “New World Express” will simply switch around all your workforce requirements while another competitor reduces the bonuses you receive by providing your people with mail. There are more effects, of course – we’ve been very creative!

Throughout the competition, radio messages will comment on all events while remaining extremely professional in their coverage, of course.

The World & Discovery

What we haven’t touched on yet is the world all this is taking place in.

As usual, the scenario map is a specifically created world with its own rules and challenges. For example, only your starting island has some coastal area, all other islands are plateaus with steep cliffs.

That means, that you’ll have to settle them by air, adding an additional logistical challenge since you will need to resupply them by air from your main island with regular deliveries. To settle new islands, you first need an official island charter; you gain those by advancing in the competition, allowing you to slowly expand your postal empire across the whole session.

There also is lots to discover on the map and we heavily recommend you to explore! You will meet some familiar faces to trade or make business with. You will find treasures and previously lost mail shipments. And you may stumble upon some pirates! (Okay, maybe you should be a bit careful while exploring.)

Some of the people you meet might become relevant in quests later on while some of the objects you find may help you with certain tasks or improve your finances. Have a look around when you got some time in between the derby’s challenges.

Similar to the previous scenarios, there’s a certain element of persistency when you restart the scenario: If you have settled on some of the plateaus, the Airship Platform will stay when you decide to restart to, for example, go for higher medal.

Winning the scenario will not only make you and your airships world famous but also give you new skins for the Pegasus Class cargo airship!

And coming with Game Update 15, there’s another reason to play the new scenario…

The Grand Gallery

… introducing: The Grand Gallery!

In the Grand Gallery, you will be able to trade Golden Tickets for various ornaments, items and more. But wait, Golden Tickets?

This is the scenario connection we mentioned: Playing the scenarios and fulfilling certain scenario-related achievements will give you Golden Tickets. Anno 1404 veterans might remember such a mechanic: Back then you received Gems for certain achievements with which you could then unlock ornaments, portraits and more. For you, the Grand Gallery should feel very familiar.

All previous and upcoming scenarios will award you with Golden Tickets for:

• Finishing a scenario for the first time
• Finishing a scenario with a specific medal
• Completing any of the “badges”, special scenario-related achievements

And before you ask: We tracked your progress since Eden Burning, meaning you will already start with a certain number of Golden Tickets if you finished the scenarios and fulfilled some of their achievements prior to this update.

Completing a scenario multiple times will reward you with Golden Tickets each time based on your performance.

Let’s talk about what you can unlock with those Golden Tickets!

Currently there are four categories: Ornaments, Character Portraits, Skins and Items. That means, on September 20^th you will be able to get various kinds of ornaments related to Nate’s scrapyard or use the Paloma as your new portrait.  If you own DLC 11 or DLC 3, there are airship skins (for the for the Zephyr and Boreas Class) you can unlock, too.

And finally, we added a few items we think are popular with our players, for example the Fjordbuster MK VI. or the Gritty Gas Extractor.

All content is available account-wide, meaning it can be used in all your savegames simultaneously.

It’s also important to note that this feature is part of the Free Game Update, meaning you can receive Golden Tickets via the free “Eden Burning” scenario, even if you don’t own any of Season 4’s DLC (and therefore scenarios). We are planning to expand the Grand Gallery with more content in the future.

After unlocking something via Golden Tickets, how do you get access to your new content?

If you played Anno 2070 and loved having the Ark, you will like this: At any time during playing, you can call on Paloma to deliver your unlocked items to your island. She will always deliver all items you unlocked. And maybe this inspires you to start a fresh game: Construct your Trading Post and immediately get your unlocked items delivered for a quicker start!

These item deliveries are only available in singleplayer. Portraits, ornaments and ship skins are immediately unlocked for you, without Paloma’s help.

We hope you find this new feature useful.

That’s it for our DevBlog about the “Clash of Courier” scenario as well as the scenario system overall with the introduction of the Grand Gallery.

We’re not only curious what you think but also can’t wait for you to try your luck with winning the Grand Postal Derby yourself!

Until the release of DLC 11 on September 20^th, you can, as usual, expect the full Release Notes for Game Update 15 as well as details about the Twitch Drops event and early access phase. So, keep an eye on our channels!

Development of Anno 1800 – Season 4 is supported by the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action within the framework of computer games funding.