Hey Anno Community!

It was great to see your reactions to the Season 3 announcement on Tuesday, the excited comments, the speculations – and the questions.

We’ve seen a few questions pop up repeatedly over the last days and instead of answering them on an individual basis again and again, we though the Anno Union is the perfect place to reach all of you at once ?

How are the Export/Import Contracts integrated into the statistics menu?

Via the “Storage” tab you can get an overview over all previous contracts fulfilled by Captain Tobias. Just like you can with your regular trade routes.

Like all trade, however, the goods exported and imported are not included in the production overview, as production and trade are two different systems in the game which work differently. The production tab checks for constant production and consumption, it presents absolute, reliable values.

Trading, however, is unreliable and therefore can’t be properly calculated into the production tab. Ships have differing traveling time, can be sunk, wind may affect their speed, they may have to wait to fulfil their trades etc. Incorporating goods from these sources as guesses would make the production tab unreliable, and therefore not useful anymore.

The new Docklands buildings and ornaments look like they might put yet more strain on my limited harbour space. Could you increase the harbour space?

Generally, with the introduction of the harbor street and being able to place certain buildings in the water instead of only along the coast, you will already be able to use the available space of your harbour area a lot better – especially if you like to play around with buildings to get the perfect layout. Add to that the modules of the “Docklands” like the depot, which are more space efficient than their regular counterparts.

However, we are not planning to increase the size of your islands’ harbour area. All maps are separated into island and ocean areas. The harbour area is always part of the island area and designed to expand from a certain line along the coast outwards to a certain limit. Reworking and expanding the construction space in the harbour area for all islands would have a significant impact on the game’s balancing and can further lead to issues impacting the stability of the game, AI navigation, and in certain cases, even corrupt savegames.

“Docklands” let’s you import goods from other DLC like “Land of Lions”. Will “Tourist Season” and “The High Life” provide similar interconnections between the DLC?

Yes, all 3 DLC will provide a certain level of interconnectivity with previously released content. Our goal with Season 3’s DLC is to offer you multiple paths to reach your goal. Owning another DLC will not make your life easier or be the “best” solution, but it will provide you with more options as to how to approach certain challenges.

“Tourist Season” sounds like it’s rather focused on beauty builders. As a record builder, will I also enjoy the contents of this DLC?

All DLC of Season 3 offer options for both beauty builders and record builders. The restaurants you’ll build to satisfy your tourists’ needs will also have an impact on the residents living nearby. Just like you might also order a burger at a restaurant nearby and won’t just leave it to tourists and other visitors. This might lead to residents e.g. consuming less bread or beer. Making the most of the bonuses provided by restaurants can be a great strategy to reduce the consumption of certain goods and instead focus on the production of other wares.

The skyscrapers in the gameplay footage to “The High Life” look strange, just like extended Investor residences.

Many of you have pointed out that the skyscrapers prototype footage seen in the Season 3 trailer and stream look suspiciously as if someone had just “stretched” our existing investor residences higher- which is coincidentally exactly what they are! It is very common in game development to try and reach a playable prototype state for experimentation as quickly as possible by “kitbashing” any existing assets and features you already have, so you can first test a feature’s potential before wasting valuable time only to find out later that it wasn’t much fun in the first place.

This is an aspect of development that is rarely seen outside of perhaps “making of” videos and usually never makes it into a proper trailer, though in this case we chose to do so as we thought it would be cool to give you a glimpse at our third DLC that is coming this Summer. One of the challenges we have when presenting a new Season to you is that, contrary to many other games, all DLCs for Anno 1800 are being developed by the same core team here in Mainz – which means that by the time we announce a new Season Pass, we are knee-deep in the development of our first DLC, but don’t have any polished gameplay from DLCs 2 and 3 to share (this was also true for Season 1 and 2).

TL; DR: The skyscrapers seen in the Season 3 trailer are just early prototypes based on existing assets, and do not represent the final quality of the feature, which will allow you to build truly modular high rises of various shapes and looks.

We know there’re many more questions out there and we’re currently planning to give you a Q&A opportunity soon. Keep in mind, though, that some answers will have to wait a bit until we’re closer to the release of the respective DLC.

Current technical issues

We have seen reports from players still having their Ubisoft Connect Rewards locked in the game. In that case, please verify the game files of Anno 1800 and then restart Ubisoft Connect. This should solve the problem.

If you’re missing your Chess Table ornaments: no worries, our team is currently looking into this.

Additionally, our team is currently investigating possible causes for the freezes and lags some of you have been reporting since Game Update 9.3. We will keep you updated on this topic and are hoping to have more news soon.

Winners of the “guess a DLC name” contest

Finally, it’s time to announce the winners from our last contest where we asked you to guess the names of the 3 DLC of the Season 3 Pass: “Docklands”, “Tourist Season” and “The High Life”.

Among everyone who guessed correctly, we have randomly selected 3 winners from both the German and the English comment section. Congratulations to:

marc1808

IDDDS

Killangel42

VaIhaIla_Rising

Sycend

Justin_One_Shot

We will contact you over the next few days via the e-mail address you’re using for your Ubisoft account to send you your Season 3 Pass key. So please keep an eye on your inbox ?

We wish all of you a great week, stay safe!