Union Update: Diplomacy, Roadmap and Community Spotlight

Hey Anno Community,

We’re here today with ANNOther Union Update! (Will we ever get tired of Anno-jokes? Don’t think so). We’ll recap what happened over the last few days and give you an overview of that to expect in the coming weeks and until the end of the year.

Livestream on the Diplomacy system

If you missed our last livestream dedicated to the Diplomacy system in Anno 117: Pax Romana, you can still watch it whenever you prefer here on Twitch. Together with Andrea and Dominik from the Game Design team and Jannik from Gameplay Programming, we talked about changes compared to past Anno games, the two different ways of waging war (limited war and all-out war), various diplomatic treaties and your relationship to the Emperor.

Next week Tuesday we’ll publish a DevBlog here on the Anno Union with all the details in writing.

Roadmap for upcoming weeks

It doesn’t stop with the DevBlog on Diplomacy, of course: As we get closer and closer to release, expect more (Dev)Blogs on various topics as well as more livestreams. Below, we want to give you an overview of our plans for the coming weeks – we’ll soon also have a more visual timeline on the frontpage of the Anno Union for quick reference.

• An overview of the multiplayer aspect of the game for those of you who want to play Anno 117: Pax Romana with (or against!) friends (end of next week)
• A closer look at the campaign and story (week starting the 13th)
• All about the Governor’s Villa and specialists (week starting the 20th)
• A glimpse into the future with our post-launch plans, something you have already been speculating on based on the Year 1 Pass artwork
• How things are looking on the topic of mod support
• An overview of the game, its features, population tiers of both provinces, etc.
• and a few more topics.

Together with DevBlogs, expect livestreams from the Ubisoft Mainz studio on our Twitch channel, to show you in practice what you will read in our blogs. As before, they will feature people from different departments of the Anno team – the perfect opportunity for you to directly ask questions to members of the dev team!

So, keep an eye on the Anno Union and our socials to make sure you don’t miss on the latest news!

Minor demo update

This is just a quick note to let you know that we’ll have a minor update for the demo next week (likely Monday) to help us better track crashes some of you are reporting. We’ll also use the opportunity to do some updates to the translations, and are adding French and Simplified Chinese localizations to the version.

Community Spotlight

To end this lengthy Union Update, we collected some more screenshots shared by you Annoholics, while playing the Anno 117: Pax Romana demo – which yes, it is still available to download and play on PC.

Let’s start with this screenshot by ONI-Player, a charming Celtic settlement in Abion, but make it “Dutch” style. Such a creative way to use the the marsh drainage and its canals!

What a peaceful shot taken and shared by PANacho on Reddit! That Latium sun and sky are quite hard to beat. We wonder how this screenshot was taken, so close to the residences… huh.

ChMalfet managed to capture Albion’s moodiness in just one picture: this Celtic city almost feels embraced by the darkness of the night, enhanced by the thick fog and the heavy rain.