Union Update: It’s release day for Echoes of Kassandra

By the gods! It’s the release day of the “Echoes of Kassandra” pack, the latest cosmetic pack for Anno 117: Pax Romana.

Inspired by the world of Kassandra, the ancient Greek hero from Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, this pack includes several new statues, skins and a grand music hall with 1h of music from Odyssey: protect your harbour with a giant statue of Zeus, choose Leonidas as protector of your city gates and Kassandra as your new profile picture, and paint some of your residences and city watch buildings in a hellenic blue colour scheme.

Learn more about the pack in our dedicated DevBlog here or watch the trailer below!

More ornaments!

We know that for some of you there’s no such thing as too many ornaments, which is why we’re always happy to point you in the direction of our awesome modding community on PC as well.

One recent example is the very, very comprehensive “Decorations Mod” by Maggus, which includes around 2000 ornaments and decorations you can use in your game. Check out their overview trailer below and download the mod directly via mod.io

You can find plenty more mods on mod.io, and we always recommend to check out the various smaller and bigger mods if you want to adjust your experience with new challenges or options.

Of course, we have a few ideas for themes for potential future cosmetic packs on our side as well, combined with the feedback from you on what kind of ornaments & skins you are currently missing.

Mods, cheat and their impact on multiplayer desyncs

Talking about mods: with the last patches, we fixed many of the crashes and desyncs (“TRAJAN”-errors) that you have encountered in the past. Now, we are at a state where the game runs much more stable, but also where a large portion of our crash and desync reports show usage of mods or cheats and wanted to address this topic.

Mods

We love seeing you both create and use mods for Anno 117: Pax Romana to further customize your experience. (In fact, we love it so much that we are working on making modding and using mods easier for you)

However, there is one important thing to keep in mind when running mods in multiplayer:
Anno is simulated simultaneously on all clients of the multiplayer match (see also the “Under the Hood” section of our blog post here) and regularly checks if all clients came to the same result – if not, a desync error occurs.
That means that if not all participants use the same mods and same version of said mods, it’s entirely possible that this alone can cause a desync error. In fact, a good share of our recent desync reports show this kind of situation.

To improve your multiplayer experience and make it easier on our side to focus on actual desync issues, we added a new restriction to multiplayer, which should stop you from starting or joining a multiplayer game if not all players are using the same mods and mod versions. This change went live with the update on August 20^th.

Cheats

Let us preface this by saying that we do not mind you using cheats, trainers or other ways to modify your personal gaming experience with unlimited resources, etc. In singleplayer.

While multiplayer can be a different matter, assuming you’re not getting yourself an unfair advantage but are doing so with the consent of the other participants (e.g. in a co-op match), similar rules as with modding apply:

Using any kind of tool to modify the game state has a high chance resulting in desyncs (i.e. TRAJAN errors) as well as potentially straight-up game crashes.

If you want to e.g. have unlimited money or resources as an option for a multiplayer match, we recommend using a mod instead (e.g. one of the mods by us shipped with the game) since that mod must be active for all players for the game to even start. This way everyone again uses the same version of the game, and you reduce the chance of desyncs.

Please be aware that we cannot consider any desync or crash reports that show that the game has been modified in some way.

The road to Aegyptus

The next stop for this year is, of course, November: On Thursday, November 5th, you will be able to set sails and travel to the province of Aegyptus in “Dawn of the Delta“, our biggest expansion of the year.

Expect more news and first gameplay livestreams around mid-October!