Hey Anno Community,

After introducing you to the setting and world of Anno 117: Pax Romana as well as several of its features, today we’re diving into the topic of HOW we make games – and look at the work of the Production department.

That’s the team planning and organising the entire development process from the beginning and making sure we stay on track over the course of the multiple years that an Anno game takes until release.

For all this, we’re talking with our Production Director Nadin, and Senior Producer Christoph. Both are Anno veterans and assuring a smooth development process for Anno games for many years already.

Let’s first start with their roles specifically, since while both belong to the “Production Department”, we have a split in terms of responsibility: Producing and Project Management. As with all roles in our team, the Production department is deeply embedded into the rest of the development team here in Mainz.

The Production Department

Project Management

We start with Nadin and Project Management.

Project Management is about the management of hard facts: task planning, milestone planning (more on that later), budget & resource planning. It also means defining, and then always keeping an eye on the scope of the project – and adjusting it when necessary.

Nadin and her team are planning the whole project with its individual phases (pre-production, production, post-launch) by transforming the Creative Vision (see this DevBlog on the responsibilities of Creative Director Manuel and Game Director Jan) into tasks. This always happens hand-in-hand with the different departments, as they – for example – need to provide time estimates for their tasks which then make their way into the production plan.

As early as possible, a first plan is set-up to see how much time realizing this original vision would take – followed by discussions on how to make it fit within the given restrictions. Since the team’s health is very important, making sure the plan works with the capacities we have is central.

Should we already identify issues at this early stage, the team tries to address this by:

• Adding more team members to the development (meaning, hiring additional people or outsourcing certain tasks)
• Reducing the scope (meaning, removing certain features or designs) or postponing features (e.g. moving a feature into the postlaunch period, like the co-op mode for Anno 1800).

The management of those external partners is also a responsibility of the Project Management team: contract negotiations, onboarding and the monitoring of their progress.

During production, the team is also regularly cross-checking the development progress with the plans, to make sure the project runs smoothly and avoids crunch – while also assuring we stay on track for the planned release date.

Producing

Now, we take a look at Christoph’s team and “Producing”.

Christoph himself describes the role of his team as one with both internal (dev team) and external (stakeholders) responsibilities. That includes the creation and management of workflows for the dev team, the checking of milestone results and goals as well as the organisation of meetings and syncs to facilitate communication within the departments (i.e. anything related to the project status).

Part of that is also “risk management”, i.e. the anticipation of risks to the development. Those can be all kinds of topics and are coming from the whole team: worries about the timeline, problems with a certain tool which could cost more time, designs that may be difficult to implement or topics that could be tricky to communicate to our players. Anticipating (and subsequently addressing) takes a high priority throughout the whole development.

On top of that, “externally” the Producing team also communicates with other stakeholders within the company. These are, for example, our production contacts at HQ-level, Editorial or Age Rating managers.

Here exists, of course, a big overlap with Nadin’s responsibilities since both are working hand-in-hand when it comes to e.g. updating stakeholders or defining workflows. Meaning: for many tasks the distinction between Nadin and Christoph and their teams is not that clear-cut and requires close collaboration and steady communication on a daily basis.

Just as some production chains require two input goods (Garum needing Mackerels and Salt), a good production department needs close collaboration between both its teams.

Alright, their roles and scope of work established, let’s go in a bit more detail on the Production planning: Which phases does a game go through from first idea to release?

Similar to the blog on creating the Creative Vision, it’s important to mention that while there are many similarities between how different dev teams approach creating their games, each tries to do things in a way that works best for their team and project. Accordingly, the length of the following phases is defined by each team individually. From experience, our Production Team roughly knows how long the Production of an Anno game will take – and taking this into consideration together with the targeted release date, and the defined length of a milestone (see further below), the Production Team can calculate the length of the phases and number of milestones.

Planning an Anno production

Concept Phase & Pre-production – First Playable

It all starts with a vision – and then the concept phase. Here only a small team is involved in getting a feel for the game, outlining general game design, core features and innovations. The small team is not working in a vacuum, of course: Already in this stage the Production Team is involved assessing the potential scope and working on a first plan and estimates. This includes project goals, project size & cost as well as the overall timeline. Those points are further impacted by input and requirements from other stakeholders at the company. The project planning for a game like Anno 117: Pax Romana is rather comprehensive and it’s the Production Team’s duty to bring all stakeholders together.

It’s also important to note that during these phases, the dev team is working on not only a high concept for each feature and mechanic, but also the detailed design documents (DDDs) for them. We’ll get to them in a future blog, but in short: These documents define the scope, as well as “must have” and “nice to have” elements of each feature before they’re being worked on and implemented into the game.

Over time, more people are added to the new project and a first version slowly takes shape, a proof-of-concept basically: the “first playable prototype” (FPP). This version is an important check for us and our stakeholders if the concept works, or if we have taken a wrong turn somewhere and need to go back to the drawing board.

Pre-production is the time where we build the foundation for main production. It’s a time to de-risk the project, a time where we can also test new or difficult features (that’s a topic we will also be addressing in our future DevBlog on Game Design) but also a time to get all the internal tools ready so that the team can start creating content efficiently.

Pre-Alpha & Alpha – Feature Complete and fully playable

This is also called the Main Production Phase. This phase has the goal to finish the implementation of all features, including a vertical slice of their content.

Example: If the game has quests, the feature of quests should be implemented and come with 2-5 quests, so one can assess the feature, but the Narrative team does not have to finish ALL the quests.

Accordingly, this phase is usually NOT about quality, so loads of things will be (visually & in terms of UX/gameplay) in an unpolished state. One could also say: This phase is about quantity NOT quality.

Beta – Feature & Content Complete and Polished

Contrary to the Main Production, in Beta the team will swap priority and try to apply quality to all the implemented features and content. In addition to that, “missing” content (see Alpha Phase above) will be added, e.g. remaining quests, remaining NPCs and so on.

Master – “Refined”

The last phase of production before the release: This one is mainly about bug fixing, performance and memory optimization but also leaves us room for e.g. adjustments to the balancing and similar feedback that we might still get from our players.

It’s also in this phase where our game is submitted to first parties (e.g. Sony and Microsoft) for them to check and approve the version.

When we reached this this point, we would be seeing the finish line, and the release of Anno 117: Pax Romana would be within reach (hello, November 13th!).

Building huge Roman cities in Latium is just a few months away.

Milestones

As discussed above, the Production team creates a roadmap in order to reach certain production levels at certain times. For those, we use milestones.

To quote from our internal documentation: “A Milestone separates the Production into smaller, manageable chunks.” This helps us structure the overall development process, which means we have regular checks on the progress of the project. Accordingly, all milestones have the same length, as they all follow the same workflows.

The team itself agrees on and commits to specific goals that need to be reached by the end of a Milestone. This usually means getting a specific feature or aspect of the game to a certain quality level. Both these quality levels as well as the Milestone goals are defined by the team itself in accordance with the overall production plan originally laid out, and some general Ubisoft guidelines.

For example, while Level of Quality 0 (“L0”) means there has to be a detailed design of the feature that has been reviewed and approved, L1 means that the feature (even though in a very early state with placeholders and work-in-progress elements) is playable for the first time.

Our “Levels of Quality”, visualized via the World’s Fair from Anno 1800.

And what happens when we reach a milestone? Well, we celebrate, of course! We regularly have “Show & Tell” meetings where individual departments present their achievements of the last milestones to the rest of the team – and then enjoy some food and drink after.

Additionally, we also regularly take Milestones as an opportunity to do playtests. Both external ones but also internal ones, when all of us can take some dedicated time to just focus on playing the game. And like our external playtesters, we also fill out lengthy surveys to judge and give feedback on our own game.

However, as you can guess, not every milestone works like a charm. Estimated tasks might take longer, people might become sick and thus aren’t able to finish their work or we find out that a certain implementation sounded good on paper, but actually isn’t that fun when playing.

All these learnings will need to be assessed, and the plan for the upcoming milestones needs to be adjusted.

That means working in Producing and Project Management is not about creating that ONE plan: it’s about creating a plan and adjusting it over and over again to match the production reality – while keeping the project’s goals in mind.

We don’t have THAT MUCH cake every time, that’s reserved for the big milestones.

Feature Teams

To achieve said Milestone goals, we assemble “Feature Teams”.

These are smaller teams focused on a specific feature or feature group and made up of people from different departments that are all working on this specific feature (for example: roads or diplomacy). People usually are in multiple Features Teams (there are maaaaany different features) and together decide on the goals and are responsible for ensuring that the feature reaches said Milestone goals.

They are supported by the Production team to assure proper workflows and scope: as discussed at the beginning, the development has to be thoroughly planned to account for the available time and staff; to assure we’re delivering a quality game on time and without crunch.

Additionally, the Team Leads and the Core Group (made up of the Directors and Senior Leads) are guiding the process and are approving as well as checking the progress and the Milestone goals.

Closing words & learnings

We’re coming to the end of today’s DevBlog, time for some last questions to Nadin and Christoph:

Are you really planning the whole development at the beginning? How flexible is it should something unforeseen happen?

Yes, you need a first full plan at the beginning. This is important to keep control over the project’s parameters (Time, Budget, Quality). As soon as one of the parameters is in danger, we need to take counter measures to make sure the project stays on track. As said earlier, adjusting the plan to fit the production reality is a big part of our work.

Both you and the team have worked on multiple Anno games over the years. Did that result in some “golden rules” for Production planning?

If the plan is not fitting in the beginning it will NOT fit in the end => you have to adjust it right there to minimize the risks.

Be realistic when estimating tasks => tasks that are estimated too optimistically will later-on result in the plan becoming skewed.

Be open and honest: be it good or bad => only with transparency can you build trust within the team and towards our fans.

Did you encounter situations of “let’s do it differently next time” and generally changes to how we produce games over the years?

Production is about managing change. The best workflow is worthless, if it doesn’t fit the team’s needs. So yes: It is a constant evolution of reviewing what went well and what didn’t.

This is especially true regarding planning: how to set up a plan (backlog) how to monitor, how to adjust the plan to be more flexible are key components of our work.

We hope you found this different but extensive insight into our development processes, and specifically the work of the Production department interesting.

Do you have more questions that we did not answer in this blog? Want to know more about the work of specific other departments? Let us know in the comments!

Hey Anno Community,

Not too long ago we told you about Attributes and Needs in Anno 117: Pax Romana, and how fulfilling them will grant you bonuses for your island. In that DevBlog we hinted at 8 different attributes, but didn’t reveal the full list to enjoy the suspense for a little bit longer.

Well, it’s now time to reveal one of those previously hidden attributes: Belief! What does Belief do and what is it connected to? Well, as the word suggests, it is connected to Religion: this is a brand-new feature added for the first time to an Anno game.

The Background

There are different reasons why Religion and Belief have been added to Anno 117: Pax Romana. Firstly, this will allow an additional level of customisation for our players, who will have the chance to strengthen their island identity by choosing which deity to worship on their islands. Secondly, it was important for us to portray the polytheism and cultural diversity of the ancient world which Anno 117 is inspired by.

As you might already know, Roman religion was primarily polytheistic, involving the worship of numerous deities who were believed to influence all aspects of life, by playing an important role in daily events. Among these deities, for example, we can find Jupiter – also known as Jove – god of the sky and thunder, who was worshipped in Rome itself. Or if we think of the “home” of Anno, Ubisoft Mainz: did you know that our office is built above a Roman Sanctuary of Isis and Magna Mater?

How is this been translated in Anno 117: Pax Romana? Let’s now take a closer look at this new feature and its impact on your settlements.

How does it work?

You’ll be able to unlock the Religion feature as soon as you have settled a few Plebeians on one of your islands: this will allow you to place a small temple in your city – the sanctuary.

Once you’ve built your sanctuary, it will be time for you to choose the patron deity of this very island, aka the primary deity you want your residents to worship on that island. You’ll be able to do so from accessing the Religion menu from any religious public building. Every island you have settled can have its own patron that its population worships.

At first, you will only have the option to choose among four deities, but you will unlock more by reaching specific conditions in the game and discovering them via the Discovery Tree. More on that feature in the next DevBlog.

Your starting deities will be Ceres, Neptune, Minerva and Mars; based on your playstyle and what you would like to achieve, it’s important for you to pick the right one: each deity will have its own unique effects for your cities, production and units.

Buff effects

These Patron god effects are unlocked by gathering Devotion over time – with Devotion being tied to the Belief (more on that in a second) in the chosen island Patron. To unlock a buff effect, you will need to reach a specific threshold of Devotion on the progress bar in the dedicated menu. Whenever the Devotion passes a marked threshold, you unlock an improvement to the primary or secondary Patron effect.

What if you would like to change your Island Patron, switching from a peaceful farming community to a war economy? Don’t worry, you can still do that. However, changing the Patron resets the Devotion to zero.

Let’s look together at an example: Neptune, protector of freshwater and the sea. If you choose Neptune as your island Patron, your fishers will feel significantly more courageous: you will notice an increase in productivity of all sea food. Additionally, you’ll attract master craftsmen who not only construct ships faster but also make them more durable.

Ceres blesses your agriculture and population! Her worshippers can increase the yields of farms and the production and storage of farming goods.

And Mars… well, he’s not so much a deity of growth and construction but your troops will have higher morale and fight better when global devotion to Mars is high enough.

Local vs Global effect

Not only do Patrons have a local effect on your islands, but they also have a global effect on all provinces, affecting all islands under your control. This is the effect of your dominant Patron. A Patron becomes “dominant” when its global devotion is larger than a certain threshold: the Patron that has the most added-up devotion on all islands you control becomes the dominant Patron.

Let’s go back to the Neptune example: his global bonus will affect your ships speed, making them faster when sailing the high seas across the map.

The Belief Attribute

Alright, let’s take one step back and talk about HOW you increase Devotion – and Belief.

As we mentioned at the beginning of this blog, Belief is one of the new attributes introduced in Anno 117: Pax Romana. The two main ways of increasing the Belief attribute are:

• Public buildings (like the Sanctuary we showed earlier) which affect building in their radius, resulting in them each providing Belief
• Goods which you provide via the Needs categories (like for example Wine)

There may be some other way (e.g. via items), but let’s keep it at that for now. In short: the more buildings are affected by various effects like these, the higher your Belief.

Devotion in turn comes from your island’s Belief. Over time, Devotion will rise to the same value as the island’s Belief. Therefore, the more Belief you have, the more Devotion will result from it, unlocking the higher buffs mentioned above.

Where do gods live?

As you probably have gathered from the paragraphs above, Anno 117: Pax Romana doesn’t feature “physical” deities which roam your cities or throw lightning bolts at people who offend them.

What we wanted to represent in our game is rather the psychological effect: your people are worshipping certain deities, and find courage and motivation in doing so. They believe that this worship has an effect and work harder (e.g. farmers worshipping Ceres) or fight better (when worshipping Mars).

The sanctuary we showed you earlier is a rather humble place of worship. Later, you will be able to construct mighty temples to dedicate to your Patron of choice. Not only do they influence a much larger area of your island, but they also provide much higher Belief buffs to the surrounding buildings.

No matter which Patron you choose for your respective island: the sanctuaries and temples, as well as the priests they spawn will visually change to fit the worshipped deity.

The ancient time we were inspired by was a polytheistic one, and while each island can only dedicate itself to one dominant Patron god, you can still construct shrines to other deities. These shrines will buff buildings in their vicinity and increase your attributes like fire safety, happiness or income further. It pays off to be a devoted governor.

“What about Albion?”, we hear you ask. Well, let’s say the Celts have their own deities and places of worship. More on that later this year.

Salvete, Anno community!

My name is Björn Frechenhäuser and I am a Senior Level Artist working on Anno 117: Pax Romana. I have been at Ubisoft Mainz for 12 years and after Anno 2205 and Anno 1800, this is the third Anno game I have the pleasure of working on. If you’d like to see some of my work on previous installments, you can check out my Artstation profile.

Level Art can mean a lot of different things, very dependent on which company, which studio and which project you work for. It can be more centric around the creation of 3D assets and textures or the visual development and dressing of levels or storytelling in the world and its locations. So, what does it mean for Anno? In short: all of the above (and more). But either way, at the heart of Level Art is always – you guessed it – the level. For Anno the level consists of the game world and its islands, which serve as canvas for players to build their cities on.

In today’s DevBlog I want to give you an insight into how islands are being created, what our processes are and how we tried to achieve the next step after an extremely successful Anno 1800.

From Anno 1800 to Anno 117 – what has changed in island creation?

At the beginning of every new Anno game, we ask ourselves: What do we want to achieve? What do we want to improve? What do we want to drop? For us in Level Art, the mission was clear right from the start: We wanted to create the best looking, most natural, most diverse, most immersive game world in the series. Sounds easy enough, right?

Of course, going forward meant more of an evolution than a revolution because the levels are still bound by the game’s rules, the balancing of its features and the performance of our target platforms – as they have always been. During the postlaunch of Anno 1800 we started researching in different directions and in this blog, you will see some of the breakthroughs we achieved.

Procedural Texturing

In the past we had already established a procedural content creation pipeline for some aspects of our island creation process, namely the generation of the island’s terrain – you can read up on it in this older DevBlog for Anno 1800. However, the texturing process of the islands (which involves adding materials such as grass, rock, sand, etc. to your terrain) was mostly a manual, elaborate but somewhat repetitive procedure back then. Furthermore, the resolution at which our textures could be added to our islands, the so-called “texture splatting resolution”, was too low. So, with the help of our Graphics Programming department we quadrupled our texture splatting resolution for the ability to splat textures with much more control and way more detail.

Now we use the so-called “splat maps” generated together with our terrain that use algorithms that simulate aspects of nature such as erosion, thermal weathering, deposition, terrain wear and many more.

Texture Displacement

The procedural texturing already added a layer of diversity and natural look that we couldn’t achieve before, but we wanted to go further to improve how the textures themselves shape our visuals. We implemented a technique called “displacement mapping” that allows textures to not only sit on top of the terrain but change the shape of the terrain and increase its visual quality without the use of actual 3D assets.

Terrain Steepness

Another lever we wanted to pull to make our islands look more natural and realistic was playing around with the steepness of the terrain and consequently the slope on which our buildings could be built. Anno 1800 had a maximum terrain angle of 12%, which presented us a significant limit for island design.

For Anno 117: Pax Romana, we aimed to increase this angle. Researching this topic was a significant collaborative effort involving multiple departments, including not only Level art, but also Art Direction, Game Direction, Graphics Programming, Game Design, 3D Art, and Gameplay Programming. This extensive teamwork was necessary because the topic is closely related to nearly every aspect of our building system. After a lot of back and forth and countless hours of testing we decided to go for it and doubled our maximum buildable terrain slope to 24%.

With these new improvements on our toolbelt – among many others – it was time to start our journey of designing and creating the world of Anno 117: Pax Romana. Below I will show you a simplified breakdown of how an island is being created from the first to the last step. 

Island creation in Anno 117 – from simple ideas to in-game islands

Setting a course

Before creating even just a single pixel of an island, we ask ourselves some questions: What should our world look like? What expectations do we want to fulfil? What stories do we want to tell? During this phase, we gather hundreds of reference pictures and explore many different ideas together with Concept Art to nail down what look and feel we want to achieve. This is when, together with Art Direction, Game Direction and Game Design we developed our two provinces Latium and Albion. We designed their look, established their uniqueness and set the ground to develop a visual direction that would serve as a guide for our creation process.

Island Conceptualisation

The first step to creating an island is always thinking about shapes, volumes and topology. Additionally, we need to establish a set of rules with Game Design: rough island size, available construction space, required beach areas, mining lode amount, etc. Once this is done and we have all the ingredients, we can start creating the first island concepts.

Unlike Anno 1800, we start our island concepts directly in 3D, using a tool called “World Machine” which has already been in use since Anno 2205. By doing this we can already get a much better feeling for an island, and this lays the groundwork for later iterations. Thanks to the procedural pipeline we set up, we can create dozens of island concepts relatively quickly. Once a batch of concepts is produced, we sit together with Game Design and Art Direction to decide which islands are fitting to be approved for further production.

Blockout

Once an island concept is approved, we create a first playable blockout version of it to further iterate its topology and the balancing of construction areas, beach locations, mining lode amounts etc. Moreover, we do a first texturing pass to check the look and feel. Besides World Machine, during this phase we work quite a bit with our proprietary tool called “Anno Editor”, to implement the gameplay features mentioned above. Still, we stay as open and flexible as possible because we might need to make a lot of changes to the island along the way.

Visual Design

After numerous iterations of the blockout version we eventually reach a state where all gameplay and balancing aspects of the island are set and approved. Now we start working on the visual aspects of the island. A lot of the visual detail already came from our procedural workflow as described and additionally we scatter vegetation assets using a tool called “Houdini”.

Once all the procedural steps are done, our base island is ready: it’s now time to start working manually on the details and flesh out the visuals of the island by adjusting textures, placing rocks and vegetation assets, adding decals, giving more character to the topology, implementing particle effects, adding waterbodies, and so on. 

Polishing

The final step of our island creation process is a polishing pass. On the one hand, it encompasses visual polishing according to feedback we receive, adding more unique details such as environmental storytelling or adding points of interest, and on the other hand it encompasses gameplay polishing to make sure all the features work as expected (e.g. buildable beaches, mining lode, forest locations, etc.), implementing audio with our Audio team and making sure that there are no bugs occurring.

We cannot wait to see your awesome cities built on our islands, read about what your favourite (or least favourite) islands are and which of the details we so carefully crafted you discover along the way!

Not long ago we gave you a first look at how we’re handling roads in Anno 117: Pax Romana and how we improved the grid with additional functionality by allowing for diagonal building of roads and buildings. If you missed it, catch up by following this link.

In today’s blog, we’ll be looking at the challenges the team faced when making the game work with these new options and how they resolved them.

We’ll also cover a few further implications of these changes, since roads aren’t the only thing you’ll build in Anno 117: Pax Romana, of course.

A quick recap

For Anno 117: Pax Romana, we upgraded the building grid with additional functionality to allow for diagonal roads and buildings. For this, we sub-divided each grid tile into 4-subtiles, which allows us to still calculate and place objects precisely into the grid even at a 45° angle.

Building diagonally does help making both streets and anything connected to them look significantly more organic and changes the look and feel of your cities, production areas and the islands overall.

Despite these new options, our focus was to still make building roads as straightforward and simple as before, where a few clicks connect two points on the island no matter how they are orientated on the grid and where buildings snap to the roads automatically when placed nearby.

The challenges

Now, let’s dive a bit deeper into what we did to get there.

There are a few different ways to bring more flexibility into a builder game like ours, and before the project went into production, we made a prototype and tested all possibilities (all angles allowed, only 45° angles allowed, different rasterizations, different connectivity logics). The most drastic would’ve been to completely remove the grid. A clear disadvantage, however, would have been that it would have become almost impossible to play “Anno-Tetris”. Like playing Tetris without a grid, it would have felt rather strange and unsatisfying and not really like an Anno game anymore.

Once we had found a solution that seemed like it would benefit the game, we went with it.

Let’s cover a few more topics that we had to work on due to the upgrade of the traditional Anno grid:

If you build a road from point A to point B, the game has to suggest a path for the road to take – but diagonal roads mean far more potential paths for the roads. In Anno 1800 a street in an open field has only two options: It can either go first vertical and then horizontal or first horizontal and then vertical. In Anno 117, there is also the option to go first in diagonal or to end in diagonal. More options are cool, but it can be tricky to know what to use when we build streets.

We experimented a bit on this topic, trying different solutions. At first, we tried to guess the intent of the player. Depending on the mouse movements we tried to guess if the player wanted to go first diagonal, or have a 90° angle, or finish in diagonal. In practice it was not reliable enough and the player had to manually change the orientation of the street.

After a lot of tweaking and experimenting, we’ve decided to try a much simpler solution: to always first use a diagonal street and then end with a vertical or horizontal one for the second segment. Sometimes the simpler solutions are the best.

And of course, if there are buildings in between, the street will automatically avoid them.

Farm fields were also adjusted to work in this new context, now able to fill gaps that aren’t the size of a full tile. This is done via a polygon tool that can take full advantage of the sub-tiles we described in the first blog. You probably already spotted this on previous screenshots, but let’s take another look:

The wider impact

We’ve only talked about roads so far but of course any changes to the grid system also impact everything else you build – from houses over ornaments to the mentioned farm fields.

It’s also important to go back to a point from earlier and state that while these changes will turn your cities into significantly more beautiful creations, the efficiency-focused builders among you will probably appreciate to know: Yes, you are losing more space by building diagonally, for a few different reasons.

Firstly – and that’s a lesson from the Anno 1800 days: building beautiful always means “wasting” precious grids that could be used for more residences or more production buildings. Making full use of the new flexibility with diagonal roads and buildings is very much a feature aimed at players who prefer a more organic look for their cities.

Also, we are actually changing the “logical scale” of objects upon rotation. Why and how? Well, let us explain:

Since the single tiles of the old 90 degrees grid are now divided into 4 sub-tiles each, we have to make buildings fit this more detailed grid-structure when turning them by 45 degrees. This can mean slightly increasing or decreasing their size – whatever value in the grid is closer. That, however, doesn’t mean that the building itself, the house (the “mesh”) changes in size, but that the space it occupies/blocks gets larger. Its groundplane (i.e. the ground the building/ornament is placed on) automatically adjusts to make sure there aren’t any weird gaps or overlaps.

Let’s make it a bit easier by visualizing what happens on rotation in our grid:

As you can see, the objects, after being rotated, do not align with the sub-tiles and have to be adjusted first to fit the grid. Of the two options, the one closest in terms of blocked area is chosen. The side length of the 1×1 object changing so much here was one of the reasons we opted for a separate solution for the farm fields, as mentioned previously.

Even if the blocked area increases, the building itself stays the same size. Below you can see what the potential impact of the rotation and scaling can look like. These are just examples for visualization, there are no 1×1 houses 😉

As you can see here, the mesh always remains the same size, even if we have to block more space to make the object in question fit into the grid. 

Non-square buildings are handled in the same way, of course, and depending on the building the blocked area might be bigger or smaller compared to it being built in the traditional grid layout. 

Additionally, we also opted to slightly increase the width of streets (visually) so that they’re a bit wider than a single grid. With both these solutions we avoid what we had internally started calling the “green gap”. 

On average, taking advantage of the diagonal option means that you will use slightly more space.

And when we’re already talking buildings: Let’s not forget a key aspect of Anno’s city building – connecting all your buildings with roads! Production buildings don’t function, and residences don’t get their needs fulfilled if they aren’t connected to a road.

In Anno 1800, at least one road tile had to connect to the building with one of its edges. Simply being in proximity and passing by the building would not count.

In Anno 117: Pax Romana, however, with the option of diagonal roads, we are suddenly faced with more ways in which roads and buildings could interact. For example, a road can just pass by one corner of the building – do we still count it as connected?

The answer is: yes, we do. The game will also help visualize this connection by adding a little cosmetic connection between road and building (marked in blue below). This way something like the below is possible, if you so desire:

As you can see, only 45° angles count for the road connection. 90° connection as in the example on the left side, still are not possible.

Well, that concludes our two-part series on the grid in Anno 117: Pax Romana! 

We hope this not only calms anyone who was worried that we’re getting rid of the grid, but also gave everyone who enjoys a little bit of a look behind the scenes some insights into our processes and the sometimes-unexpected challenges when doing changes to something so central like the grid. 

Please let us know if you liked these kind of development deep-dives and leave any open questions you might still have for us on our social channels, Discord or Reddit, so we can address them later.  

You can also expect to see the new diagonal building options in action later on in videos and livestreams. Until then: have a fantastic Friday!