Hey Anno Community,

It’s August, and that means the release of the “The Hippodrome” DLC as well as update 2.0 are near. Today, we’re looking at the latter: what kind of larger improvements and changes does the update add for everyone?

We look at new features, tell you more about how they work and also highlight changes to existing systems that may impact the way you play. Read on for news on the photo mode, note function, new items and some balancing changes.

Keep in mind this is only covers some of the changes of Update 2.0. The full patch notes will be published on August 18^th.

Photo mode

Take even more beautiful screenshots of your islands and cities, of ships on the open sea and armies clashing on open fields!

• A free camera allows for far more angles to take screenshots from, and also allows you to zoom in and zoom out further
• The time of day can be freely set to pick the perfect ambient for your photo
• Several lens effects, from depth of field and focal length to a tilt shift effect

We can’t wait to see what you do with these new options!

Worth noting also is that we right now consider this just as a first version: we have a few more things we want to implement later and are also very happy to hear your feedback on what you’re missing in terms of options.

Note function

A big quality-of-life wish you have been sending our way for a while already was a way to take notes in-game. With this update, you can write notes to remind yourself to e.g. expand your city when you start the game the next day, or to check on a ship in 20min, etc.

The notes can be simply added anywhere in the game world, or attached to specific buildings or units.

For example, you want to buy agriculture specialists at Valeria’s harbour, send the ship there and attach a note to it reminding you of your plans, before you continue with your city expansion, that new island in Albion, etc. When you later see your ship at Valeria’s, the note will remind you WHY you sent it there.

You can also set timers for each note, resulting in you getting a notification as a reminder.

We hope this will make your job as a busy governor easier.

Honoured Guests & Heroic Specialists

Your Prestige grows, your monuments’ Splendour increases – you’ve become a famous governor! Honoured Guests are willing to visit you and support your efforts, will you welcome them in your city?

There are two feedback topics we’re aiming to tackle with this feature: making the Prestige attribute more valuable and adding new layers to the item/specialist system overall.

In your prestige screen you can now find a new page for these Honoured Guests.

Depending on your overall prestige, you increase the chance of specialists joining you in certain intervals. The higher your prestige, the higher the chance to receive a rare specialist.

That’s not all, however: we also introduce a new rarity-level called “heroic”. These specialists are very rare, and they are unique: each of them can only exist once per savegame.

Let’s have a look at one of them: Paldius, Ovine Authority Unquestioned

As you can see, their effects are not only quite strong, they also have both a ranged-effect like all specialists, and an island-wide effect.

Before you can employ them, however, you will need to have enough Prestige: as you could see in the screenshot above, each Heroic Specialist comes with a prestige cost, from just a few thousand to multiple ten-thousands. This “cost” is not removed from your Prestige but your prestige rather acts as a threshold.

With 10,000 Prestige you could employ two specialists “costing” 5,000  Prestige or one that “costs” e.g. 9,000. But you can’t, for example, employ a specialist costing 5,000 and another costing 6,000 as that would exceed your current maximum. Increase your Prestige to employ more or more expensive Heroic Specialists.

There’s one last key difference to the other specialists you can get via the “Honoured Guests” system, however: their drop chance is decided by the Splendour you amassed across your monuments, both from the Amphitheatre as well as the Hippodrome. Each level of Splendour in your monuments adds a 2% chance to receive a Heroic Specialist.

The “Honoured Guests” visiting chance is calculated on a by-island-basis.

Amphitheatre Buff Rework

We just mentioned monuments, so, let’s continue on this topic:

With this update, we’re reworking the buffs of the Amphitheatre. The intention here is to increase the clarity of the provided buffs for players, as well as the usefulness of the buffs.

Now, the Amphitheatre has a 9-stage buff system, and holding events increases the splendour required to reach higher buffs.

Additionally, as some have already noticed after the previous update, its effect are now affecting the entire island and are not range-bound anymore.

A further quality-of-life improvements is that you can now set events to be automatically repeated, reducing micro-management if you so desire.

Both of these points are also true for the Hippodrome monument which is part for DLC 2.

Time-limited challenges

With some delay, challenges in Ubisoft Connect will arrive for all platforms (PC and consoles) with the update as well.

A rotating set of challenges with a limited time to complete will award you with “Ubisoft XP” (to level up your Ubisoft Connect profile, with level-ups awarding “Units” which you can use for e.g. store discounts or to unlock rewards for games in Ubisoft Connect) as well as Fame points (to use in the in-game Hall of Fame).

Rotating here means that the challenges will repeat in certain intervals and can be completed again, providing the same rewards another time (progress doesn’t carry over).

Please note that together with the update we’ll also expand the Hall of Fame by adding a page with previous Twitch Drops, which you can now unlock this way as well.

Resident Quests

The update also adds a new type of resident quests.

They can be repeated and will therefore pop up occasionally, providing another way to engage with the world and get some rewards throughout your game.

We’re also doing some balancing adjustments:

Bread consumption

From our perspective, current bread consumption is too low. As a result, bread production chains have limited strategic importance, which undermines vision of Rome relying on bread and imports.

We therefore increase bread consumption by roughly 50%.

To compensate, bread provides +1 population (i.e. +3 instead of +2).

You may have to adjust your supply chains and build additional farms and bakeries to compensate for this change.

Incident size

We’re doing further adjustments to major incidents to address feedback on high negative attribute numbers not feeling impactful enough and being easy to ignore.

Both major fires and major plagues now affect significantly more buildings, especially so in large cities, making their impact felt more and being more clearly distinguishable from minor incidents.

This brings us to the end of this first look at Update 2.0, releasing alongside “The Hippodrome” DLC on August 20^th.

As mentioned at the beginning, expect the full patch notes with all changes and bug fixes closer to release for the full picture – today, we wanted to give you an overview of the major changes and improvements you can expect, and potentially give you time to adjust and prepare for the two balancing adjustments.

Ah, and yes, with this update field workers will be added to various farms and plantations.

Salve Anno Community!

My name is Oliver Mertins, Senior Technical Artist on Anno 117: Pax Romana. I’m with Ubisoft Mainz for 5 years and have started on Anno 117: Pax Romana at the very beginning.

Often, I get asked: “What does a Technical Artist actually do?”
Simply said, they are the glue between the Art (e.g. Level Art, 3D Art, Animation) and development departments (e.g. Game Play Programming, Engine Development, Tools Development).

While Artists tend to think in shapes, colors and timing, Programmers might think in game logic, code design patterns or data types. To bridge between them a Technical Artist is needed who understands both worlds and can support in meetings, write scripts and little tools to support the Artists, do research to explore new fields of interest or investigate into asset optimization to improve the game performance. They take care of the more technical art side, like building functionality out of node networks, creating control rigs for character or props, developing procedural materials or stunning visual effects using several techniques or even writing shaders.

When you think about Anno, you immediately think about building a beautiful-looking empire. But today I will show you how to burn it down to the ground, leaving destruction and chaos. Curious? Then read on

Creating a fire

In ancient times, fire was a central element for humankind to survive and prosper. It not only spent light at night but enabled us to cook and prepare food, manufacture goods and weapons and helped to protect against wild animals. But whenever we thought we had total control over the forces of nature, we were proven wrong, as the great fire in Rome under Emperor Nero showed, for example.
All these cases found its way into Anno 117: Pax Romana – but before we start to create and control an inferno, we need to start mastering small flames and sparks first.

For achieving a vivid blazing fire effect, we will combine multiple visual components starting with emissive flames at its core, sparks for tiny details, heat distortion and a light source to send out light and shadow to its surrounding, to behave believable in the game world. Some aspects will be artistically exaggerated compared to reality to be visible from the usual player-perspective or to create more dramatic imagery.

For creating animated flames, we jump into the most advanced tool for creating visual effects: Side FX Houdini. Here we gain the ability to create digital fire-based rules on how it would work in the real world. This is called a simulation and will be done for each element: the flame, smoke and embers flying through the heated air.

Since a high-resolution simulation contains too much data to process in a real-time game environment, we need to simplify the information by baking a single animated flame into a texture – the “flipbook”. It will be read from left to right and from top to bottom in a repeating fashion from a shader later.

Now we want to have the appearance of a three-dimensional object as well, so we create multiple moving points in space called “particles” and attach the flipbook at each point to create the overall moving fire shape. Here is an overview of the fire ingredients:

Of particles, heat effects and light sources

“But wait a moment, the flipbook texture is just black and white, where are the colors?”, you might ask.
By using a gray scale texture for the flames and a fire color ramp texture, we can later tweak the colors of all fires in the game at a central place. This makes iteration and achieving a consistent quality much easier. We go even further and split the color into two ramp textures, one for the emitting color and one for the pure albedo color. But this is just for a more vivid color shifting look. These will be used as separate inputs for our shader later.

What else would you expect from a fire? Right, sparks! Let’s add some:
Back in Houdini we create particles flying around affected by wind turbulence and gravity. We make them a bit bigger than in reality to have them visible even from greater distance.

Now that we have made the more obvious and “loud” components, it’s time to address the subtle ones. We want to feel the heat the fire sends out, meaning, we want to distort the air around the fire. So, let’s add a few particles for that as well. To achieve the effect, a normal map gets assigned in the shader which deforms the pixels behind it.

Since Anno 117: Pax Romana has a day and night cycle, our fire should light our way at night as well. For dancing shadows on surrounding walls or a gloomy atmosphere, adding a light source becomes essential.

In the real world not only, objects get lit but the air around the light source as well. Tiny dust particles fly through the air reacting and transporting the light further, creating what we perceive as beams or god rays for example.

And there we have it:

Combined with fireplaces and baskets it nicely illuminates the city:

Setting a city on fire (in-game)

Now that we made fire, let’s have a look at unloved fire city incidents.
In Anno 117: Pax Romana we have three types of incidents: fires, disease, and uprisings. The fire incident is what we want to have a closer look at.

Overall fire incidents were a complex topic because they required multiple departments to achieve the overall feeling. When the incident happens, residents panic and run away, resolver units come to the rescue, extinguishing smaller fires. The air fills up with smoke, rooftop holes become visible and multiple fires spread in dangerous rings across the city leaving ruins behind. Therefore, multiple types of fires and smoke effects in several sizes were created, position markers were added to every building and all pieces got balanced and adjusted. For example: in the first iteration the smoke was way too intense from the players’ perspective, hiding the actions of residents and resolver units.

Looking at a single residence building the visual dramaturgy can be explained:

First, smoke and small fires start to evolve, getting bigger and more threatening.
After the fire has eaten through the building, holes in the rooftop get visible, showing glowing and black burned wood beams. When the building has reached its end, it collapses to dust leaving ruins behind.

How to destroy a building

This leads me to the final topic: Building Destruction.
Since Anno 117: Pax Romana contains many different building types and creating an individual destruction animation would require significant extra hard drive storage, we came up with several solutions for specific cases.

The bulk of buildings which are not that often destroyed, get a shader solution with additional smoke and dust effects leaving the detailed destruction animation for military strategic targets like walls, towers, gates and the villa which get seen relatively often.

Usually, the buildings are created in an “onion style” meaning multiple single sided shells got added to compose a building. Unfortunately, this is not ideal for the destruction process for which a “solid” geometry – closed geometry from all sides – is needed.

Therefore, the mesh gets prepared to be solid first. Afterwards it gets cut into pieces – “fractured” as we say – by using simplified fracture patterns, each standing for a different material like wood splitting into long shards, while stone bricks stay as single bricks compared to concrete material crumbling into many pieces. Marble, for example, gets chopped horizontally into multiple pieces:

Now let’s have a look at how we achieved the destruction animation for the stone tower.

By having loose fractured pieces only, our tower would instantly fall apart in an uncontrolled way – but that is not what we want. So, to gain controllability, we glue the loose pieces together and remove the glue partly over time, exactly where and when we want. This results in areas where the tower crumbles first, then second and so on which looks much more realistic.

In our game engine – the Empire Engine – we use a technique called “vertex animation” to playback the animation of the falling pieces in a shader. This is an alternative method for animated meshes compared to the “bone with a skinned mesh” approach usually used for characters and animals. A vertex animation requires two animation textures, one for translation and another one for rotation of the fractured pieces in addition to the fractured mesh. All these get exported, converted and put together by a python script to speed up and smooth out the process.

This is only a high-level overview of the main process of how we destroy specific assets. The whole network to do all these steps bit by bit looks like this under the Houdini hood:

This brings me to the end of the insights into fire and destruction. I hope you will enjoy the effects as much as we do while playing Anno 117: Pax Romana.

Have fun,

Oliver