Category: Union Update

Union Update: Questions, Answers and Artificial Intelligence

Posted on by Bastian Thun

In today’s Union Update, we will once again give you answers on some of the most burning questions from our communities. You also can look forward to our upcoming DevBlog, in which our programmers Jonas and Johannes will show you how we teach our second party characters how to build a believable metropolis.

But before we dive into our QnA section, we have a small reminder: The Union ship design contest will end next week Monday. We got a few strong designs already and we are looking for the last few submissions entering the race before the beginning of next week.

Without further ado, let’s answer some questions:

DfZug
Will the number of wagons per train depend on your production or is it just a visual feature? Will the trains run faster or slower depending on their weight?
Answer: While the payload will not affect the speed of a train, the number of wagons will be an indicator for you how much oil is currently loaded.

Mr.Beko80
Will you need to construct power plants near to the residential area, which will further have a negative impact on your residential happiness? How will the electrical support work, will you need to power supply lines on your own or can you just upgrade your streets?
Answer: To pander your demanding investors, you will need to support them with electricity from a close by a power plant. However, you will not need to install power lines manually, as power plants have their own influence radii like the marketplace and the fire station. Electrical poles will automatically appear across streets, which are in the influence radius of a power station. When you upgrade your simple farm roads to proper streets, the influence of all buildings will expand which also affects your power supply. Power plants will have an impact on the pollution of your city but are not a real competitor against your smoke covered heavy industry.

Acroz.Gaming
While watching the video, I’ve noticed that they look rather static right now. Will you include more animation and visual feedback in the future?
Answer: Many assets used in the electricity blog are not final yet, so you can look forward to a higher level of detail and more visual feedback. Same goes for the oil harbor, the oils ships and the motor carts, which are currently in a low polygon state or getting overhauled. How about an update on that in a future blog or live-stream?

Sandi.V.
Will the roads cross the railway? Or will the railway line block the construction of road crossing?
Answer: You will be able to cross streets when building railway tracks.

olblf
Are power plants only using oil? I guess it makes sense from a gameplay perspective, but historically and logically, coal would have been the go to fuel. I would have liked if powerplants could use both coal and oil.
Answer: In Anno 1800, coal is finding is an important resource for many production chains and it is especially utilized in your heavy industry. Power plants need a very high amount of fuel in order to operate. If we would just use coal for our power plants, we would completely devalue the resource for other production chains and furthermore, we need to ensure that trains could also access the mines. The new electricity production chain including oil as fuel is an exciting new system, which challenges players but also rewards them with technical progress coming to your metropolis. We choose quality over quantity as making use of two fuel resources (oil and coal) would artificially bloat the system while at the same time, watering down the gameplay as a result.

Anno_2070_
Is he ascension to the next tier bound to the need on available and needed workforce or will it be more like in the past, where only a percentage of your residents was able to ascend, which further guaranteed that you always had enough workforce to run everything?
Answer: Anno 1800 will not have the classic ascension rights. If a residential building has all needs fulfilled to reach the maximum amount of residents it can inhabit, you can upgrade the house to the next tier by investing the needed construction material. There won’t be any limit for the number of residents you can upgrade, which means you can let as many farmers ascend to the working class as you like, even if that will cause a bottleneck for farmhands needed on your rural production buildings. Although, you will be able to downgrade buildings if you need an additional workforce in a lower tier.

nico_Darmstadt
If I start building production lines to create luxury goods, will it cause higher upkeep costs but also generate higher income?
Answer: Luxury goods will make your residents and your treasury happy.

Gxy12
Will it be still possible to deny your residents certain goods (such as fish), like it was possible in Anno 2070 or 1404?
Answer: It will be possible to deny your residents any goods you wish by locking it in the specific residential window for each tier. Seems your poor residents have to run dry if you need the schnapps to hand in that quest at your neighbor’s island.

Union Update: GC2018 Community Dinner

Posted on by Bastian Thun

While some of you hopefully enjoy the weather during this record summer, our team is taking on the road to gamescom 2018. While the preparations for gc2018 keep us busy for the upcoming weeks, we will still bring development insights and updates to the Union. Some other formats, such as our development streams are on hold for now but will come back after the event.
To give you a teaser for this week’s content: industrial revolution enthusiasts will find what their hearts desire, as we will highlight technology, which truly changed life in the 19th century.

Anno Union gc2018 community dinner
We are looking forward to Europe’s biggest gaming event and can tell that gamescom 2018 will be especially exciting for Anno 1800 fans. While we will share the exact details about our presence at the event in another update, we have a special announcement to make for Union members visiting Cologne in August.

With the upcoming one-year anniversary of the Anno Union in mind, we want to invite you to celebrate with us at our Union GC2018 community dinner on August 23rd.

During the meet and greet, we want to reminisce with you about the journey so far, chat about Anno 1800 and share development and community stories alike.

How can I register?
Just use our Anno Union “GC2018 community dinner” form.

When and where will the community dinner happen?
Thursday, 23. August 2018 at 9pm (MESZ)
Restaurant “Em Kölsche Boor”
Eigelstein 121, 50668 Cologne

General information about the event

  • Registration via the form is required – we will send out confirmation mails after the advanced registration period has ended on August 6th.
  • Receiving a confirmation mail is required in order to participate.
  • Keep in mind that we have limited seats available, register as fast as possible.
  • Only register if you are sure that you can participate.
  • Participants have to be 18 or older.
  • As the event will take place outside of the gamescom 2018 venue, receiving an invitation to the dinner will not grant you access to gamescom 2018. On the contrary, you will not need a gamescom 2018 ticket to join the event.
  • While we take care of full boarding during the event, we will not cover travel and accommodation expenses.

Union Update: Happiness and Community QnA

Posted on by Bastian Thun

Before we handle the needs of our residents in this weeks DevBlog: Happiness, we will tackle some community questions in todays Union Update. 

Thaliruth
I have a question coming from how other building games do it. I cannot recall Anno games ever having some kind of maintenance mechanics for buildings, such as that they wear off after a while and have to be repaired. How is it with 1800? Do we need to maintain buildings in order to keep the production going?
Answer: Buildings will not wear themselves out from usage and therefore there is no need to perform any maintenance actions. However, incidents such as fire can damage buildings, which will regenerate over time. Ruins on the other hand, have to be manually refurbed by the player. When it comes to harbor defense, repair cranes serve as a measure to maintain your damaged defense structures. While the idea of a maintenance mechanic for buildings sounds interesting for the early game, it would have an extremely heavy micro-management impact in the mid- and late-game. In Anno, you construct not only hundreds or even thousands of buildings across multiple islands and sessions, you also have to take care of trading routes, your fleets and to manage complex logistical networks.

Jinkha5
What if I spent all my influence on a big fleet of ships and then want to change my strategy to use a ton of items or settle on many different islands?
Answer: That depends on the size of your empire, as the amount of influence points is bound to your population. Even if you spend enough points on one category to benefit from the bigger global buff, you will have still some influence at your disposal to invest in other categories. You can also downsize your fleet to reinvest the points in different categories. The military category will allow building fleets at a size and scope previously unseen in an Anno title but a total focus on military won’t be necessary to build up a strong fleet.

Das_ist_Phil
„Investing in Expansion will allow you to settle on more islands, …..”
Does that mean that we will be restricted from the get go? We won’t be able to settle on an unlimited amount of islands and NEED to invest in the expansion category?
Answer: Players who like to steal islands away from AI or other players as fast as possible will need to invest in the expansion category in order to do so. Most players however won’t even need to spend any influence in the beginning, unless they pursue a rush strategy at the start of the game. This way, during the early game influence is especially relevant for players who want to fully commit to a certain playstyle, such as expanding quickly in all directions or to rush a production pipeline to have a large fleet of battle ships as early as possible. When it comes to the “Expansion”category, there is something you have to keep in mind: additional islands will automatically generate influence alongside your growing population (unless you are just claiming new land without establishing settlements). If you just establish a few production islands, you won’t need to spent much (or even any) influence at all but if you want to prevent other parties from expanding, you will need to invest. Players who want to build huge empires don’t need to worry, as influence has no upper limit and will grow together with your empire and its number of inhabitants.

Hexagon19
Is it correct that gramophones are produced by engineers? It makes sense to a degree, but will investors even provide any form of workforce? I also think that it would make more sense that the artisans create the ornaments for the gramophones, instead of the engineers.
Answer: Not all production chains are final yet, as we are still working on balancing, which is also affected by feedback from our focus test groups. It is also important that we find a good distribution of all workforce, in order to ensure that each residential tier is equally relevant, and remains so even in later stages. If we notice that we ask for too many engineers in one production tier while artisans are being left out, we will sit together to find ways to have the workforce distributed more evenly. Since we started developing the game, we had to re-arrange and sometimes even completely change different production chains. But there is one overarching rule: the workforce from all residential tiers stays relevant throughout the whole game.
Investors are different, as they will not provide a typical workforce for your production chains. However, the amount of investors available will play a role when organizing events that are hosted at the world fair.

Ger_Lunak
Will there be a Beta phase for final polishing and bugfixing?
Answer: In order to improve the game, we will continue to make use of our Union focus test program, but also have larger scale testing phases with a lot more players later on.

Frederic440
I would really like to see that every residential tier would get their own enhanced version of the basic kontor. IN the tradition of Anno 1602, it would be great if the enhanced kontor would be available as a project from your construction menu instead of upgrading automatically.
Answer:  While the kontor will not automatically upgrade with every new residential tier, you will be able to upgrade every kontor as well as you warehouses in several stages.

Union Update: Contest, Stream and details

Posted on by Bastian Thun

With today’s Community Update, we want give you an overview on this week’s content and provide a few additional details regarding our last DevBlog about Influence.

As mentioned last week, we are about to start our next big Anno Union contest later this week. This time we will allow you to create your own ship variant and will provide some general guidelines and information needed for you to put your own unique spin on the Imperial Pride.
There were also many questions wondering if we could also allow to create a second variant for the Iron Dragon, as this flaming terror of the seas lost the vote by the smallest of margins. We love seeing your passion, implementing a second community-edited ship is sadly not possible. However, as previously mentioned, you will be able to get your hands on all of the unedited basic ships from the vote.

Next week, we will continue our feature showcase and show you how you can manage the satisfaction of your residents with another DevBlog. With the Happiness feature, you will have the freedom to exploit or to cultivate your residents without lowering one’s sights on advancing your empire to the highest tiers.

Next AnnoAfternoon on the horizon!
Rest is for the wicked – our community team O5ighter and Seraxia jump on deck once again to continue their journey through Anno 1404’s waters. These fellas does not seem to always have a clue what they are doing but at last, they seem to be unstoppable doing so! Give them some support and tune in this SATURDAY at 5pm CEST at twitch.tv/ubisoftbluebyte
UPDATE: Due to the World Cup Finale, we’re moving the Stream Day from Sunday to Saturday the 14th.

Some additional information to our DevBlog: Influence
Last week’s Devblog about the new Influence system sparked a lively discussions in our communities. As it is a currently worked on feature, our team were eagerly awaiting constructive community feedback and with over 200 comments in the Anno Union alone, we got a lot of material to work with. As our design team currently analyses sentiment from our blog as well as from our focus playtests, we want to share some further insights with your today.

Company Level – Naming conventions and general understanding
Many of you stated that you are not necessarily happy with the word “company”, as it does not feel right given the city-building nature of Anno’s gameplay. As we mentioned before, naming as well as translation is not final at this stage and for us, this kind of feedback can be of equal importance as discussing actual features. Therefore, we will consider using a different name instead of “company level”, which will fit better into the world of Anno 1800.
When it comes to the company level as a gameplay element, which generates your pool of Influence points, we want to provide some additional information on how the system works.

Some of you are concerned that the system hinders you in your ambitions to control and expand over the whole island world. The “company” level is bound to your global population and therefore only limited by size of your empire, which means there is no hard cap applied which will hinder you to conquer everything the way you want to. To put it simply, the more residents living in your empire, the more influence points you will accumulate.
With the progression curve we have in mind, we want you to have enough influence points at the start of a match to push for an agenda while in the late game, your Influence will continuously grow, allowing you to stretch your empire in any direction you want to.

Let’s talk about numbers
We deliberately avoided talking too much about the exact amounts of points and the distribution costs based on category. As a subject to constant balancing, we will continue to change and alter the ratios up until release, and if needed even beyond. For that, we take Anno Union feedback as well as our focus playtests result into consideration. Balancing does not only affect the accumulation your growing pool of influence points but also the amount of free units, the investment costs in each category and even the category gameplay elements as a whole.

Optimisation category and the public buildings confusion
This caused a lot of confusion in our community, as the description of the affected buildings was not clear enough in our blog. The optimization feature only affects the three previously revealed buildings able to slot items: the town hall, harbor office and guild hall. You will be able to construct a set number of each of them for “free” before investing influence points in more of these buildings to boost certain aspects of the game. It will not affect buildings like the church or school and therefore, has no negative impact on the needs of your residents whatsoever.

Work in progress and the expansion category
The idea that vast island expansion is tied to a progression system resulted in some heated discussions and our team is currently going through your feedback. As the feature is still a work in progress, we cannot say how it will affect the whole system, the expansion and other categories right now but we will make sure to give you an update on that topic in a future blog.

Union Update: Ship vote has ended

Posted on by Bastian Thun

It was an incredibly close head-to-head race but at the end, the Imperial Pride managed to reach the finish line in a true photo finish just ahead of its closest competitor, the Iron Dragon. But beyond a highly entertaining race to watch, it was also very insightful for us to see how the comments and the actual votes being cast can vary. We knew from the start of the vote that the Imperial Pride would be a strong contender, but given some of the comments about the design, who could have guessed that the Iron Dragon would almost steal the race? On the other hand, the tourist ship did not manage to rally a large enough number of voters, despite being one of the team’s favorites. However, we were all delighted to see that the little tug boat that could was so popular with the Anno Union members.

For the Union members who had high hopes that their personal favorite would make the race, remember that you still will be able to acquire all of the ships via gameplay.

With the closing of the Union Ship vote, we all can look forward to the second stage: the Ship Design Contest, where the Union will be able to hand in their own design ideas for an alternate variant of the Imperial Pride. The exact details for the contest will be shared next week.

When it comes to Union content during the summer, we are not planning to lay back and enjoying the nice weather. Instead, we will bring you exciting DevBlog’s in the weeks to come, among them features highlighting how we encourage player freedom as well as gameplay complexity and customization. The first one will put our new Influence feature into the limelight, a great way to customize and support different gameplay approaches. Gameplay complexity is a theme we mentioned many times since reveal of Anno 1800, but Influence is only one of the many features the game has to offer.

But it is not all just deep systems and mechanics, we will soon tackle one of the most important technological achievements of the industrial age!

Do not forget: English Community Roundtable this evening 7pm CEST
The last weeks German Roundtable session was a blast and today, we are looking forward to have a chat with our international Union community. If you missed the previous roundtables, it is a friendly chat session where our community team and Anno Union members come together to discuss everything Anno 1800 and Anno Union related.
Join our Anno Union community roundtable in our Annoverse Fan Discord at 7pm CEST: https://discordapp.com/invite/V4xhZ8Z

Our communities are important for us: let us know if you run your own fan project or want to share some cool or even crazy ideas how we could highlight projects and content from our Anno communities out there. Just get in contact with us vie the comments, our Anno Ubisoft forum or just hit us on Twitter our official Twitter channel @Anno_EN

We are looking forward to this week’s DevBlog and if you have anything to add, feedback to share or just cool ideas for the Anno Union and our communities out there, let us know in the comments below!

Union Update: Nine years of Anno 1404

Posted on by Ubi-O5

This year marks the 20-year long history of the Anno series and this week, we will jump into our time machine once again, as one of the most influential Anno games has its ninth anniversary. In June 2009, the Anno ship set sail for the fourth time and the prominent feature of the number four fits perfectly for one the most beloved games in the franchise: Anno 1404.

This week, we want to celebrate the ninth anniversary of a true fan favorite. Released on June 23rd in North America as Dawn of Discovery and two days later as Anno 1404 in Europe, the game embraced and expanded many features of its predecessor, Anno 1701.

With its renaissance setting, from gothic architecture to the exotic orient, its complexity and rich feature list, there are many reasons why many Annoholic’s still play Anno 1404 today.
It was the first time we introduced items, expanded on end-game content such as monuments and added a completely new eastern climate zone, to only name a few. The following February, the Venice expansion added even more to the package, with a new neutral Venetian
faction, additional buildings, fresh scenarios and more.

Anno 1404 is one of our main inspiration for the upcoming Anno 1800, as we bring back many of the features fans have asked for while also adding new exciting mechanics and content to the series.

Many of you also might remember the Anno 1404 collector’s edition, coming not only with an art-book and poster but also with truly special items such as a real compass and almond seeds, packed in a nice wooden chest. Who of you proud collectors owns one of these rarities?
If Chris and John managed to get you into the right mood for Anno 1404 entertainment with their AnnoAfternoon Community stream last Sunday, we have more for you! If you missed our last community stream, you can catch up with the VoD here: AnnoAfternoon Episode 2

This Friday, we will host another special anniversary stream here in Mainz. Tune in this Friday 29th at 4.30pm CEST, when the developers of Anno 1800 jump right back into a time of discovery!
Popcorn, anecdotes and backseat gaming allowed: twitch.tv/ubisoftbluebyte

Developer Stories

Burkhard Ratheiser, Executive Producer
Anno 1404’s development was as extensive as the amount of content, which the game had to offer. Even 9 years ago, creating one building from concept to finish took roughly 20 days of work. Still under the name Related Designs back then, we were able to benefit greatly from our experienced gathered from the work on our first Anno game: Anno 1701. That experience and previous big step into the world of 3D should benefit us greatly, Anno 1404 was more detailed and complex as its predecessor and added many fan favorite features to the series. There is a reason why if you ask Annoholics, Anno 1404 is still one of the most beloved Anno titles.     

But the Union is not the first time that we share development details with our communities. Some of you might remember our developer diaries, and Anno 1404 gives me immediate callbacks to the technical progress of that time. Multicore CPU’s started to become a new standard in PC gaming and we wanted to make use of that potential for Anno 1404.

It is crazy how much has changed since the beginning of the Anno series, two decades ago: from pixel cities to the big leap into 3D, from multithreading to multisession. With Anno 1800, we not only want to follow the footsteps of Anno 1404s complexity, we will also enrich the classic Anno formula with new exciting features.
A snapshot from our 1404 release party. Many of the veterans are still working on Anno 1800 today.

Christoph Knauz, Project Manager
I have fond memories of Anno 1404. Back then, I was a new addition to the studio with my position as “Head of Localization & QA” and Anno 1404 was the first game in there series where I was heavily involved into development. Before that, I was part of Sunflowers and worked on Anno 1503 as well as Anno 1701 as a part of their QA team.

Anno 1404 was for my one of the best productions I ever had the pleasure to be a part of. The team was great, the game was promising and the collaboration with the Community was something special, as we to work with our fans intensively. Compared to today, internet was kind of underdeveloped back then, so we had to rely more on personal contact with our fans. If I recall correctly, we had almost a dozen focus test groups, consisting of almost ten Annoholics, to test the game during the “Beta phase” (which means the period shortly after Alpha but before Beta).
These testers had the chance to test the game for almost 6 hours on a Saturday, in order to provide us feedback in the form of questionaires. Following this, we invited them to roundtables where we gathered furtehr feedback. Developers volunteering from almost every department to guide the players during the tests.

If you so will is the Anno Union with our focus tests also following Anno 1404’s tradition.

Volker Sassen, Game Designer
With the introduction of the orient setting, deserts and their non-flat dunes became a topic in development. They kind of contradicted Anno’s premise, in which you can place buildings and create settlements on a flat 2D plane. Our first try was a mix between even construction terrain and uneven dune areas, but that reduced the construction space significantly and also felt unrealistic.

We started to work on texture solutions, so we painted light and shadows on to the actual texture. But that was not providing satisfactory results, as islands had now only good lighting from one specific viewing angle.

One of our coders came up with a solutions and saved the day, or better to say the dunes. With the use of bump maps, we were able to include light and shadows to the texture in a more granular and dynamic way. The system would interpret these texture layers differently, depending on the camera angle, which gave us beautiful and dynamically looking dunes – a simulated 3D terrain on a 2D construction space.
Throwback: Here our small Anno 1404 booth at gamescom 2009. Who of you where there and do you plan to visit us this year?

Community Stories

Nox_29
I used to (and still do sometimes) go over to my friend’s house every weekend to play Anno 1404 multi-player. It is probably one of the games I’ve played most in my entire life, almost every weekend for 6 years. We usually played multi-player with easy or medium AI players (mostly Leif :D) because we were decent, but not the best Anno players out there.

One time we decided to play against two AI players on hard. I think it was Cardinal Lucius and Giovanni di Mercante.

My friend and I made an alliance and as soon as we hit patrician level, we declared war on the AI players. Our plan was simple: wipe out their fleet as soon as possible and control the sea. This way we could slowly start besieging their islands. I sailed out with a huge fleet to control the seas while my friend was creating a massive siege army. We destroyed Giovanni’s fleet quickly and we just left a sea blockade. The Cardinal was a bit harder but we managed to defeat his fleet as well. My friend immediately started the siege of his main island. This siege took several in-game days and we came together for several LAN parties over the course of several months. Eventually we defeated the Cardinal and left Giovanni’s Island suffering from starvation and the plague.

I have been playing Anno for so long now and it never gets old. For some reason, every continuous game I start is somehow different from all the other ones. And this is, why we still play Anno 1404 today.

Drake-1503
My best 1404-Moment was a contest in which i participated, without having played Anno 1404 a lot before. Through the other contestants and discussions with them, i learned a ton about the game and had a lot of fun. That was always, what excited me about the Anno-Community: Experience something with others. I think, that it might not even matter, which Anno-game you do that with, as the specific requirements for such a contest are always focusing on the areas on the edge, that get excluded normally. This creates a “First Time” Feeling.
And you need humans for that, not features.

Thomas4795
One of my favorite Anno Moments was, when my younger brother challenged me, to play against him and i was only allowed to settle one! island. After 4 hours i had enough nobles to build my large warships and after 8 hours his island went up in flames due to my blockades. I thought i was the greatest (i was pretty young back then).

Or when i played Anno 1404 again, many years later, after the Anno 1800 Announcement, just to play a “quick” game only to have my girlfriend tell me the next morning that “it’s 11 AM, you’re going to bed now”. But i just warmed up from playing (in 18 hours).
Despite it’s age, Anno 1404 looks still beautiful today, thanks to it’s incredible details and love which went into it. 

Union Update: PC Gaming Show, Community Roundtable and more

Posted on by Bastian Thun

Welcome back to our regular Union Update, as the last week has been quite busy bringing Anno 1800 to the PC Gaming Show in Los Angeles. However, before we dive into the news, let us talk about upcoming Union content.

This week, we will reveal the last residential tier of Anno 1800. The 19th century was not only a time of progress; it was also the time of big business, from old aristocrats to soldier of fortune trying to build the next big company. New production chains will be challenging and exciting alike and as mentioned in our last Q&A, the last tier will unlock interesting end-game content. After that, it is time for the anniversary of one of the most influential Anno games of all times: Anno 1404. After the anniversary content, you can look forward to blogs that will tackle the technological marvels of the 19th century. On that note, we are still looking for any 1404 anecdotes from our community. If you have a special, funny or just awesome 1404 moment to share, let us know in the comments below!

Anno 1800 at PC Gaming Show 2018
Last week, Anno 1800’s Executive Producer Burkhard and Community Developer Bastian traveled to Los Angeles to present our game during the PC Gaming Show. To show the game to PC players and strategy fans out there, we revealed our new trailer, kicked off a new Anno Union vote as well as talked about the game, setting and why community feedback matters. However, the PC Gaming Show was only the beginning, as we are looking forward to see Anno Union members and Anno fans at this year’s gamescom 2018.

YouTube

YouTube has been deactivated. Do you accept the use of cookies to display and allow you to watch the video content?
Set Cookies

I acceppt Cookies

Save the date: Community Roundtable
The next community roundtable is happening! Meet our community developer and members of our community team to chat about anything Anno 1800 and Anno Union related. Our Annoverse Fan-Discord will host the roundtable session, in which you can join, ask us questions, discuss or just listen to the ongoing conversation.

This time, we will run the two roundtables (one in German and one in English) on two different dates:
Second Anno Union community roundtable German: Monday, June 25th, at 7PM CEST
Second Anno Union community roundtable English: Monday July 2nd, at 7pm CEST

We use Voice Chat to communicate during the roundtable, but you can also ask questions in the chat if you don’t have or want to use a microphone. We will share some further details with the next Union Update.

You are hungry for more Anno or want to get in touch with other Union members and Anno fans out there? Check out our growing Anno fan Discord community: https://discord.gg/V4xhZ8Z

Current vote and availability of the AI ships
Many of you mentioned that they would love to get their hands on every ship and we heard you. We will make sure that you can get the hands of most, if not all, of the special ships via gameplay. While you will not be able to build them in your shipyard, there will be different ways to acquire the ships when playing, if it will be from third party NPC’s or via other features. Do not worry about the variety of ships you can construct, they will cover a lot from sail to steamships and we will share some details when we highlight the while Naval system in a future Union blog.

With the current vote, we want not only to get insights which ship is your favorite (and especially why from gathering your comments), it will decide for which ship we will create a second variant designed by the Anno Union itself. Do not worry about the missing details; we will share some examples and details when the contest starts.

Next focus test has already started!
The next round of our Anno Union focus tests is currently live. We invited a new group with over a dozen Anno Union members to test Anno 1800 inside out while providing daily reports to the development team. If you did not make it into this round, do not worry, we will continue the focus test program throughout the year and will invite bigger groups of players later on.

We heard your feedback that you want more details on what and how focus tests affected the development of Anno 1800. When the current focus test round concludes, we will provide you with a more detailed update about our insights and findings from this session. As always, our “player stories” are a combination between Anno Union blog feedback, discussions in our forum and fan groups as well as detailed feedback from our focus groups.

Union Update: Next vote ahead!

Posted on by Bastian Thun

For the first Union Update for the month of June, we want to share some details about upcoming Union content.
During the last episode of our AnnoCast, we were able to present you Anno 1800’s UI design. From design to functionality, many of you shared their feedback and questions and our UI Design team would like to invite you this week to give you exclusive insights into their design and thought process.

Next week will be a little bit different, as we won’t have a classic DevBlog or Union Update. However, we have something exciting up our sleeves: the first stage of our next Union vote!
We don’t want to leave you fully in the dark, of course, so we can tease that it has something to do with ships and will give you some interesting insights about another third party character in Anno 1800.

Beyond that, you can also expect some new anniversary content for one of the most beloved Anno games in June. Can you believe that it has been 9 years already since 1404 set sail for the first time? Let us see what kind of fond memories and old anecdotes we can gather from our team. And as always we want to hear from you!
What are your personal best Anno 1404 moments, anecdotes or funny stories you remember?

With the engineer’s blog, we moved from the early years of the industrial era to the second wave of the revolution. Naturally, we want to highlight some of the wonders of that time, when the old age passed the torch to a new era. Finally, you can expect the reveal of the fifth and last residential tier as well.

Before we head over to today’s community Q&A, we have one more update for you. We plan to bring you the second community roundtable at the end of this month, this time with two different sessions for our International and German community. The roundtable is an event where we invite everyone from our community to an Anno Union voice chat session to talk about the Union, the game and its fans.
We will share the exact details and dates with you soon!

Community Q&A

Nox29
Will you be scattering little easter eggs across 1800 like you did in previous games?
Answer: Some of you folks have a keen eye and were able to spot some easter eggs already.
Our developers love to sneak smaller and bigger details and easter eggs into the game. Fun fact: We do not even know how many of them will be in the game, as our developers themselves keep it secret.

T1MR
Will street networks be realistically simulated, so that pedestrians and carts can cause congestions?
Answer: The distance travelled on your street network will play a role in the transport of goods in Anno 1800. Production buildings will calculate the most effective way to get goods either from another production building or from the warehouse. As goods are physically represented in the game world, transporting carts will need to queue up in front of your warehouse in order to load or unload the materials. This can, if your street and warehouse network is not optimized, lead to traffic jams in front of the loading/unloading areas.
We had our own development blog dedicated to the logistic system, which you can check out here: LINK

Henning00
Will the attractiveness of a city affect the productivity of some buildings like in Anno 2070?
Answer: Attractiveness itself will not affect the productivity of your industry. The new feature will support beauty builders with meaningful gameplay while also adding a new economic layer to the game. However, we do not want to force players, who want to concentrate on their industry, to use the city attractiveness if they don’t want to.

schwubbe1980
Will it be possible to fast forward time like in 1404, so that the visuals and gameplay will run noticeably faster? (Anno 2205’s fast forward was too slow).
Answer: You will be able to fast-forward the gameplay but the exact parameters are not final yet. With Anno, we always have to find a balance between comfort and usability. Especially with all the different gameplay loops of an Anno game, combined in a large game world and economic simulation, forwarding gameplay too fast would lead to issues. Think about all the things you need to keep track such as complex production chains, economic balance, AI behaviour of your opponents or potential city incidents.

Gert8517
What I would love to see in an upcoming blog are some insights about the soundtrack of the game, if this kind of blog isn’t already in the works or even ready to go. The music in Anno games was for me, especially in the older titles, one of the important factors, which pushed the game experience.
Answer: We are aware that you folks love the Anno music and are curious how we design and create sounds for an Anno game. We are currently working on DevBlogs related to audio design and soundtrack but these blogs take some preparation time.

SirKju
Will tourists just come out of nothing or arriving from different islands? Will it be possible to make use of a sea blockade to cut your opponent off from tourist ships?
Answer: Tourist ships will enter the map and then travel around the session, stopping at any visitor harbour on the map and drop visitors based on the specific attractiveness level of a city. There will be ways to affect the tourism of an opponent’s island, keep an eye on the Union for future details.

drizzle64
I would like to raise something based on the previous gameplay tours through the cityscape of the game. The small people, which run around the various places, are comically huge in the farthest zoom level. I mean sure, you want to be able to identify them but it would make more sense and help the atmosphere if the residents would be small.
Answer: The not realistic proportions in Anno are a deliberate choice, as visual feedback units are not only an important part of the atmosphere; they play an important part in the readability of the game. On one side, you want that the game gives you the feeling of creating a lively city, on the other side need players to be able to get important basic game information when observing feedback units.
However, the current ratios are not final yet and we got a lot of feedback from the community. Rest assured that we will modify the proportions to be more in line with the classic Anno appearance you are familiar with.

Union Update: Stream Summary May

Posted on by Ubi-O5

In today’s update, we will give you a summary of our last AnnoCast developer stream with Game Designer Natacha and UI Designer Jack. Grab a seat and see our completely overhauled UI, the City Attractiveness feature and the Zoo in action!

Twitch has been deactivated. Do you accept the use of cookies to display and allow you to watch the video content?
Set Cookies

I acceppt Cookies

Thanks to everyone who joined our last AnnoCast , it is awesome to see how engaged Union members discuss and chat with us during our livestream. Our game developer streams provide a great opportunity to show you gameplay from the development version of Anno 1800 and this time, we put our big UI overhaul and the City Attractiveness feature in the limelight. A perfect moment for Game Designer Natacha to give us a tour through the zoo and to demonstrate how the new attractiveness feather offers a major gameplay addition to the Anno series.

Here is a quick overview:

Streaming Room and Community Creations
Even before our first episode of the AnnoCast, we asked you for screenshots and other community creations in order to decorate the streaming room. With the new streaming room, which was literally finished one day before we went live with AnnoCast 04, we can finally use your great screenshots and fan arts to decorate our wall.

Community Island
Speaking of community creations: as some very perceptive viewers accurately noticed, the island which we used for our stream is indeed the Community Island from GMExpresso! You can find out more details about the island here.

UI overhaul and traderoute menu
Since our last episode, Anno 1800’s UI went through a major overhaul. Our UI Designer Khajag “Jack” Jabaghchourian not only demonstrated the new UI, he also talked about the relevance of a good UI design and why it is so important in a strategy game like Anno 1800.
Being a major topic of AnnoCast 03, the traderoute menu was the perfect candidate to show you the visual improvements we added to the latest iteration of the UI. What do you think about the new UI overhaul and our artistic direction? Is Anno 1800’s UI and UX design something where you would like to share feedback or to learn more about in general?

If you want to compare the new and old UI for yourself, you can check out AnnoCast 03 HERE.

City Attractiveness
The Zoo is one of the huge construction projects for Anno 1800’s new City Attractiveness feature. Natacha Hentzien gave us not only a tour through her beautifully crafted tourist paradise, she also went with us to the zoo, showing of some of the common wildlife but also exotic species from far away. While you can sink hours in the highly customizable buildings, we also talked about ornaments, city hotspots and the new visitor harbour. Serving as the drop off point for tourists who want to explore your city, we also had to take care of a special visitor who decided to take root in our city.
But there is a flipside to the industrial revolution, the soot blackened factories are not really something you would call a marvellous vista for tourists. Did you like the smoke effect of our factories? Are you a fan of the tourist visual feedback and the zoo project?

Community Q&A

mmateos19
Rivers and small lakes in the island would be awesome!
Answer: We are currently working on it and hope to share some impressions pretty soon!

Netorak2
Is the purple colour on the menu a players choice or is it always the same?
Answer: There are currently no plans for a customizable UI colour scheme. However, the state of the UI shown during the stream still includes some older elements. The game UI is an ongoing project and with that, still subject to change for the next couple of month. We are really curious about any feedback regarding the UI so keep your questions and feedback coming!

martin1
Is it possible to move buildings?
Answer: Shouldn’t be that hard, right? We give you an update on that matter soon 🙂

eric_spielerheim
The zoo is still missing a fence, are there any plans to add a fence to it?
Answer: While there is currently no fence, we got a lot of feedback from the community and see what we can do!

TwitchChat
What does the Currency in the Public Moorings Interface mean?
Answer: That is the current income earned by tourists visiting your city.

SardaHDD
Are we forced to make a pretty city and get tourists if we want the best modules/people?
Answer: We will provide many different options to get new items. Attractiveness is only one way to get them and some are specific to the way you can acquire items. So don’t worry, you don’t have to aim for a high City Attractiveness rating to get your hands on the precious specialists.

Sauerbraten95
What happens when I suddenly tear down my zoo? Will people protest?
Answer: The number of tourists visiting your city is determined by the attractiveness rating of your city. If it drops (because you reduce the modules in your zoo, swap out interesting for boring animals or create a new industrial district), a part of them will go back to the harbour and wait for the ferry to leave your island. They might change their mind if you provide new attractions, though.

Jalioss 
What is the max capacity for animals at the zoo? Or can I make the zoo as big as I want?
Answer: With the zoo, customizability and creative freedom are of highest importance. You will be able to freely build and place as many modules as you like, display a variety of different animals and biomes and make use of city ornaments between the animal enclosures.

Lord_Desert
How does it work with the rating for festivities and celebrations? I can’t see any points in that category on your island?
Answer: If the overall happiness of your residence raises, they might return you the favour with celebrations. Furthermore, there are other events which can push your happiness greatly for a short amount of time, which also might result in your residence organizing festivities in your city.

DieHun
Will we be able to place every ornament, tree, etc individually (like in 1404) or is it random like in 2205(hope not) where u just draw a rectangle and the game places everything for u?
Answer: You will have full control over what kind of ornament you want to place in your city.

Anno Afternoon #1

Twitch has been deactivated. Do you accept the use of cookies to display and allow you to watch the video content?
Set Cookies

I acceppt Cookies

On Sunday, the 20th of May, we also had the premiere of our new Anno community stream:  AnnoAfternoon! Anno community team member Seraxia and O5ighter decided to challenge their skills with an old classic and fan favourite: Anno 1404. They even managed to reach a sizeable population of patricians in their town Wolfshafen, as it was named by our community.
In honour of most important trading partner, our first oriental settlement now bears the name “Al’s Summer Home” (since “Al Zahirs Summer Mansion” is a bit too long). A lot of questionable decisions – aside from naming conventions – were made, like placing a church in the oriental settlement instead of a mosque, as there was the hope that the Nomads would be happy with the choice.

We were having a lot of fun with you guys and we plan to continue where we have left in the next episode of AnnoAfternoon, coming next month from our re-decorated streaming room in Newcastle! (Probably not needing months in the process like our dear developers in Mainz :D)
Have you watched the community stream? Feel free to discuss our new community show, share your thoughts and don’t forget to let us know if you would like to see more formats like this in the future.

That was it for today’s community update, there is still a lot of work to do before some of our team members will find some well deserved rest during the upcoming bank holiday weekend in Germany. We will be back next week with a new DevBlog and further Union updates.

Union Update: Livestream week

Posted on by Bastian Thun

This week, it’s all about the upcoming next episode of our Anno 1800 development live-stream. AnnoCast 04 will be the most ambitious episode as of yet, as we not only show the latest state of the development but also present the city attractiveness system in action.

Our first guest, UI Designer Khajag Jabaghchourian, will demonstrate our big UI overhaul, as also provide insights about the importance of a well thought UI design for Anno 1800. A perfect chance for Anno enthusiasts and future game developer to learn something about intricate UI designs for complex management and city building games.
Our second guest might be familiar from our Monument and City Attractiveness blog. Game Designer Natacha Hentzien will take you to a small trip to our island paradise, when we follow our tourists through our panoramic city including a nice trip to the zoo but also not ignoring the smoking dark side of your modern industry.

As always, you will be able to watch the stream on our twitch channel twitch.tv/ubisoftbluebyte as well as on our Anno Union website. We will make the blog including the video player available by Thursday noon, to give you enough time to share your questions in the comment function.

AnnoCast Episode 04 – A trip to the zoo
Thursday May 17th at 5pm CEST / 1 AM ET / 8 AM PT
Follow us on: twitch.tv/ubisoftbluebyte

Other than that, it will be the first time we use our new streaming room. Expect a new look while we will continue to improve decoration and a few other elements in the upcoming episodes.
As there is another bank holiday coming up, we will do a short break from our regular Union Updates, which will not affect next week’s DevBlog.

But before we leave it to this week’s community Q&A part, we have another small announcement to make. Our Ubisoft community team taking care of Anno, among them some familiar names such as O5ighter and Seraxia, will host a new streaming show on our channel. Join them this Sunday, when they dive into old classic Anno games in our new Anno Afternoon Community stream. Feel free to watch and comment – backseat gaming is welcome!

AnnoAfternoon #01 – Anno 1404: Maiden Voyage
Sunday May 20th at 5pm CEST / 1 AM ET / 8 AM PT
Also on: twitch.tv/ubisoftbluebyte

Community Question and Answer

loex1337
Is it possible to merge different enclosures to larger modules into each other, so that I can create a big elephant enclosure if I connect two of them?
Answer: Allowing the enclosures to merge into bigger compounds leads to different issues to tackle, such as what happens if you unequipped one of two elephant items or how do you expand visual feedback, as animals and visitors heavily rely on pathfinding. One solution would be to develop preset modules in different sizes, but that would also ramp up the workload to create said assets. The various different and free to place enclosures offer many customization options for your zoo project. As it is a vast feature already, we think that we are doing the zoo a favor if we invest that development time into quality and variety of the different animals.

Revadan
Will Anno 1800 have a mobile companion app like Anno 2205?
Answer: There are currently no plans for an companion app for Anno 1800.

banan1996.1996
In the devblog about artisans glass was produced by workers and here it is produced by artisans. Did you change your mind about it or is it a mistake?
Answer: During development, we continuously work on the balancing, from small bits and pieces up to the re-work of whole production chains. Just recently, we reworked some of the production chains, which are one of the biggest balancing points for an Anno game. Rebalancing, as well as minor and major changes to the game, will continue for a while, often fueled by feedback gathered by the Anno Union blogs and especially playtests.

HarroLP
How much impact had the last playtest, did you made any major changes based on player feedback?
Answer: The playtest gave us a lot of important feedback on the current state on the game. Every feature has its own “player stories” note in our development plan. The “Player Stories” are insights and findings we gathered from blog and forum comments as well as from our playtest groups. That feedback will be gathered in reports, which are then being discussed in the team. The last playtest lead to a lot of smaller and even some minor changes to the game, from pure balancing to altering content. We are looking forward to the next test, which is planned to start in June. From that on, we will run further focus playtests throughout the year.