Highlights of Update 2.0 – Changes and Improvements

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.