Highlights of Update 3.0 – Changes and Improvements

Hey Anno Community!

We’re taking a break from DevBlogs focused on the content of the upcoming “Dawn of the Delta” expansion and instead talk about the update that’s accompanying this release. With patch 3.0 we’re adding some new quality-of-life features, improve on some existing systems, change the consumption balancing and fix a variety of bugs.

The fixes will get their own article next week, when we publish the full patch notes. Today, we want to give you an overview of some the changes coming with the update.

Stamps

Update 3.0 adds the reworked Stamp Feature veterans already know from Anno 1800.

For this, we’re expanding the functionality of the copy tool which gets a small visual change: the icon now looks like a stamp. The copying-functionality remains, however!

What’s difference is that when you have selected an area for copying, you can now decide to save this selection by creating a stamp from the menu on the right, by either directly creating it or selecting to edit it first, which allows you also to directly add it to a specific Stamp folder. Watch a brief demonstration in the video below:

All your created Stamps can be found in the construction menu. Here you can also edit their names, the icon and move them into folders.

On PC, you can also move stamps between folder via your File Explorer. The files are not account-bound, meaning you can also share the stamp files with other players or try out layouts made by other players.

Statistics

Additional work has also been put into the statistics menu, expanding it with additional functionality to help you manage your empire more efficiently.

Firstly there’s the “Storage” tab.

This tab gives you more information on (yes) the goods stored across your islands, for multiple islands combined or just for a single island, including “stock over time”.

Additionally, you can also review the trade history (active and passive trades) of each island.

Secondly, there’s the “Items” tab.

This screen allows you to filter and search for all specialists in your possession and find out on which island or ship they’re currently located. Furthermore, you can check the source of each specialist: can you get them from a trader, a specific quest or a contract? This information is all visible here.

You can also search for specialists you do not own yet and look for ways to obtain them.

Hall of Fame

The Hall of Fame is getting plenty new content. A new “Aegyptus” category will be added with three new tiers of unlocks. All this content is available for everyone, regardless of if you bought “Dawn of the Delta” or not.

This means several news ornaments like more market stalls, some Aegyptian statues and plants, as well as several new player logos and character portraits.

As with all other categories, you will need to earn “Fame Points” by either fulfilling in-game achievements or doing the weekly challenges via Ubisoft Connect.

Keep in mind, if you don’t want to see those challenges in your quest book, you can hide them anytime via the options.

Consumption balancing

We’re adjusting the consumption of goods across the board by increasing overall consumption. But wait, before you grab your pitchfork, let us add some more details:

This change does not affect existing savegames, but you can of course switch to a different consumption difficulty setting at any time.

The starting money has been increased to account for higher goods consumption in the early game.

A new “very high” difficulty setting is now also available, with about 75% higher goods consumption than normal.

Finally, there are a few smaller changes and improvements we also want to make you aware of prior to the update:

• We’re removing some camera restrictions from photo mode, letting you get closer to buildings and partially clip into them to find better angles, e.g. through arches or entrances.
• You can now also hide individual quests from your questlog if you accepted them by accident and/or don’t want to do them right now.
  • Just open the questbook and click on the “hide” icon, they will then not be shown anymore in the questlog.
• A small one, but when pressing “Escape” while editing a trade route, you now go back to the main trade route screen instead of leaving the trade route menu entirely.
• We addressed desync issues related to the note function in both co-op as well as PvP multiplayer modes.
• Please also note that with this update we’re optimizing the install size of the game on consoles. This may (especially on Xbox) result in a larger download for the update but will ultimately save you space after and lead to smaller patch sizes afterwards.