- Anno 1800
- Union Update
Union Update: PC Gaming Show, Community Roundtable and more
- 19.06.2018
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.
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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.
I am so excited for the 5th tier! I expect to see a really complicated and exotic production chains combining all workforce types!
I wish you had shown something new at E3, I was really waiting for your Anno presentation… and I saw nothing. 🙁
The trailer is stunning but we learned nothing new from it. It just made me more excited for the 5th tier because of those awesome residences and the World Fair building.
I’m thinking about going to Gamescom but I have never been to any such event. Will Anno 1800 be shown only on specific day at specific time? Or will I be able to see it every day? I am asking because I probably wouldn’t go for more than one day and I have no idea which day I should choose. And I wouldn’t want the tickets to be sold out before I buy one.
Yes! More information about focus tests and how our community’s feedback influences the game is something I really want! In my opinion it’s something that AnnoUnion really lacks. We should be informed about every change in the game that was influenced by our feedback.
Don’t worry, we will share detailed information about Gamescom at some point. When it comes to E3, we wanted to raise some awareness for the game to strategy players out there. It is true that the content shown had nothing “really” new outside of getting a good impression how the game looks and feels right now. E3 was our first small presence on an event this year, with more to come in the following months.
Every single change based on community feedback is actually not that easy. We would need to basically open up the whole development documentation and that is something we cannot do. There are sometimes big things, intricate details or changes to features we change but cannot just “talk” about. Also, development is dynamic and other things change often back and forth until we find the right balance. But we will make sure that we improve on that and provide as much transparent information as possible.
Just share the information before all tickets are sold out 😀
Yeah, I understand that you can’t really talk about everything. I basically want to know if our feedback actually means something. You ask us about our opinion on various topics but then we have no idea if that was somehow used.
I used to (and still do sometimes) go over to my friend’s house every weekend to play Anno 1404 multi-player. It’s probably one of the games I’ve played the most in my entire life since we did this almost every weekend for like 6 years.
Anyways, we usually played multi-player with easy or medium AI players (mostly Leif :D) because we where decent, but not the best Anno players out there.
One time we decided to play against 2 AI players on hard. I think it was Cardinal Lucius and Giovanni di Mercante.
Me and my friend 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 pretty quickly and we just left it blockaded. 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 several months of irl LAN parties. Eventually we defeated the Cardinal and we left Giovanni’s Island suffering from starvation and the plague.
It was one of the best Anno games but also one of the most stressful. We usually like to play in easy and relax while playing Anno but this was something completely different.
I’ve 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 it today.
On a side note for Anno 1800: it would be really cool if we for example could’ve asked Giovanni to join us in the war against the Cardinal.
hah nice gameplay my friend and yes the Anno 1404 is the best in the series till that moment, really hope 1800 be better or even the same, i would be thankful.