You wouldn’t be doing your job as a Roman governor correctly if you didn’t try to become ever more efficient at your job and find the best ways to tackle the challenges your population, rivals and the emperor himself are throwing at you.

So, let us today take a look at the Discovery Tree feature!

What’s the Discovery Tree?

The Discovery Tree in Anno 117: Pax Romana allows for the research of technologies (discoveries!), which offer additional options as well as improvements to many aspects of your governorship.

As you can see below, the Discovery Tree is split into three categories: Economy, Civic and Military – the names being rather self-explanatory as to what kind of discoveries await you in each.

Researching any technology requires Knowledge (more on that further below), with technologies further down in the tree costing you more knowledge.

Why a Discovery Tree?

Here we also come back to the topic of “choice” we have mentioned at various points before.

With the three different categories, you can set the focus that’s currently (or in general) important to you and invest time and resources into what fits best to your playstyle. The unlocks also expand your toolkit and allow you to tackle challenges in a different or more efficient way.

It also helps us to better highlight features and mechanics to players and make sure they’re not getting lost amongst tons of other unlocks. For example, the repair crane in Anno 1800 simply unlocked through progression at some point amongst various other new buildings – but was never explained to players. With the Discovery Tree, unlocking the repair crane is a conscious choice and assures that players will know that they unlocked it and can now use it to repair their ships.

Finally, similar to the Optional Needs the Discovery Tree also allows us to expand your options later on in postlaunch, potentially adding new discoveries and therefore more options and choice for you.

Knowledge is Power

How to research (knowledge)

Okay, now we’ve given you an overview – but how do you discover new technologies?

First, you require Knowledge. Knowledge is one of the eight attributes we talked about in a previous blog, and is gathered in the same way: needs and building buffs let building generate knowledge points.

Your first way of doing this will be by building the Grammaticus, a public service need for the Plebeians, which let’s all buildings in its vicinity (even the pig farmer!) generate +3 knowledge points. As with other buff buildings, the more houses and other structures are within the radius, the more knowledge you generate.

Another way to generate those points can be, for example, to supply your Eques (Tier 3 residents) with Writing Tablets (also +3 knowledge), a household need. Regular practise with those makes them smarter, of course, and helps you research faster. Wine on the other hand buffs your belief but counteracts your education efforts to a certain degree.

You see, we very much try to tie all the different systems in Anno 117: Pax Romana together.

Alright, now you have gathered some knowledge points, let’s discover a new technology!

Each technology has a certain knowledge point cost, and the more points you produce, the faster the technology will be discovered. The time is displayed directly in the Discovery Tree.

To progress through the tree, some technologies have to discovered in a certain order – and, you will occasionally have to fulfill certain conditions to unlock certain “gates” we call “Inspirations”.

For example, setting up trade routes, building a certain number of aqueducts or reaching a specific city status. Focusing on what’s important for your current situation and your general playstyle therefore becomes even more important – even if you ultimately, with enough time, are able to discover everything. We didn’t want to lock you out of certain technologies entirely, so, there are no “it’s either path A or path B” decisions.

Some technologies, and “gates” also are province specific. For example, only if you expand from Latium to Albion will you be able to research a discovery that allows your woodcutter to plant trees in those wide meadows, instead of relying on forest-areas.

Examples

Give us examples! What kind of discoveries have you hidden in the Discovery Tree?

Alright, alright, let us walk you through three examples in a bit more details.

• A) Paved Roads: Not only do they look much nicer than dirt roads, they also let your transports travel faster, which extends the street range of buildings. A classic.
• B) Blood of Terra: If you just dig deep enough, you’ll find iron everywhere! This allows mining of iron ore even on islands without a deposit – albeit at a greatly reduced rate.
• C) Protective Entourage: A personal guard never hurts. This discovery increases the morale and toughness of your Auxilia troops.

As you might imagine, the feature underwent multiple iterations over the course of the development. Both visually – improving the structure and readability, making it easier to see in which direction you need to progress – as well as regarding its content: which discoveries make sense, where do we want to put a focus on (see the “why” section at the beginning), etc.

Summary

All in all, there are over 150 discoveries waiting for you. While you can queue the research of several of them, it’s always worth checking back to see if there’s a new Discovery that would help you now that you made some progress – or which requirements the next gates have, so you can work towards unlocking them.

While discovering new technologies is optional, they do provide you with a wider range of possibilities to build and supply your cities, optimise your production and get an advantage over your rivals.

Any questions on the Discovery Tree left? Do you want us to tackle a specific part of this feature in more detail in the future, for example in a livestream? Let us know!

Hey Anno Community,

Not too long ago we told you about Attributes and Needs in Anno 117: Pax Romana, and how fulfilling them will grant you bonuses for your island. In that DevBlog we hinted at 8 different attributes, but didn’t reveal the full list to enjoy the suspense for a little bit longer.

Well, it’s now time to reveal one of those previously hidden attributes: Belief! What does Belief do and what is it connected to? Well, as the word suggests, it is connected to Religion: this is a brand-new feature added for the first time to an Anno game.

The Background

There are different reasons why Religion and Belief have been added to Anno 117: Pax Romana. Firstly, this will allow an additional level of customisation for our players, who will have the chance to strengthen their island identity by choosing which deity to worship on their islands. Secondly, it was important for us to portray the polytheism and cultural diversity of the ancient world which Anno 117 is inspired by.

As you might already know, Roman religion was primarily polytheistic, involving the worship of numerous deities who were believed to influence all aspects of life, by playing an important role in daily events. Among these deities, for example, we can find Jupiter – also known as Jove – god of the sky and thunder, who was worshipped in Rome itself. Or if we think of the “home” of Anno, Ubisoft Mainz: did you know that our office is built above a Roman Sanctuary of Isis and Magna Mater?

How is this been translated in Anno 117: Pax Romana? Let’s now take a closer look at this new feature and its impact on your settlements.

How does it work?

You’ll be able to unlock the Religion feature as soon as you have settled a few Plebeians on one of your islands: this will allow you to place a small temple in your city – the sanctuary.

Once you’ve built your sanctuary, it will be time for you to choose the patron deity of this very island, aka the primary deity you want your residents to worship on that island. You’ll be able to do so from accessing the Religion menu from any religious public building. Every island you have settled can have its own patron that its population worships.

At first, you will only have the option to choose among four deities, but you will unlock more by reaching specific conditions in the game and discovering them via the Discovery Tree. More on that feature in the next DevBlog.

Your starting deities will be Ceres, Neptune, Minerva and Mars; based on your playstyle and what you would like to achieve, it’s important for you to pick the right one: each deity will have its own unique effects for your cities, production and units.

Buff effects

These Patron god effects are unlocked by gathering Devotion over time – with Devotion being tied to the Belief (more on that in a second) in the chosen island Patron. To unlock a buff effect, you will need to reach a specific threshold of Devotion on the progress bar in the dedicated menu. Whenever the Devotion passes a marked threshold, you unlock an improvement to the primary or secondary Patron effect.

What if you would like to change your Island Patron, switching from a peaceful farming community to a war economy? Don’t worry, you can still do that. However, changing the Patron resets the Devotion to zero.

Let’s look together at an example: Neptune, protector of freshwater and the sea. If you choose Neptune as your island Patron, your fishers will feel significantly more courageous: you will notice an increase in productivity of all sea food. Additionally, you’ll attract master craftsmen who not only construct ships faster but also make them more durable.

Ceres blesses your agriculture and population! Her worshippers can increase the yields of farms and the production and storage of farming goods.

And Mars… well, he’s not so much a deity of growth and construction but your troops will have higher morale and fight better when global devotion to Mars is high enough.

Local vs Global effect

Not only do Patrons have a local effect on your islands, but they also have a global effect on all provinces, affecting all islands under your control. This is the effect of your dominant Patron. A Patron becomes “dominant” when its global devotion is larger than a certain threshold: the Patron that has the most added-up devotion on all islands you control becomes the dominant Patron.

Let’s go back to the Neptune example: his global bonus will affect your ships speed, making them faster when sailing the high seas across the map.

The Belief Attribute

Alright, let’s take one step back and talk about HOW you increase Devotion – and Belief.

As we mentioned at the beginning of this blog, Belief is one of the new attributes introduced in Anno 117: Pax Romana. The two main ways of increasing the Belief attribute are:

• Public buildings (like the Sanctuary we showed earlier) which affect building in their radius, resulting in them each providing Belief
• Goods which you provide via the Needs categories (like for example Wine)

There may be some other way (e.g. via items), but let’s keep it at that for now. In short: the more buildings are affected by various effects like these, the higher your Belief.

Devotion in turn comes from your island’s Belief. Over time, Devotion will rise to the same value as the island’s Belief. Therefore, the more Belief you have, the more Devotion will result from it, unlocking the higher buffs mentioned above.

Where do gods live?

As you probably have gathered from the paragraphs above, Anno 117: Pax Romana doesn’t feature “physical” deities which roam your cities or throw lightning bolts at people who offend them.

What we wanted to represent in our game is rather the psychological effect: your people are worshipping certain deities, and find courage and motivation in doing so. They believe that this worship has an effect and work harder (e.g. farmers worshipping Ceres) or fight better (when worshipping Mars).

The sanctuary we showed you earlier is a rather humble place of worship. Later, you will be able to construct mighty temples to dedicate to your Patron of choice. Not only do they influence a much larger area of your island, but they also provide much higher Belief buffs to the surrounding buildings.

No matter which Patron you choose for your respective island: the sanctuaries and temples, as well as the priests they spawn will visually change to fit the worshipped deity.

The ancient time we were inspired by was a polytheistic one, and while each island can only dedicate itself to one dominant Patron god, you can still construct shrines to other deities. These shrines will buff buildings in their vicinity and increase your attributes like fire safety, happiness or income further. It pays off to be a devoted governor.

“What about Albion?”, we hear you ask. Well, let’s say the Celts have their own deities and places of worship. More on that later this year.

Your population is always demanding something new: food, clothes, public buildings, … what do you get from it? Why fulfil all these demands?

Well, alright, because it’s part of the core gameplay-loop of course; but also cause each need you fulfil gives you something in return: citizens pay more taxes, have a lower chance of setting their own houses on fire or are simply happier and less prone to rebel against your glorious governorship.

These bonuses of needs and – as you’ll soon see – also buildings we call “Attributes”.

In today’s DevBlog we will take a look at how we handle these attributes in Anno 117: Pax Romana and how we spice it up with a new little puzzle system.

If you haven’t watched our livestream on the topic, we also recommend to check it out here.

Attributes General

Anno veterans know: attributes are nothing entirely new, things like income, happiness or population have already been a part of past Anno’s and picking which needs to fulfil first and which additional happiness needs (Anno 1800) to fulfil for bonuses are a part of progression strategy.

In Anno 117: Pax Romana, attributes are values provided by different buildings, but to large parts by residences and are primarily increased by fulfilling their needs. Let’s use an example and reference the topic of “Optional Needs” which we have discussed in the previous DevBlog.

Providing your Tier 1 residents with Fish (+1 Population, +1 Income), Tunics (+2 Income) and access to a Market (+1 Population, +1 Income) means all residences supplied this way give you +2 Population and +4 income total (and the residence is now upgradeable).

If you provide them with Porridge (+2 Population), Pileus (hats) (+1 Income, +1 Happiness) and access to a Tavern (+1 Population, +1 Happiness) on top, each residence will provide you with the total following attribute values: +5 Population, +5 Income, +2 Happiness.

(Please note: as we are still very much in development, these and any other balancing values mentioned throughout this blog might still change.)

You can check which kind of attributes each residence is currently providing for you and each respective island directly via the object menu of the building.

It’s not just happiness, income and population, though: we also include fire safety, health and some others (that are related to features we haven’t talked about yet) in this attribute group. Having such a wide range of different attributes and linking them to the needs system means, that we have more options to work with for the needs – and you get a larger number of choices to fulfil the needs that make the most sense for your playstyle or the island’s current situation.

We also want to provide more overall visibility on your islands’ “values” , and therefore now list all these attributes and the source of e.g. the -100 fire safety points in detail in a dedicated bar at the top of the screen. This will make it much clearer to you what’s contributing to the positive or negative value and will help you address e.g. the low fire safety by moving buildings or adding new ones.

Let’s take a closer look at what has an impact on said attributes.

Attributes Details

Of course, needs are something we have already touched on in far more detail in our DevBlog on “Optional Needs”. We highly recommend checking out how needs are handled now in Anno 117: Pax Romana and how we increase your flexibility in regard to with which types of production chains you want to engage with, how fast and where you want to expand to and how this helps you setting your own level of game complexity.

Fulfilling needs plays the main role in how you make money and increase your population: all attribute values a residence provides are dependent on the needs they are supplied with. Higher-level needs also provide higher attribute values, both for fulfilled needs and as buffs (if they’re buildings – see the “Building Buffs” section below).

We always try to link the attributes of a need narratively to the object in question, so that soap – besides increasing your income – also increases the health attributes of the residences supplied.

We also differentiate between two major different layers for the attributes: island values and global values.

An island value impacts island-related features like incidents (fire safety, health, happiness) or workforce, while global values (like province-wide population) unlock new buildings and needs. Income of course also is a global value that can be accessed from any province or island.

Finally, on the topic of calculation, attributes are calculated with decimals and then summed up over the island (e.g. 10 houses with 10% fulfilment provide 10×0,1=1 income), so you’re not losing out on partial values. We’re only rounding numbers for displaying it in the UI, meaning, an income of 1,1 provides 66 money per hour, not 60.

While workforce is linked to your population (or rather: the population attribute of a residence), it’s calculated via a workforce factor that’s also displayed in-game: not every citizen is a worker.

Building Buffs

But wait, we basically only talked about the impact of needs on the attributes of your residences. However, those aren’t the only things that have an impact on your attributes. Let’s talk about “building buffs”.

At the core, this also isn’t something entirely new, since e.g. a fire station already existed in Anno 1800. It increases the fire safety in its vicinity and helps should any fires break out after all. This principle exists the same way in Anno 117: Pax Romana, but we’re now providing more visibility on the fire chance in your city: In the aforementioned attributes bar at the top, you can see how high the fire safety of your island is, which buildings have a positive and which have a negative impact.

The fire station (or Vigiles in Anno 117: Pax Romana), therefore is a buff building.

Similarly, a public service building essentially also provides a buff to residences within its area: if it’s a residence need, it counts towards its fulfilment and gives attributes. If it’s not a need, it still provides additional attributes to the affected residence (and other buildings in its radius)  in the form of a status effect.

What’s new in Anno 117: Pax Romana, however, is that production buildings now also provide buffs (and debuffs) to buildings in their vicinity.

Let’s use the bakery for this example: Within a certain radius around it, the bakery provides a buff of +2 income and a debuff of -2 fire safety to all buildings. This leaves you with the interesting choice of where you want to want to place it: somewhere outside where the reduced fire safety may only impact a few other production buildings? Or in the city to make the most of its income buff?

Other production buildings similarly come with a range of buffs and debuffs which can greatly impact your island attributes. The intention here is to give you something else to puzzle with within your cities and to further home in on the attributes that you need most.

This buff is always applied to all buildings within its radius, which you can already see while constructing the building in question:

As mentioned earlier already, we try to tie the attributes narratively to the object they’re originating from, and anything with an open fire naturally is a risk for any city. Please be careful.

These buffs are non-stackable, meaning that the hat maker, for example,  will only give residences +1 income, multiple hatmakers in the vicinity do not provide the income buffs multiple times

It’s also important to note that the building in questions needs to be functional (e.g. neither damaged/destroyed nor paused) to apply the buff – and production buildings have a productivity threshold which decides if the (de)buff is applied or not.

And finally, to answer a question from previous week’s livestream: Supplying the need to a residence (e.g. hats, to receive +1  income and +1 happiness) and the residence being in vicinity to the production building (+1 income) count as two separate buffs, meaning, the result here would be +2 income and +1 happiness.

Outro

This concludes our two blogs on the topic of Needs and Attributes, which essentially are an evolution of the systems our veterans know from previous Anno games. The Building Buffs are a new feature, which we hope has an impact on your city building strategies.

The Needs Attributes are also closely tied to for example incidents (fire safety, health, happiness) and ways to reduce the chance of them happening, workforce and its relationship to your military (ships require workforce to be built) and some more features which we will talk about in the coming months.

To summarise, our goals are more choice for you which needs to fulfil, greater transparency on the different island attributes and more ways to influence said attributes if you want to get the most out of your cities and production chains.

We’d love to read your comments on these changes and are also happy to answer any further questions you might have on the topic. Leave them in the comment section!

Sometimes playing Anno feels like being a bird parent trying to fulfil the needs of the ever-demanding offspring: Your citizens want clothes, they want sausages, beer, carpets, pasta and energy drinks. Let’s also not forget the marketplace, tavern, laboratory or the concert hall.

Granted, your citizens pay taxes (usually) to make up for the hassle, but they really make you work for that.

In short: needs are a core aspect of Anno gameplay loop, you fulfil them to make money, to make your people happy and to level up residences in order to progress through the game.

Want to see us talk about today’s DevBlog subject? Then have a look at our past livestream from April 15th!

Needs in general

This hasn’t changed much in Anno 117: Pax Romana, on first glance: We still separate needs into two types: consumption needs and service needs.

The former require the player to produce goods (e.g. Porridge) in certain quantities which are then consumed by the residence. As long as enough goods are produced, the need fulfilment slowly rises to 100% and the need is considered fulfilled.

As in past Anno games, the consumption is always calculated for the whole island (“island demand”) and goods are consumed directly out of the island storage. Like in Anno 1800, you can also pause needs (which also pauses the consumption of the respective good).

Service needs are fulfilled via public service buildings. Accordingly, they are fulfilled by the residence simply being within the radius of the service building.

If you’ve played any of our previous games, all of this should feel familiar, just like the next part: Fulfilling needs is how you advance through the game. If you fulfilled enough needs, residences can be upgraded to unlock the next population tier, as well as new buildings and production chains.

The actual activation of a need (i.e. when the people demand for it and start consuming it) is tied to the amount of population of each tier of an island.

Making things optional

Alright, so, but what has changed?

A quick look into the object menu for any residence building will immediately make our Anno veterans stop: needs are ordered in categories! Let’s compare the needs of the Farmers from Anno 1800 with the needs of the Liberti from Anno 117: Pax Romana.

These changes in Anno 117: Pax Romana we sumarised under the feature name “optional needs”.

The different types of needs now all belong to one of multiple categories, for example food, fashion or public services. Higher population tiers have additional need categories that unlock as you progress.

Providing a residence with any kind of good will contribute to the overall supply value of a category. Reach the required supply threshold in all categories and the residence is ready to be upgraded.

Let’s dive a bit deeper into these supply values with two colleagues from the Game Design team: Christian, Senior Game Designer and Jan, Game Director.

Each need has a certain supply value for a category. For example, delivering porridge OR sardines to our residents is equal to a supply value of 1 each. Luckily, the supply threshold for food for the Liberti tier also is exactly 1, meaning we can already consider this category “done” by simply supplying one of the two food needs. If we now also fulfil the “fashion” and “public service” category, we can level-up this residence.

The food category of the Plebeians, however, has a supply threshold of 3. Even if we supplied both sardines and porridge, it wouldn’t be enough. We will have to set up at least one of the new food production chains to reach this threshold.

As a general rule, the supply threshold of a category is always lower than the sum of all supply values of a category – and it will increase with each upgrade of a residence. That means, you will not need to provide all the needs of a category and not setup all the production chains at your disposal, but you also can’t just stick to only providing the lowest (and easiest to produce) type of need in a category.

To visualize this a bit better, have a look at the object menus of a Libertus and Plebeian residence side-to-side. You can see:

• Each needs category has a certain minimum threshold, split into multiple bars
• Each need has a certain value, also represented by bars, which feeds into the category threshold
• The food category of Plebeians has a higher threshold than the Libertus food category
• Fulfilment is represented in green (regular) and golden (more than minimum)

As you might have guessed from the context already, however, upgraded population tiers keep the needs of all previous tiers. Your early game goods and public buildings will therefore continue to be useful, and you can decide if you want to reach the supply thresholds of the different categories by also fulfilling multiple lower-level goods or fewer higher-level ones that each provide higher supply values.

You can’t provide lower-level population tiers with higher-level goods or services, though.

What happens if you provide a residence with more than the required supply threshold, you might ask.

Well, let’s first take a closer look at the individual needs: Each need, no matter if a consumption need or a service need also provides certain attributes.

For example, providing your residents with sardines gives you +1 income and +1 population per residence, while providing them with porridge gives you +2 population for this particular residence. Garum (a need of the second population tier in Latium) gives you +2 income and +1 happiness for said residence, just to name another example.

Accordingly, assuring more than the minimum supply for a category means the respective residences also receive additional attributes – providing both sardines and porridge nets you +3 population and +1 income from the food category per residence.

When a consumption need is only partially fulfilled, you also only receive a part of the attribute bonus (e.g. only +1 population instead of +2 when fulfilling the porridge need only to 50%). At the same time, however, this also means you can reach the supply threshold of a category by combining several partially fulfilled needs.

These “needs attributes” in Anno 117: Pax Romana encompass more than just income, happiness and population and require some more explaining. Today, we’ll leave it at this since it’s enough to understand the basics of the “Optional Needs” feature – and go into more detail in a separate DevBlog soon.

Implications

So much for the “how”, let’s take a look at the impact of these changes on the game and the answer to the “why” question.

Firstly, something we have already alluded to earlier in this blog: choice and flexibility.

This was especially important since we wanted to let players choose the level of complexity for the game themselves. The goal here is to give enough choice that both veterans as well as newcomers can enjoy Anno 117: Pax Romana, and for the latter to slowly grow into their role as governor.

With a lucky combination of fertilities on your starting island, you might even be able to continue to progress through the population tiers there for longer, allowing you to stick to fewer islands and only expand later, if you so desire.

This focus on choice also impacts the type and complexity of production chains you can pick: how many complex needs do you fulfil? Will you go for fewer but more complex production chains or more but less complex ones? Which ones take up more space?

Another point of choice also related to the provinces: As already announced last year, you will be able to start in either of the two provinces at the start of a new game. With the optional needs system, you will be able to remain in a single province and still reach the highest population tier by solely relying on providing needs that you can produce locally.

Higher population tiers mean more needs – and more choice! Let’s compare the needs categories of a Libertus with that of a Plebeian. As mentioned earlier, there’s also a fourth category added now: household goods.

As mentioned, it was equally important to us to provide challenges and reward experienced players if they provide their citizens with more than the minimum of needs category. The additional attribute bonuses will help you sustain ever larger cities and militaries, compete more effectively against opponents and strategically grow your influence in both provinces by, e.g., taking key islands.

Making use of both provinces will therefore provide different rewards and options. As will Romanising your population in Albion – if you manage to provide them with goods imported from Latium – and following both the local and the Roman path at the same time.

Lastly, this system also gives us as developers more flexibility: new content and new needs can be integrated into the game much easier than it has been the case in Anno 1800. It gives you more choice and makes expanding the game easier for us, if we’re looking at the topic of “postlaunch”. And we already have more different needs in the basegame compared to Anno 1800!

Outro

We hope this has given you a good idea of the changes we have done to the needs system and how it gives you, the player, more flexibility in terms of how you want to set up your islands both in Latium as well as Albion and how you can scale the challenges of the game to a degree you feel the most comfortable with.

Additionally, there’s a cool new puzzle aspect to city building that will hopefully also motivate you to build more than the minimum required production chains. What that is? Well… that’s a topic for a future DevBlog.

Until then, leave all your questions and feedback below, we’re looking forward to your comments!

Salvete, Anno community!

My name is Björn Frechenhäuser and I am a Senior Level Artist working on Anno 117: Pax Romana. I have been at Ubisoft Mainz for 12 years and after Anno 2205 and Anno 1800, this is the third Anno game I have the pleasure of working on. If you’d like to see some of my work on previous installments, you can check out my Artstation profile.

Level Art can mean a lot of different things, very dependent on which company, which studio and which project you work for. It can be more centric around the creation of 3D assets and textures or the visual development and dressing of levels or storytelling in the world and its locations. So, what does it mean for Anno? In short: all of the above (and more). But either way, at the heart of Level Art is always – you guessed it – the level. For Anno the level consists of the game world and its islands, which serve as canvas for players to build their cities on.

In today’s DevBlog I want to give you an insight into how islands are being created, what our processes are and how we tried to achieve the next step after an extremely successful Anno 1800.

From Anno 1800 to Anno 117 – what has changed in island creation?

At the beginning of every new Anno game, we ask ourselves: What do we want to achieve? What do we want to improve? What do we want to drop? For us in Level Art, the mission was clear right from the start: We wanted to create the best looking, most natural, most diverse, most immersive game world in the series. Sounds easy enough, right?

Of course, going forward meant more of an evolution than a revolution because the levels are still bound by the game’s rules, the balancing of its features and the performance of our target platforms – as they have always been. During the postlaunch of Anno 1800 we started researching in different directions and in this blog, you will see some of the breakthroughs we achieved.

Procedural Texturing

In the past we had already established a procedural content creation pipeline for some aspects of our island creation process, namely the generation of the island’s terrain – you can read up on it in this older DevBlog for Anno 1800. However, the texturing process of the islands (which involves adding materials such as grass, rock, sand, etc. to your terrain) was mostly a manual, elaborate but somewhat repetitive procedure back then. Furthermore, the resolution at which our textures could be added to our islands, the so-called “texture splatting resolution”, was too low. So, with the help of our Graphics Programming department we quadrupled our texture splatting resolution for the ability to splat textures with much more control and way more detail.

Now we use the so-called “splat maps” generated together with our terrain that use algorithms that simulate aspects of nature such as erosion, thermal weathering, deposition, terrain wear and many more.

Texture Displacement

The procedural texturing already added a layer of diversity and natural look that we couldn’t achieve before, but we wanted to go further to improve how the textures themselves shape our visuals. We implemented a technique called “displacement mapping” that allows textures to not only sit on top of the terrain but change the shape of the terrain and increase its visual quality without the use of actual 3D assets.

Terrain Steepness

Another lever we wanted to pull to make our islands look more natural and realistic was playing around with the steepness of the terrain and consequently the slope on which our buildings could be built. Anno 1800 had a maximum terrain angle of 12%, which presented us a significant limit for island design.

For Anno 117: Pax Romana, we aimed to increase this angle. Researching this topic was a significant collaborative effort involving multiple departments, including not only Level art, but also Art Direction, Game Direction, Graphics Programming, Game Design, 3D Art, and Gameplay Programming. This extensive teamwork was necessary because the topic is closely related to nearly every aspect of our building system. After a lot of back and forth and countless hours of testing we decided to go for it and doubled our maximum buildable terrain slope to 24%.

With these new improvements on our toolbelt – among many others – it was time to start our journey of designing and creating the world of Anno 117: Pax Romana. Below I will show you a simplified breakdown of how an island is being created from the first to the last step. 

Island creation in Anno 117 – from simple ideas to in-game islands

Setting a course

Before creating even just a single pixel of an island, we ask ourselves some questions: What should our world look like? What expectations do we want to fulfil? What stories do we want to tell? During this phase, we gather hundreds of reference pictures and explore many different ideas together with Concept Art to nail down what look and feel we want to achieve. This is when, together with Art Direction, Game Direction and Game Design we developed our two provinces Latium and Albion. We designed their look, established their uniqueness and set the ground to develop a visual direction that would serve as a guide for our creation process.

Island Conceptualisation

The first step to creating an island is always thinking about shapes, volumes and topology. Additionally, we need to establish a set of rules with Game Design: rough island size, available construction space, required beach areas, mining lode amount, etc. Once this is done and we have all the ingredients, we can start creating the first island concepts.

Unlike Anno 1800, we start our island concepts directly in 3D, using a tool called “World Machine” which has already been in use since Anno 2205. By doing this we can already get a much better feeling for an island, and this lays the groundwork for later iterations. Thanks to the procedural pipeline we set up, we can create dozens of island concepts relatively quickly. Once a batch of concepts is produced, we sit together with Game Design and Art Direction to decide which islands are fitting to be approved for further production.

Blockout

Once an island concept is approved, we create a first playable blockout version of it to further iterate its topology and the balancing of construction areas, beach locations, mining lode amounts etc. Moreover, we do a first texturing pass to check the look and feel. Besides World Machine, during this phase we work quite a bit with our proprietary tool called “Anno Editor”, to implement the gameplay features mentioned above. Still, we stay as open and flexible as possible because we might need to make a lot of changes to the island along the way.

Visual Design

After numerous iterations of the blockout version we eventually reach a state where all gameplay and balancing aspects of the island are set and approved. Now we start working on the visual aspects of the island. A lot of the visual detail already came from our procedural workflow as described and additionally we scatter vegetation assets using a tool called “Houdini”.

Once all the procedural steps are done, our base island is ready: it’s now time to start working manually on the details and flesh out the visuals of the island by adjusting textures, placing rocks and vegetation assets, adding decals, giving more character to the topology, implementing particle effects, adding waterbodies, and so on. 

Polishing

The final step of our island creation process is a polishing pass. On the one hand, it encompasses visual polishing according to feedback we receive, adding more unique details such as environmental storytelling or adding points of interest, and on the other hand it encompasses gameplay polishing to make sure all the features work as expected (e.g. buildable beaches, mining lode, forest locations, etc.), implementing audio with our Audio team and making sure that there are no bugs occurring.

We cannot wait to see your awesome cities built on our islands, read about what your favourite (or least favourite) islands are and which of the details we so carefully crafted you discover along the way!