- Anno 117
- Cosmetic DLC
- Union Update
Union Update: It’s release day for Echoes of Kassandra
By the gods! It’s the release day of the “Echoes of Kassandra” pack, the latest cosmetic pack for Anno 117: Pax Romana.
Inspired by the world of Kassandra, the ancient Greek hero from Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, this pack includes several new statues, skins and a grand music hall with 1h of music from Odyssey: protect your harbour with a giant statue of Zeus, choose Leonidas as protector of your city gates and Kassandra as your new profile picture, and paint some of your residences and city watch buildings in a hellenic blue colour scheme.
Learn more about the pack in our dedicated DevBlog here or watch the trailer below!
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More ornaments!
We know that for some of you there’s no such thing as too many ornaments, which is why we’re always happy to point you in the direction of our awesome modding community on PC as well.
One recent example is the very, very comprehensive “Decorations Mod” by Maggus, which includes around 2000 ornaments and decorations you can use in your game. Check out their overview trailer below and download the mod directly via mod.io
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You can find plenty more mods on mod.io, and we always recommend to check out the various smaller and bigger mods if you want to adjust your experience with new challenges or options.
Of course, we have a few ideas for themes for potential future cosmetic packs on our side as well, combined with the feedback from you on what kind of ornaments & skins you are currently missing.
Mods, cheat and their impact on multiplayer desyncs
Talking about mods: with the last patches, we fixed many of the crashes and desyncs (“TRAJAN”-errors) that you have encountered in the past. Now, we are at a state where the game runs much more stable, but also where a large portion of our crash and desync reports show usage of mods or cheats and wanted to address this topic.
Mods
We love seeing you both create and use mods for Anno 117: Pax Romana to further customize your experience. (In fact, we love it so much that we are working on making modding and using mods easier for you)
However, there is one important thing to keep in mind when running mods in multiplayer:
Anno is simulated simultaneously on all clients of the multiplayer match (see also the “Under the Hood” section of our blog post here) and regularly checks if all clients came to the same result – if not, a desync error occurs.
That means that if not all participants use the same mods and same version of said mods, it’s entirely possible that this alone can cause a desync error. In fact, a good share of our recent desync reports show this kind of situation.
To improve your multiplayer experience and make it easier on our side to focus on actual desync issues, we added a new restriction to multiplayer, which should stop you from starting or joining a multiplayer game if not all players are using the same mods and mod versions. This change went live with the update on August 20th.
Cheats
Let us preface this by saying that we do not mind you using cheats, trainers or other ways to modify your personal gaming experience with unlimited resources, etc. In singleplayer.
While multiplayer can be a different matter, assuming you’re not getting yourself an unfair advantage but are doing so with the consent of the other participants (e.g. in a co-op match), similar rules as with modding apply:
Using any kind of tool to modify the game state has a high chance resulting in desyncs (i.e. TRAJAN errors) as well as potentially straight-up game crashes.
If you want to e.g. have unlimited money or resources as an option for a multiplayer match, we recommend using a mod instead (e.g. one of the mods by us shipped with the game) since that mod must be active for all players for the game to even start. This way everyone again uses the same version of the game, and you reduce the chance of desyncs.
Please be aware that we cannot consider any desync or crash reports that show that the game has been modified in some way.
The road to Aegyptus
The next stop for this year is, of course, November: On Thursday, November 5th, you will be able to set sails and travel to the province of Aegyptus in “Dawn of the Delta“, our biggest expansion of the year.
Expect more news and first gameplay livestreams around mid-October!
Comments
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Dear Anno Team, I like most of this new cosmetics DLC and the Skins and Ornaments you have added. I will happily integrate those and they really look amazing to me. However, greek skins for the 2nd citizen tier would have been nice since most production islands and secondary islands usually need the first two tiers to function well or be useful. Maybe these can be added later on?
I would also like to use this Chance to pitch some wishes for future cosmetic packs or updates to you. As a beauty builder the first of my current issues is with the public service buildings, especially the smaller ones (well, watch tower and toilet) as well as with some of the lower Level communal buildings (especially the market place). These buildings look great and fit in well for lower level city (areas) which have level 1 and 2 houses. However, for higher level luxurious city areas they do not really fit great. Maybe you can consider adding a second texture for these buildings like you did e.g. for the market place in Anno 1800. This would enable Players like me to change the look of these buildings to fit better into a patrician city center.
My second point is ground textures for a lot of buildings. To match better with streets, plazas and gardens etc. it would be great to be able to choose the base ground texture of emergency and communal buildings as well as houses myself like e.g. already possible for the shrine building. I would like to give an example: The Temple as a big 4th Level communal building looks really great, but it always has the stone plates as ground texture. If I want to design a central plaza using marble roads and textures, it just does not fit in very well. Same for the other big communal buildings. Sometimes there even is a thin grass edge on the ground texture for these Buildings (I think it was the library) making the transition and compatibility even harder.
And my third point is with the mosaic pack. In general I like this pack a lot. However, I have some difficulties making the big centerpieces work well in my plazas. The issues are two-fold: First the big center piece mosaics are circular and are framed by a circle of mosaic tiles, however this circle is cut by the size of the placable centerpiece object on the edges (hard to describe, sorry for that). Basically the framing circle is not fully intact but partly cut away. This leaves a very strange transition. Maybe these centerpiece textures can be rescaled a bit to encompass the whole framing circle decor around it? Second, the “background” floor texture of these centerpieces (corner areas e.g.) mostly do not fit well with the floor textures we have in the base game or the mosaic pack. It would be far more convenient and more beautiful to use in my opinion, if the centerpieces were modified just a bit so we only place the real centerpiece and the corners are transparent. In this case I could place a floor texture of my liking first and then apply the centerpiece on it like a sticker.
I am aware that some of these wishes might be hard to do, but maybe you can consider some of them. Keep up the good work, I really love this game and I am looking forward to build more beautiful cities in the future and explore the new content coming up!