Anno 117: Pax Romana – Patch 1.6.1

Hi Anno team,

First, some context: I’m a long-time Anno fan. I pre-order every title on day one, spent countless days and nights in Anno 1800, pre-ordered the Anno 117 Gold Edition, and I’ve been enjoying it immensely — especially since Update 1.5. Thank you for the continued trade route improvements; this suggestion builds directly on that work.

I’d like to share an idea I’ve been wishing for since the early days of the series — one that addresses a pain point I’ve also seen raised across community discussions. I genuinely believe it would add a remarkable layer of strategic depth to the game.

THE PROBLEM: A CONCRETE EXAMPLE

Island A produces olives. Island B turns them into olive oil. I set up a route:

“Load 50 olives at A → unload at B → load olive oil at B → unload at C.”

After a few cycles, the chain can deadlock: B’s olive storage fills up, so the ship cannot unload its olives at B. Because its cargo slots are still occupied, it cannot pick up the olive oil either — and C stops receiving oil. The entire supply chain collapses until I intervene manually.

In the early game this is a manageable annoyance. But in the late game, with dozens of routes and hundreds of stops running, it becomes a real problem: ships drifting around the map effectively doing nothing useful, and the screen filling up with dozens of “there is a problem with your trade route” notifications. Instead of growing my empire, I find myself spending my session repairing routes — which seriously diminishes the quality and enjoyment of what should be the most rewarding phase of the game.

The existing advanced options I currently rely on do not really solve this:

“Wait until fully loaded” forces me to wait for A’s storage when what I actually care about is B’s or C’s stock level. Sometimes I do not want a full load at all — I want the ship to depart the moment the destination runs low, with whatever is available.

“Discard cargo if storage is full” means throwing away goods I worked to produce, which feels wrong in an economy game.

THE SUGGESTION: AN OPT-IN “ADVANCED CONDITIONS” PANEL

I am not asking to change the current trade route system in any way. Everything should work exactly as it does today, by default, for everyone.

The idea is a purely optional panel in the route editor — hidden unless the player opens it — where experienced players can attach trigger rules to a route, or to individual stops. These rules could be combined with AND / OR operators.

For example:

“Start the route when olive stock on Island B drops below 30.”

“Load olive oil at Island B when its stock exceeds 50.”

“Depart when olive oil on B exceeds 30 AND olive oil on C falls below 20.”

“Depart when olive oil stock on C falls below 20 OR olive oil stock on D falls below 15.”

That last OR pattern unlocks something genuinely useful: imagine one feeder island supplying two consumer islands. With an OR condition, a single supply route could become active when either consumer island needs goods, instead of running constantly regardless of demand.

While a route’s conditions are not met, the ship would simply wait at anchor at its previous stop or home port and resume automatically once the conditions are met. Routes without any conditions defined would behave exactly as they do now — zero impact on players who do not want this.

WHY I THINK IT IS WORTH IT

Ship-based logistics is the backbone of Anno, and it is a core system where strategic expression could go even further — today we can only set fixed quantities. Condition-based triggers would turn route planning from “set amounts and hope” into genuine supply chain design, prevent many deadlocks like the one above, and add enormous strategic depth for players who opt in.

There is solid precedent that this mechanic works and is loved: OpenTTD’s conditional orders and Factorio’s train schedule wait conditions, with AND / OR logic, are among the most praised logistics features in their genres. An Anno take on this — applied to island stock levels — would fit the series perfectly.

Since it would live behind an optional “Advanced Conditions” toggle, it would not add any complexity for new players and could be introduced without changing how existing routes behave or cluttering the default UI.

Thank you for reading, and for the great post-launch support on Anno 117. I would be happy to elaborate or provide more scenarios if useful.

A dedicated fan from Ankara 🙂