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.

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 ...

Hey Anno Community,

As you might have seen from our social post last Friday, we announced a couple of things happening in the upcoming weeks.

Back in February, during our IGN Fan Fest segment, we mentioned we would show more of the game in April… well, we got the months mixed up. The full gameplay reveal will happen during the week of 19th May.

In the meantime, what about a developer livestream next week? During this livestream, we will be talking about changes to the Needs and Attributes system with Creative Director Manuel and Game Director Jan. So, if you’re curious to more about these topics, don’t miss out our livestream on Twitch, 15th April at 5:00 PM CEST / 9:00 AM PT.

We’ll see you there!

Der Beitrag Union Update: April developer livestream erschien zuerst auf Anno Union.

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 ...