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 ...

Not long ago we gave you a first look at how we’re handling roads in Anno 117: Pax Romana and how we improved the grid with additional functionality by allowing for diagonal building of roads and buildings. If you missed it, catch up by following this link.

In today’s blog, we’ll be looking at the challenges the team faced when making the game work with these new options and how they resolved them.

We’ll also cover a few further implications of these changes, since roads aren’t the only thing you’ll build in Anno 117: Pax Romana, of course.

A quick recap

For Anno 117: Pax Romana, we upgraded the building grid with additional functionality to allow for diagonal roads and buildings. For this, we sub-divided each grid tile into 4-subtiles, which allows us to still calculate and place objects precisely into the grid even at a 45° angle.

Building diagonally does help making both streets and anything connected to them look significant...

Hello Anno Community,

As you might have guessed from the title, today’s DevBlog will focus on modular ships in Anno 117: Pax Romana. If you watched our segment at IGN FanFest, you have probably heard Manuel Reinher, Creative Director, talk about this new feature; therefore, let’s have a closer look at modular ships!

Anno & ships: a 27 yearlong cruise (and counting)

Since 1998, ships have always played a key role in Anno games: whether you were transporting tools after desperately buying the whole stock from the travelling merchants in Anno 1602 or efficiently coordinating trade routes in Anno 1800, you certainly have sailed the high seas in some shape or form while playing Anno.

It should not be a surprise to you all, then, to see ships play a key role in Anno 117: Pax Romana. However, unlike earlier Anno games, Anno 117: Pax Romana will change things up a bit with a new feature: ships will be modular, and you will be able to se...

Hey Anno Community,

Welcome back to part two of our in-depth look at the games included in this month’s Anno History Collection. Today we want to tackle Anno 1701, which is a special game to the team in many ways. But before we get into the specifics of 1701, let us recap our general approach to the Anno History Collection and the improvements that have been made across the board on all the games. Should you have missed our first blog on Anno 1602 History Edition, we would encourage you to give that a read first.

Classic gameplay on modern PCs

As outlined before, our priority with this collection and the four games included (History Editions of Anno 1602, 1503, 1701 and 1404) was to maintain the classic gameplay that we have all grown to love over the past two decades, while ensuring that playing these games on your current PCs is smooth and hassle-free. This is of course also true for Anno 1701 History Edition:

The game has been completely ported to be 64-bit only, meanin...

Hey Anno Community,

Last month we announced the release of the Anno History Collection arriving June 25, which will update the beloved first four games in the Anno series to take better advantage of modern PCs, while maintaining the gameplay we all know and love. As promised at the announcement, we will have a separate blog post for each of the games to not only talk about the new improvements, but also about the games and their place in Anno history themselves. As this is the first blog, we will take this opportunity to talk a bit about the History Collection in general, before diving right into Anno 1602 History Edition!

Our goals for the History Collection

The first question that came to many minds upon our announcement was of course “why?”, so let us start with that. As you know, Anno 1800 has been a huge success for the team, becoming the fastest-selling Anno game right out of the gate, and attracting more than a million players within its first nine months on the market...

Let the “Bright Harvest” begin

Last Tuesday, June 2, marked the release of the “Bright Harvest” DLC and Game Update 8!

Boost your agriculture by building silos and state-of-the-art tractors, and beautify your islands with additional farming and industrial ornaments. The farming revolution is already well underway!

Game Update 8 additionally provides you with a convenient item overview, bigger warehouses, the Great Eastern steamer and many smaller improvements and fixes which you can find here.

Thanks to your feedback following the release, our team is currently working on Game Update 8.1 to address some of the concerns you voiced. We will have more info on it closer to its release around Mid-June.

Get ready for analogue Anno 1800

And another kind of announcement was made last week which we are extremely excited about: On Thursday Kosmos Spiele (whom you may be familiar with from games such as “Catan” and “Legends of Andor”) announced “Anno 1800: The Board Gam...

Game Update 8 will release Tuesday, June 2 at 6pm CEST/ 12pm EST/ 9am PST.

The download will roughly be 1.8GB.

Game Update 8 adds support for our second Season 2 DLC, “Bright Harvest”, for all Season 2 Pass owners. “Bright Harvest” will also be available as a stand-alone purchase from June 2 onwards.

Added an Item Overview system within the statistics screen. With this much requested feature, we are giving you an easy to use overview of all your current items, and where they currently are being used or stored. This includes extensive filtering options by their effect or what buildings they can be socketed into, as well as text search (which has also been added to the Trading Post and expedition preparation menu). Finally, you can also use the item overview to search for any missing items, and information on how to obtain them!

Trading Posts and War...

Hey Anno Community,

today we are very excited to share the announcement of the upcoming Anno History Collection with you all. With this collection, we are updating the first four Anno games (1602, 1503, 1701 and 1404) to take advantage of modern PCs, while keeping the classic gameplay we all know and love. Among the more notable improvements to all four games are:

• All games being ported to 64-bit to improve performance and stability (say goodbye to Anno 1404 running out of memory)
• Support for new resolutions all the way up to 4k, making your empires look better than ever before
• Improved multiplayer, with all games now running through Uplay, with comfort features such as quickmatch and desync recovery (as seen in Anno 1800). And yes… ANNO 1503 MULTIPLAYER IS OFFICIALLY HERE!
• Full save game compatibility, so we hope you have held on to those beloved saves from years past
• Of course, all games include their expansions, as well as any other official content that may have been released ov...

Over the coming weekend we will give you the opportunity to already take a closer look at the contents of upcoming Season 2 Pass DLC “Bright Harvest” as well as Game Update 8 by watching some of your favourite streamers during another Twitch Drops Event.

The whole event takes place from Friday May 29 until June 8.

During the event, you will be able to watch how a variety of selected Twitch streamers attempt to integrate the new tractor modules into their farming islands and maybe also use some of the new ornaments to beatify their cities further.

Anyone watching them build a new farming paradise can grab two brand new ornaments, the Bright Harvest Flag and the Bright Harvest Billboard. The only thing you need to do is link your Uplay to your Twitch account and watch the streamers during the event for up to 3 hours to receive your loot. You don’t have to watch these hours consecutively to receive your drop; watching them accumulated on participating streamers will also gra...

In an office environment “working in silos” seems rarely a good thing, but out there among the buttercups and daisies these silver sentinels must surely be a reassuring sight to a farmer. Though the word comes to us from ancient Greek, Levantine silos for holding grain have been found dating back over 7000 years. The modern farm silo appears to have been the brainchild of one Fred Hatch, who in 1876, finally managed to convince his old man to let him build a grain store in the barn for green corn fodder. Hatch’s cows quickly became inflated distortions of themselves, living out the winter in luxury, and becoming the envy of any neighboring farmers.

Imagine then the effect, at a similar time, of the “portable” tractor, putt-putting its way nonchalantly about the place, undercutting millennia of peasant toil and hardship. Steam-driven, petrol-driven it didn’t seem to matter; the efficiencies were great, and drastic of course in their implications for Frank and Felicity the farmhands...

All of the Anno games are inspired by history and our team spent a significant amount of time researching the era of Anno 1800. History buffs across all departments of the team spent countless hours going through hundreds of photographs and pictures as a reference for the design of ships and houses, researching on the societal changes and struggles of the time and discussing how to implement those as a gameplay feature. So while we are not and don’t want to be historically accurate, plenty of references can be found in the game.

The 1800s have also been an era of technology and innovations. Take “The Great Exhibition” that took place in London in 1851 as an example, which inspired the World’s Fairs in the game. Ground breaking innovations of the time found their way into Anno 1800, like railroads, electricity or steam ships, while Old Nate and his inventions are of course a small venture into early science fiction.

When we’re talking about expeditions, many of you were also curi...

Hey Anno Community,

while it is still a while to go before Bright Harvest will further expand your Anno 1800 experience, we want to take this opportunity to already make you aware of two important changes that will happen at the same time as part of Game Update 8.

Changes to map generation and seeds

As some of you may know, there is an issue during map creation that can result in maps not having certain fertilities, which players would sometimes only realize after playing for some time, or when reaching the New World. This can make for a frustrating experience, so we are making some changes to the map generation to ensure that every fertility will be present in newly generated maps.

And while we are at it, we will also tackle the issue of some maps having significantly more copper than zinc mines, despite game balance dictating that you should always have both resource nodes at a 1:1 ratio. With Game Update 8, this will be changed to ensure that copper and zinc mines wil...

Release: May 8, 12pm CEST/ 6am EST/ 3am PST

Download: 1GB

Release Notes

Fixed several potential game crashes.

Fixed several issues that could cause Desync errors in multiplayer.

Fixed an issue that could result in the game not starting (or crashing immediately after starting) if started in offline mode, or without an internet connection present.

Fixed some UI issues that could appear in DirectX 12 mode.

Fixed an issue with carts deleting their loaded goods if they were unable to unload them at their destination building.

Solved an issue where hovering the mouse over tiles such as ornaments or farm fields could cause its position to appear offset, making it harder to use.

Hey Anno Community,

it has been a while since we ran our last Anno Union vote— high time to do so again! This time we want your input on the topic of our next Cosmetic DLC Pack, giving you the choice between three themes. Once the voting ends, we will begin development on the new content, which we plan to cover with blogs on the Anno Union to show you how the Union’s chosen topic comes to live.

So, what exactly is a “Cosmetic Pack”? As you know, we released the Holiday Pack last December, giving you the option to turn your cities festive with an assortment of Christmas-themed ornaments such as Christmas Market stalls. While many of you loved the Pack, we also received a lot of feedback that if we were to do another such pack, you would prefer to have something a bit more general that you can proudly display in your empire all-year-round. You also provided us with many suggestions about potential themes, which inspired us to turn the decision about the next pack’s theme over to ...

With all the tools necessary to construct a palace worthy of an industrial magnate at your disposal, we are sure that many of you have already created some amazing and lavish palace complexes! The ideal time to start another creative contest and ask you to share pictures of your architectural marvels with us.

Simply share your screenshots with us on Twitter using the #seatofanno hashtag or post them in this dedicated forum thread.

And while it is not mandatory and will not be part of the selection process, feel free to tell us more about your palace! Did you model it after any real-world monument? Is there any cool story behind it? We want to know!

The submission deadline is May 8th, 11:59pm CET. We will announce the winners in an upcoming Union Update after our team had some time to browse through all your magnificent screenshots.

Of course, palace-building is hard work, and needs the right tools. Thankfully, our good friends at CORSAIR (no business or family relations...

Game Update 7.2 is now available, with a download size of roughly 1GB.

Further improved game stability by fixing several potential crashes and desyncs.

Improved reporting on desync errors.

Note
While Game Update 7.2 fixes several issues that could cause crashes and desyncs, we cannot, in the interest of transparency, promise that it will fix these issues for all affected players. We are still in the process of investigating recent error reports, and are not always able to reproduce the issues during our own tests. To help with this, the Game Update also includes further improvements to crash and desync reporting so we can narrow down the potential causes for these issues. 

Hey Anno Community,

Time sure flies! Has it already been a year since you all first joined us in the age of the industrial revolution? Turns out the answer is yes, and what an incredible year it has been for all of us. So, let us look back at the first year of Anno 1800 together!

April 16, 2019: Anno 1800, the seventh game in the equally beloved and long-running Anno series is released, inviting PC gamers worldwide into the age of the industrial revolution

April 29, 2019: Thanks to all of you, we can announce that Anno 1800 is officially the fastest selling game in the franchise’s 20-year history! Thanks everyone

June 5, 2019: “The Anarchist” Dr. Hugo Mercier joins the party as the first new content release for the game, including a new NPC opponent (or ally), new quests and items. Alongside Hugo come new menus for construction projects like the world fair, dig site and court of justice.

July 30, 2019: Annoholics start the hunt for “Sunken Treasures” with our first D...

Hi Anno Community,

we are currently working on our next Game Update, 7.1, to tackle many of the issues that you have been reporting to us in the past week. We are currently testing Game Update 7.1, and will share details on the release timing with you all in the coming days. Until then, stay safe!

Update: We are currently expecting to release Game Update 7.1 today, Friday April 3rd, at 2pm CET. The download will be roughly 1GB.

Game Update 7.1 Release Notes

An issue with disappearing infotips while the right-click menu was pinned has been fixed.

An issue that could cause ships to remain stuck in transition mode after entering a session while new DLC was being activated has been fixed.

Fixed a multiplayer desync caused by selecting a blueprint building while owning a Palace.

Fixed an issue with certain menu windows (such as transfers, options etc.) preventing players from scrolling all the way to the bottom.

Fixed an issue where policies slotted in the Pala...