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...