This is a somewhat complete summary for the AMA for everyone who doesn’t want to dive trough the whole thing by themselves. For the content I’ve tried to compile what I found to be relevant and important answers concerning the series in a direct manner. Attention, I might have forgotten, overread or misrepresented some things along the way although if such a thing happened it was not in bad faith, corrections are welcome in the comments.

This Summary was at around 12:00 or 12 am CET, I might update it if anything else of importance was answered later on.

Of course, any of the information here is not definitive and might be subject to change as I am in no relation to Ubisoft and/or the Anno team.

General Info

About the game in general:

The Team is very happy about the community and the great fan response, especially the growing international community. Ubisoft is happy too, as shown by the continued development on the game. The sales seem to have surpassed the expectations by a lot which in the end is great for us. The current team working on Anno is of a size between 50 to 60 people with some people having been involved and/or worked on Anno since 1503.

About the next two DLC’s:

While we know no release date besides the rough estimates of Spring and Summer, we do know that they too will be released at 18:00 or 6 pm Central European Time (and probably on a tuesday too) like every other Update and DLC before. We did not get much info concerning Tourist Season and High Life except that they start with the tourist pier and maxing Investor needs respectively.

Explanations

We got a lot of answers for why things are the way they are or how they happened:

First about the general approach they had concerning the development of Anno 1800 which is supposed to be a compilation of all the very well received features of the previous Anno’s and then being expanded on. Apparently, most inspiration came from 1404 because it was the best received and last Anno in the past.

There were 3 more expansive answers that I will just link to:

Story management: https://www.reddit.com/r/anno/comments/lpl1mi/anno_1800_dev_team_ama/gogd6vf?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

DLC development process which took 3-5 months but not with the full team: https://www.reddit.com/r/anno/comments/lpl1mi/anno_1800_dev_team_ama/gofzx0c?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Session simulation: https://www.reddit.com/r/anno/comments/lpl1mi/anno_1800_dev_team_ama/gocwxgi?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

We got two answers concerning the visual design process: One concerning Inspiration which comes mostly from a ton of historical references like books and photographs some of which is in their in house library. The design of buildings is best shown with this GIF: https://anno-union.com/content/uploads/2017/10/ConceptArtFrameAnimation-1.gif

We also got some explanation for generic questions: The Choice for why the Islands are handcrafted and not generated by a program is mainly for control and balancing reasons but they don’t completely rule out doing generated or partially generated content in the future.

There is also an answer why DLC’s only indirectly interact with each other (concerning the Crown Falls castle and Tourist season but also Botanica) which is mainly for fairness reasons as to not force anyone to buy a DLC to experience the full content of another.

As to why the Great Eastern looks different between the main screen and the actual game, it’s because those were designed by different teams, one being an external one responsible for some of the artworks in the game.

About the choice of wonders they had to say that while there is a lot of choice the choose to go with what seemed most fitting for the theme of industrial revolution which is why we have the crystal palace and not Westminster Abbey (or any other cathedral).

And if anyone ever asked itself why a certain industry is in one category and not another it’s most likely because of balance reasons which is why Telephone manufacturing is not carpentry.

We learned that the Editor is a pacifist which is why he reports all declarations of war in a negative way.

As for the final and greatest Question of them all: We still don’t know who is responsible for the uneven size of the palace, but we do know that Com_Raven posed in a golden Anno throne. Make of that whatever you want.

New Content

We had a load of questions concerning new content and they had a boatload of answers (most of which consisted of not having plans for it though).

First things that are not going to happen: More airships (cause they’re arctic exclusive), new warships in season 3, any big balancing changes (because that would break saves) and land combat in 1800 (or probably any big overhaul of the combat system).

The things that are not planned: Submarines, new roads and bridges, using ornaments as roads, diagonal roads, a use for the courthouse, new islands, Asia, a map editor, scenarios (though they see that that is something the community is very interested in), native mod support, and in fact season 4 before season 3 is done. (Pleases don’t get your hopes up to high)

And then there are the things that will happen which include but are not limited to: More ship skins, more cosmetic DLC’s, new items, building skins (only maybe but have been hinted at), more easter eggs and references and a rework/addition for Enbesa.

The Enbesa rework might contain a working version of the Chronicles of Enbesa as well as a way to fix the Temple of Elam. (the two hints: https://www.reddit.com/r/anno/comments/lpl1mi/anno\_1800\_dev\_team\_ama/gobwyre?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/anno/comments/lpl1mi/anno\_1800\_dev\_team\_ama/got1lbr?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3 thanks ubi_natacha)

Quality of Life

Concerning the things that make our lives easier or harder they had the following things to say:

First because I’ve read it a lot, but it seems that at least some of the lags might be a driver problem that they are currently looking into together with Nvidia.

Second they also recognize that some of the game elements are not getting explained as well as they should be and might change something about it sooner or later.

Concerning UI and settings there is no planned ingame clock but you can look at the clocks on the buildings, they work. We might get stacked research if they can make it work. There will be no active pause because it would be difficult to implement but maybe an even slower speed if the demand is there. We will also not get any major statistics changes ore additions. There is also no plan for a default skin setting to change them for all ships.

Concerning buildings, we will get a change that will make ornaments fit better with plain ground as well as a reforesting tool in the next big update.

There were also a few questions regarding multiplayer but we’ll get neither the Enbesa story nor multiple Crown Falls but they have recognized that there might be an interest for this in the future.

Future of the Anno Series

Finally, there’s the question about the future of the series in general. While not much is planned yet for after season 3 we do know that they wish to continue the development for future titles in a similar manner as this one, including the community trough Anno-Union in the development process. They will however be clearer with what to expect from said influence.

It has also been stated that Anno for consoles would be cool but is not planned.

Whatever is going to happen however they are looking forward to giving us the best experience possible. And I doubt they will run out of ideas anytime soon.

Once again, I’d like to state that none of this is in any way definitive Information as I am in no relation to Ubisoft and/or the Anno Team.

Thank you for answering our questions, Devs!

TL;DR:

A lot of things are going to happen, a lot of things might not happen, we know a lot more about how some things happened, we know why some things didn’t happen. It’s going to be fun in the future. Bye *runs away*

Edit: Posted it on the forum as well: https://forums.ubisoft.com/showthread.php/2323740-Reddit-AMA-Summary?p=15358120#post15358120

If anyone needs a translation to german I might do that later

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