Yes, that visual effect when placing the road is one of the reasons why the clip has the "work-in-progress" label on it ;)

In fact, in the most recent build it's already fixed, but too late for the blog I'm afraid.

And yes, farm fields are also impacted. A bit more on that in part 2 in March.

edit: also, glad someone appreciates the Bilbo quote!

You can still do that manually, of course, we do not want to take away your main (?) source of fun in Anno!

We have not yet sent any invites for the beta test. We will let you know when that has happened (so people check their inboxes) but don't expect that to happen for a little while longer.

Your efforts to produce all these shiny assets summarising various features and content of Anno 1800 are very impressive!

Have you considered bundling them in some kind of document? My point would be that there's a danger of all your great work getting "buried" here on Reddit at some point.

It's a great design and personally I also like the aesthetic of the design you went for.

Ultimately, we received so many submissions it wasn't easy to pick only five - on the basis of Level Art's approach to island-design, characteristics of the region (Latium) as well as playability aspects and balancing (Game Design).

Thank you for participating in the contest! All of us very much enjoyed looking through the large number of different entries - we'll probably share the rest (or at least a wider selection) after the winner has been decided. Similar to how we've done with the statue contest last year.

We have not yet sent out any invites for the beta (if you're referring to the recent sign-up). This will still take a while - we'll definitely post news as soon as we start sending out invites.
You can continue to sign up here if you haven't done so already: https://register.ubisoft.com/anno-117/

We did already do smaller playtests over the last 1,5 years or so, but those do not have a public sign-up. They are a mix of hand-picked people and people who generally have signed up with the User Research Labs (e.g. when we looked for people who had zero experience with Anno), the latter usually being in-person playtests (link to User Research Labs: https://playtest.ubisoft.com/ - this is not restricted to Anno specifically).

We're not getting rid of the grid, as previously mentioned. More later this month in dedicated DevBlogs :)

While this can make it easier, there still are serious efforts involved, especially since we're using a proprietary engine. Plus, every platform (that includes Xbox and PlayStation as well) has some specific requirements before you can release there.

So, sure, not impossible, but if you have to decide where to spend your team's time, you go for the platforms with higher player numbers.

Doesn't rule anything for the future, after all, we released Anno 1800 on consoles years after the PC release, but for now: no, no macOS plans.

Better create an ebay account.

Yes

I see this was already edited but no, this is not and has never been the release date.

Right now there are no plans in that direction. For release, Anno 117: Pax Romana will be available on Windows PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S

From the pool of everyone who signed up, we will randomly pick people for each upcoming beta test.

Depends on the playtest, really. The registration here is for multiple different test phases.

For the large phases like Closed Beta: very much a random selection for each platform + some handpicked people.

For smaller playtests: mostly handpicked people or at least much more specialised criteria (platform? player type? played Anno before yes/no?).

You would need to change the email address of your Ubisoft account, that's where we send the invites to.
You should be able to change it via this website: https://account.ubisoft.com/

Looks like the wrong URL was added on Ubisoft Connect. Please use this link: https://register.ubisoft.com/anno-117/

This is just a registration for future beta tests ;)

I understand you (and many others) are impatient now, but the next test is still a little bit further into the future. We'll post news when invites are about to be sent out.