Anno 1800 Dev Tracker

If it's caused by a specific mod (do you know which one?) maybe that's something the modder can look into themselves?

The chance for us to investigate and fix an issue that only appears when using a certain mod is rather low. That would mean taking resources from a bug fix for the main game and all players to fix something specifically that "breaks" when using mods. And as you can see by the meme here, our normal workflow is already causing "complaints".

(no offence, I understand it's a meme and not 100% serious)

We always appreciate memes :P

Yes, this issue should be fixed with next week's Game Update. From then on they should appear at the Traders as described.

Should the issue still be present for you after next week's update, we'd definitely appreciate receiving more affected savegames to further investigate the causes. For the time being, on all savegames we received, the fix seems to work (final validation is still ongoing).

Just to provide some context here ;)

We're of course not ignoring issues to talk about Easter Eggs (Lotta and me, who wrote the blog, are also not much help in fixing trade route bugs, to be honest). But before releasing a patch, the issue itself has first to be found and fixed. Plus, we always bundle multiple bugs for a Game Update and each update goes through a roughly 1 week validation period to test the fixes/changes. So: Things take a while, releasing an update for a single bug after just a few days is not realistic. Additionally, this particular issue only affected some savegames and not all players, meaning the investigation and fixing tend to take a bit longer.

Long story short, though: The issue should be fixed with Game Update 12.1 next Tuesday.

Not really, no. They lead to "we won't invest significant amounts of work into reworking a system of the game and the engine to make sure it doesn't cause issues only for the benefit of increasing the harbor area a bit".

The efforts would be disproportionate to the gains (and potentially risky), especially so post-release in a live game.

We continue to be quoted as having said "it's not possible", which is not what we have said ;)
Let me quote from the article where we addressed this topic:

"Reworking and expanding the construction space in the harbor area for all islands would have a significant impact on the game’s balancing and can further lead to issues impacting the stability of the game, AI navigation, and in certain cases, even corrupt savegames."

This is a currently known issue which we're investigating. We hope to have a fix with the next Game Update.

I appreciate that a free upgrade would have been great for players, but the reality is that we spent more than 6 months working on the History Editions, and that development time does not come cheap.

So the choice for us was to charge for the History Edition, or it would not have happened. I know that some other developers have handled this differently in the past, which is great!

But I hope that players can appreciate that one important reason why Anno is still going strong (arguably stronger than ever with Anno 1800!) after 23 years when many other classic strategy franchises have sadly stumbled or fallen, is that we always try to make economically responsible decisions that will hopefully allow us to bring our players more Anno to enjoy for years to come.

So I understand if some players are not happy with this decisions, but think that it was the right one for the long-term health of the franchise.

Best,

Marcel

I like this guy, he gives clever replies.

We're currently having a look at this issue but I can't say more yet at this point.

The history edition does not add new content, that line is likely referring to the included Venice expansion.