Great catch! There are multiple scenes with the detective, actually.

If you want to read a bit more on it, we covered this (and the work of our Game Writing team) in a blog post back then :)

https://www.anno-union.com/devblog-game-writing-and-detective-stories/

Well, colour me intrigued.

Sorry for the late reply: not for me to say, maybe a mod has some input on this.

If you do a post every week, for example, that should be totally fine, though

That's a great initiative, looking forward to the rest of the advent calendar!

That is super impressive and must have taken a WHILE. Mad respect for this project.

No buildings this time in Anno, sorry. It's mostly about landscapes and long hikes through the hills and along the beaches.

(we will, next year!)

Then we're in good company, that's a gorgeous game.

The store page is very much an early version and will be expanded with more information next year.

Nope, they only need the goods + service buildings listed in their respective interface. The need usually just carries over to the next tier but not further.

(I believe there's a mod that changes that, however, if you prefer the extra challenge)

Even more specific: we're Ubisoft Mainz. "Ubisoft Blue Byte" is the combination of all three German studios (Berlin, Düsseldorf, Mainz).

Well... it's quite a colourful pack, that could also include skins, of course...

It's not about ornamental buildings as such, but about the huge ones that Seilofo was asking about. Sure, the rollercoaster, swan pond or the ice rink are larger structures (that's why there's also just always only one of them in a CDLC, if any) but I believe not quite what the original comment was about.

The philosophy is to provide additional, purely ornamental content with no gameplay impact. It's to provide players with more options to bring their cities to life and/or create themed areas (a Christmas market, an old town, etc.) in their cities.

Visual clarity is also important in Anno, i.e. players should see on first glance and without UI help what they're dealing with (that's a factory doing smelting, this place is cooking something, that's a residence, that's a public building, and so on). That also applies to the CDLC, where even larger structures should be clearly ide...

Oh, it's not Anno 117 that's the reason here. Our design-approach for Cosmetic DLC was that we want it to be smaller objects that fit well into cities (or landscapes) to fill up any "empty" tiles and are as flexible as possible.

Most cosmetic packs have a larger structure included (e.g. the bath in the Steampunk pack, the large swan pond in the City Lights pack, etc.) but the rest of the pack focuses on smaller to medium-sized structures.

Large structures (the big ornamental building you mention) are very expensive in terms of workhours; that would mean that (considering the 5€ price tag for CDLCs) there would be VERY few of those in one cosmetic pack. Additionally, from our perspective, putting all this effort into such a huge building (let's use the Cathedral example) and then not having it have any gameplay impact would feel like a waste. There's also a good chance of it not matching player expectations: us adding/selling a huge Cathedral but not giving it any ...

It's not themed to a specific real life event ;)

I understand the wish for ornamental buildings, but that's not within the scope for the Cosmetic DLC and also not part of our design philosophy for these packs, I'm afraid.

That is still the case, yes. We are not planning to release any of the gameplay DLC that exist on PC for the console version, sorry.

Achievements: no, those are bound to your Ubisoft account.

Savegames: You can delete all of your savegames if you so desire, and also deactivate cloud syncs in Connect. That should mean that on a new PC, no old savegames should be present.