Ubi-Thorlof

Hey there! Indeed, we did not send out any confirmation mails for the entries, but as long as you didn't receive an error message from your email provider and also stuck to the guidelines we provided, you can be sure it made its way onto our desks :)

On the voting: we'll likely move the voting to later this week - and instead have a DevBlog this afternoon - as we need a little bit more time to decide for our favourites.

There are many awesome entries, though, with a wide variety of ideas. We had a lot of fun so far.

Thank you, Wuslwiz and MGuenny.

Can't reproduce that myself (tried multiple browsers), I can see all blogs and comments, but will forward to the devs to investigate.

The tags are on me, I'll adjust them, thanks for pointing that out.

Maybe?

And for good reason

Hey all, little bit of (kinda) self-promotion here, but we're organising a community event in Cologne in August!

In addition to the opportunity to meet fellow members of the Anno community, you can also meet (some of) us as we have some presentations prepared by e.g. Lead Game Designer Andrea and Senior Game Writer Matt.

We'd love to meet of you there - more info here: https://www.anno-union.com/union-update-anno-community-event-2024/

...

We got so many cool statue concepts, thank you to everyone!

We're going through them this week with the Art Team, voting on the Anno Union will start next week.

Extreeemely impressive - has been shared with the rest of the team as well.

And hey, you already "predicted" the two starting provinces - even if they're different provinces. Very fun read!

The efforts to grab all the different assets alone and making those slides look so clear: great stuff.

Totally fair, the CDLC specifically can be very much up to personal taste.

While the first ones much more focused on providing a mostly authentic bunch of ornaments and/or skins, we really wanted to try out some slightly crazier things now at the end of Anno 1800's development cycle.

That's how the Eldritch and Steampunk Pack came to be: let's see what our players say to slightly wilder cosmetics. If they don't perform well, we also learned something.

They are all digital paintings. Some are by Karakter (Greg Rutkowski), as has already been pointed out, many others are from our internal Art team.

Thank you for highlighting this, will forward this to our Store Team to investigate.

More related to the two things I mentioned: feedback units and animals. We might be able to look at animated objects as well, but it wouldn't be the focus.

I got a question, actually:

We said "no gameplay", as you know, but what's everyone's stance on some insights into animation - on top of the topics we already said we'd cover this year? Of course we'll have feedback units in Anno 117 (i.e. all the people walking in the streets) but also animals to populate the world (incl. oxen like Lola, from the reveal trailer).

Too early to say anything from our side. Of course, with all DLC regions, Anno 1800 has a significantly higher impact on performance than with just the two starting regions. So, some light performance problems in late game Anno 1800 with 5 regions will likely not translate into big performance issues for Anno 117: Pax Romana.

But of course we're pushing things further on a graphical level as well, for Anno 117, compared to 1800.

For smoother performance, CPU and RAM have slightly higher importance than your GPU, so, if e.g. your CPU is your oldest/weakest component right now, that might become a bottleneck in the future.

We're using the same engine since 2006, technically. Or at least the foundation - it has seen massive improvements, changes and additions over the years, and in between every title a lot of work is done on the engine/our tools to make it future-proof.

Self-promotion, I suppose, but we did write a blog post about that in 2021, if anyone wants to read more: https://www.anno-union.com/devblog-the-anno-engine/

We had a livestream just a few weeks prior with both Haye and Manu where we even talked about the games we're all playing right now.

While I understand some of you might not have gotten the information you wanted from this livestream, I'd very much appreciate you not assuming things about people without having anything to back it up.

<3

We'll have a blog in July/August talking about Production Phases and Milestones that should also help clear up a few things. I'm aware that knowledge might not be very widely know outside the game dev sector itself, so, hope this will make things clearer.

But you wouldn't be in Beta so far from release; that would also be way past the point where we could gather meaningful feedback. Same was true for Anno 1800 back then.

I think there's a misunderstanding. We are not trying to explain to you what Anno is.

We're trying to highlight the work that goes into creating a new Anno game and that "What actually makes Anno "Anno"?" is a very important part of that. You can see these kind of discussions even amongst players here all the time, for example:

- Is it a city builder or primarily a logistics game?
- Do military aspects belong in an Anno game?
- Does Anno need islands?

Not looking at your own brand and reflecting on what the DNA of your game(s) is, can easily make you lose track of your identity and lead to a game that goes completely past your fan base.

It's fine if that's not a topic you're interested in, but please don't misconstruct our announcement into a "they want to explain to us what Anno is".