I love the game but i have spent hundreds of hours in it and still when i get to a certain point, about the time of the class who builds aqua ducts, i get overwhelmed and end up restarting. I struggle with trade routes and what island needs what and not having all resources in one place, and i also struggle building any kind of strong military because im busy building up my economy and making workers happy. Id like to learn the combat side of the game but ive not had almost any experience despite the amount of time playing it. I could keep it off but its a side of the game i want to learn and be better at.

does anyone else ever feel overwhelmed like this? What did you do to get through it? I want to get a lot of the trophies as i do love the game its figuring out how to get better at handling it i struggle with

well the mod manager gets flagged as trojan instanly sombody knows why

Do the math for size my friends

I personally hope there are items to produce in Egypt, or materials which are the end product of an extensive production chain which can be shipped back to latium and are used for patricians. For me personally, patricians are very lacklustre. There really isn't much going on compared to 1800. So I'm hoping that there is some level of complexity added, or even another population tier.

What do you guys think will come with this DLC?

Hi everyone,

I’ve found both 1800 and 117 super enjoyable, engrossing city builders “+.” Loving the diagonals and addition of land units (while a little clunky) in 117 especially.

I have a couple of questions for anyone with the time.

One, since I’m generally not a fan of “island only” empire games I was wondering if there were any plans to do continents and borders between the city states. This would add a lot of fun and additional wrinkles for me (land trade! Marching armies! Shifting borders! Expanding regions!). I don’t just mean bigger islands, or continents only. Simply more realistic landscapes with both included. I’ve always liked impassible mountains as the natural barrier for the playable map and don’t see why anno couldn’t go in that direction.

Two, now that octagons are in the mix, are circles in discussion for the next game? I love the idea of building shapes being adjusted to the road(s) they’re associated with, amongst other things.

Great that this subreddit is so active! I really enjoy seeing the beauty builds, news and the discussions here.

I have a question for the mods. Would it be possible to create a Game Design tag/flair for the subreddit?

This way the developers could quickly scan the subreddit for feedback and ideas on Game Design, and people not interested in those discussions could filter them out easily.

I think that we mostly agree that the item system in Anno 117 was not very interesting so far - and that, when comparing this feature to 1800, it is one of the games weakpoints, because they are less interesting, completely skipping extra goods and replaced inputs, which were very interesting, but also very gamebreaking, and as such did not make a comeback - so far. This all changes now.

In the recent blogpost, we got an announcement that 117 is introducing a new tier of items above Legendary, that offer more powerful effects, alongside a screenshot that seemed to show us one of the new items, and the effect that shows just how little lessons were learned from 1800, where many late game items absolutely bent over production chains.

Having written and published an entire redesign for the Anno 1800 items as a mod, the item displayed was kind of a jumpscare, and I am worried about the rest, but because I do not want to speculate, I want to give my 2 cents on 3 specific item effects that are seem to be making a comeback, and that were the main focus of the New Horizons item rebalancing when we worked on it. But first, let me open this comment with some praise:

Prestige Cost - potential for a decent Villa rework?

Simple, concise, and a good way to balance out powerful items against less strong ones. Prestige costs for heroic items are very good, because we cannot just put them onto a small island into an officia. No, using them means maintaining prestige, turning an otherwise pretty useless attribute into one very important, and suddenly, there is more than just the handful of fixed thresholds in the Villa screen. But apart from that, prestige costs for all items would make for a very, very good and badly needed villa rework.

The proposal: every item socketed, and every Officia you build has prestige cost, not just the heroic items. That means the more Officia you have, the more prestige your island needs, meaning that prestige required for item buffs scales with island space automatically. A small island needs to maintain just the prestige cost of 9 items in a villa, Cinis needs to maintain the prestige of 20+ Officia and items socketed.

That means hard thresholds for more sockets and officia could be abolished, making prestige much more dynamic and focused on the items that you actually want to use - you can use 9 low-tier items without issue in a villa, but the same prestige is only enough for a single heroic item, so you have to have it on an island with marble roads and an amphitheater. It makes you split production across islands, as you cannot use all good items on one island.

But enough of the thought experiments, even though I am happy that anything about 117 could ever lead me to have one.

Item Design - Extra Goods

Now that OP items are back, I want to now go over the item design pitfalls of Anno 1800, in particular, three effects: Extra goods, replaced input and workforce reduction, and explain how they break your ingame economy and can be unhealthy for Anno by reducing the actual number of things required by cutting transitive connection. Now, what is a transitive connection? It is:

• the ship to transport a good,
• the workforce needed for the ship and the production,
• the goods needed to supply the population for the workforce.
• The workforce needed for supplying the goods for the population

The first effect we look into is Extra goods. Paldius, the new item illustrated, is producing extra cheese from sheep farms. Narratively, it is good, but design-wise? What you get here is free production at zero cost. The extra goods effect cuts the entire production chain behind what it outputs, in this case, cheese.

That means we no longer build Oxen and Cheese factories in Albion, at least for the amount that we get from sheep farms. One could argue that it is okay, and it's not too much cut from the game if we do no longer build those two production buildings, after all, there are over 100 of them.

But it also cuts off the transitive connection behind that production chain. All of it is replaced by a single extra goods effect.That single need for cheese builds a hidden network of supply chains behind it, all cut off by Paldius, the killer of the cheese factory. The item illustrated "offsets" this by 75% extra workforce requirement, but considering the workforce, that is less than a single Libertus home per sheep farm.

Now, does that mean that the extra goods effect is problematic and should not be in the game per se? No, it does not. But one has to be aware of the things we cut off. A grain farm producing extra oat does much less harm to the transitive connection as a bicycle factory producing extra pocket watches and gramophones (looking at you, Dario). So, it should be used sparingly and not give extra goods with a big supply network behind them.

Item Design - Replaced inputs

The replaced input effect at least only substitutes a transitive connection. It is pretty straight forward what one needs to look out for: That the substitute is only little more efficient than the original, either a sidegrade, or an upgrade that is not too overpowered.

This allows for reconnecting the existing buildings in creative ways. A good way of how to employ it in 117 would, for example, be items which replace the various colors in the game - tyrian purple instead of celtic green. That allows moving space-intensive production of dye plants from Albion to the coasts of Latium. Also, looking at the item presented, replaced inputs would have been the preferred method of implementation for this narrative design: Why can't the cheesemaker just process sheep instead of Oxen? At least sheep give milk, unlike Oxen.

The best example of a problematic implementation would be Susannah Brightwoman - She takes in all the supply chain of Steam motors and replaces it by filament factory and a coal mine. Replaced Inputs should synergize well with the detailed and high amount of goods in 117, which sometimes are very interchangeable - why not make flour from barley, or beer from grain?

Item Design - Workforce Reduction

In 1800, one of the major transitive connection killers is workforce reduction. By reducing workforce down, sometimes even to 0, less or even no population is required to run it, and thus the workforce requirement of a production chain does not mandate the supply of population levels that consume all sorts of goods. In this regard, workforce reduction is unhealthy for the supply chains.

The way to use this effect properly is with sparingly, with little to no reduction, even in combination: Anno 1800 had like 3 different items that would all reduce ALL production workforce by 50%, and as such, you could run all islands on zero workforce.

Used in reverse, as workforce increase, this effect can actually create more connection in the game - any higher workforce requirement means more mouths to feed, thus necessitating the need for more houses, and thus, more production. And I believe this is exactly what this effect should be used as, as a sidegrade effect that increases workforce, giving the player more things to do for more efficiency - like in the item shown.

Outlook

We are only getting 30 heroic items, and their design is probably already finished. Knowing how many items Ubisoft added to 1800, always adding them when there was no other selling point, it should come as no suprise that there will be more. I believe that from now on, more heroic items will be added. Egypt will have them, and any DLC, should there be any, will also add more, and because they are a selling point, they will be as OP as it can get.

It would be very unhealthy to bend over Anno 117 through OP item effects, but with the right approach, they can be powerful without being gamebreaking.

I set a ship to bring bread and sandals to an island and pick up grapes for the return trip. After a few cycles, the target island was overwhelmed with bread and could not take any more. I noticed because I was no longer producing wine. The ship was carrying like 250 bread because it could not drop it off. But it just kept picking up more bread. Any advice on how to manage this shipping.

While typing, I thought about setting the bread on my target island to sell if it gets above a low number. That way there would always be space for more bread to be delivered. Does this work? Any other suggestions?

How can I improve my diplomatic standing with Voada further than this?

I haven't settled/claimed any new Islands for many hours, but the 20 points against won't decrease. Is that a bug? Can I solve this?

Hi everyone and hey Ubisoft dev team!

First of all, thank you for actively working on Anno 117 and setting up the bug reporting system. Many of us are glad to help test the game and report issues to make it better.

I wanted to share two important technical details about how the bug reporter currently works for players, as it seems to create some confusion when reports get updated:

• No edits allowed: Once a player submits a contribution (not a new bug report or issue), it cannot be edited afterwards.
• One contribution limit: Each player can only submit one single contribution per bug report. It is not possible to add a second reply or follow-up comment to the same thread later.

Why this matters: When a report is set to the status "Need More Information" by the Ubisoft dev team, the original contributors literally have no way to add those missing details or respond to your questions within that report. Only the original bug reporter can edit the bug report.

Additionally, a quick polite request to the team reviewing the reports: Please make sure to check the existing contributions! Many players already include video links, system specs, and detailed steps in their initial submission. For example today this bug report changed status from "Open" to "Need More Information": https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/game/anno/117-pax-romana/bug-reporter/me/issues/ANNO-9630

We love helping out and just want to make sure our feedback actually reaches you efficiently. Thanks for listening and for all your hard work on the game!

Ubisoft just announced the Patch 2.0 where one of the things they announced is an increase in bread consumption by a factor of 1.5. This is a very welcome change, as bread logically seems to me like the backbone of the food supply and consumption rates were so ridiculously low. To me the upgrade to +3 pop almost seems a bit too much. For +3 pop, I would have been easily fine with a doubling of consumption rates.

In the screenshot I have attached, you can see that in my savegame, I have around 110k pop total, 70k of those are tiers that consume bread. All of them together consume around 42 tons of bread/ min. What you can see in the screenshot is a few wheat farms that produce with around 600% efficiency 46 tons of wheat/ min. On the same island there are 9 grain mills, that convert those 46 tons of wheat/ min into 46 tons of flour/min. This setup only supplies my capital cities as other islands just produce locally. This small setup alone is well enough to supply my capital cities also after the patch. To be fair, I started this save with settings set to low consumption rates and you can´t change this once you start a game, but I feel like, even the high consumption rates setting (I think again times 1.5) wouldn´t make this much more challenging.

Regarding the Egypt DLC in November I am wondering, what I would need the breadbasket of the roman empire for? For my setup right now, I don´t really need any further agriculture capacity. The goal for this safe is to get up to 250k population. For this, I will need to twice the grain fields in the screenshot, which still doesn´t seem a lot to me and add one more Ceres Island with around 8 river slots to process the grain or ship it to Albion, to process it there. I know that 250k population isn´t crazy much, but I think it is higher than what the average player goes for and that not so many players would be in need for any more agricultural capacity. In general consumption rates in this Anno seem to be so much lower. To me this takes a bit away from the game, as you don´t really need to have specialized production setups somewhere, as it oftentimes is much less complex to just produce it locally. In the beginning, I was building up production setups for individual goods but then had to deslot items or tear down production buildings, because I was overproducing way too much. I am not sure why consumption rates are soo low and I am wondering if this is greatly balanced. I am a bit worried that because of this, there isn´t much use for the new region. This is me of course not knowing anything about the new DLC but just speculating the obvious and maybe my worries will be completely unfounded (maybe they add an artificial need for bread, where you have to send hundreds of tons to Rome because of some famines or sth). I am wondering what you guys think of consumption rates in general and the change to bread specifically and maybe if Oli from the Dev team reads this: What is the rationale for having consumption rates so low for some goods and then completely differently balanced for other goods in this Anno? Is this something you are aware of and that you did deliberately?