Prepare for fire, smoke and ash: in just a few days, on April 30th, the “Prophecies of Ash” DLC releases on all platforms. Settle Cinis, the largest island in Anno’s history, turn it into your new capital in Latium – and endure the moods of the volcano, bringing both destruction as well as powerful buffs.
Important: Due to a potentially savegame-breaking bug we decided to postpone the release of Prophecies of Ash and patch 1.5 from April 23rd by one week to April 30th.
Alongside the DLC, we’re releasing Patch 1.5, again including a variety of changes, improvements and bug fixes. While the full patch notes will be released next week, today we walk you through some of the changes and quality-of-life improvements that are included in this update as well.
Please keep the feedback coming – more adjustments and improvements are already planned for future updates, including (as mentioned previously) much-requested features like note-taking and the mod browser.
Big Changes
We’re starting with some larger changes that are worth providing some more details on:
Passive Trade rebalance: was too powerful previously and now gets adjusted downwards a bit.
Rivals/Traders only sell goods they actually have in stock
Rivals pay the same price as traders now
Rivals/Traders have less budget for trading starting in mid-game
Goods have higher trade prices
Important: the old balancing is still available, and all these options are now part of the game setup. While old savegames can migrate to the new balancing if you want, you can also pick and choose how you want to set up passive trade in your savegame.
“Prophecies of Ash” DLC: during volcano phases, traders will not sell goods impacted by volcano phases (food, crops, fish, animals)
Word filter adjusted in singleplayer
While the filter is still in place (mandatory requirement), there’s no more censoring on client side
Other participants in a multiplayer match will still see ***** if a word another player used is affected by the filter
Various Trade Route screen improvements
Assign route to a group during creation
Give trade route a name directly during creation
Hold shift to copy a good across all vacant slots of a ship
Trade route lines are now displayed on the map on the right when hovering over a trade route
The number of buildings producing a good is now displayed in addition to the stock level for each island
Some more improvements are still in discussion/in development
Small changes
In addition, plenty of smaller changes and improvements have been added, including (but not limited to) the following:
It’s now possible to zoom & pan the mini-map
Amphitheatre events can now be run on multiple islands simultaneously
Weather effects like rain in Albion or the volcanic ash rain from Prophecies of Ash can be disabled via the options menu
Destroyed Officia remember slotted specialists
We’ve added a “Favourite” category when using gamepad
It allows you to add ships, buildings as favourite for quick-access
You can add both menu entries and your current selection
Gameplay DLC can now be activated at any point while playing
When loading a pre-DLC-release savegame, a prompt will appear, but the decision can be postponed to later
Added a workforce priority system to help with avoiding negative spirals
The priority now is: Military < adding population < population area effect < income < income area effect
Defeating a pirate now gives positive emperor reputation
When using mouse & keyboard, all pins at bottom of the screen can now be removed/replaced, the resource pins are not fixed anymore
Water mill gets +1 knowledge, donkey mill –1 health as area effect
to better represent the water mill being more “expensive” due to requiring a river slot
Many many visual quality improvements on the UI side, including:
Ingame/pause menu
Save & load menu
Building menus
General HUD
Patch Notes and release
Again, please note the list above is not exhaustive: these and other improvements will be added to the game on Thursday! Stay tuned for the full patch notes, to be published next week, for a list of all changes as well as bug fixes that are part of the update.
This update will release alongside the “Prophecies of Ash” DLC for Anno 117: Pax Romana on April 30th.