u/Basic--Annual

For those of you that have spend some time playing Anno 117, don´t know what to do anymore in the game and that enjoy the military aspect of it, maybe you enjoy the following challenge: Try to initiate a rebellion and become pro-consul as fast as possible on a single island and without a navy. I had lots of fun with it, and it really does feel like you are being under siege. It took me around 14h. However, I was just having fun with the “scenario” and taking my time. It’s possible to do it in less than 10h. Some of you will probably manage in 5. It truly does remind me of the Anno 1404 scenarios, and it definitely is a challenge. Screesnshots below.

 

#The setup:

The challenge isn´t necessarily based on not having a navy. I just think that within a few hours it´s just not feasible to build up a fleet that is able to rival the emperor’s fleet. With one island you probably also don´t have the income to support one. This is why once the invasion starts, all the ships that you have will eventually be destroyed by his fleet. It´s not worth bothering rebuilding them. So, I just built a few military ships in the beginning to fight NPCs but let them be destroyed by his fleet. I just focused on building up a bastion, to defend against the troops landing on shore. If you are wondering about how to deal with his fleet, more on that later.

The “only one island” part is also a bit of a lie, as you need at least another island to progress to the equites and patricians tier, which should ideally also have marble. Once the invasion starts, however, and all your ships are being destroyed, there isn´t any trade happening between your islands anyways, so you can just destroy their trading posts and get rid of them.  So, when the invasion starts, you truly only have one island.

#General strategy:

Anybody who has played with the military aspect in 117 knows that a military is super expensive in terms of workforce. Building up your defense needs lots of Liberti (gates) and Plebeians (ballista towers). The main type of army that I went for were catapults, spearmen and archers, which again require Liberti and Plebeian workforce. The best way to get lots of those, is Ceres of course (haven´t tried out the new god) and building their houses under the influence of late game buildings. I rushed Patricians so that I had access to the temple and then only upgraded as many Patrician houses and Equites houses as needed. Even though the Colosseum provides another strong population boost, I didn´t deem it worth building and in the end managed without. Your balance is also something to pay attention to. All your troops and defenses weigh heavy on your balance, which is why you want to put as many production buildings (that have an income boost) as possible in your city even though they might also have negative area buffs. I went for the biggest of the islands (Cinis wasn´t out yet and I think you know what other island I am talking about) and loaded up several games until I had fertilities I was happy with. Then you want to have as many of your houses under the influence of a bathhouse, temple and forum. One very important thing is that you start the game with other NPCs. You need to hardcore farm negative reputation with the emperor as soon as possible. You want to declare war on the other NPCs as soon as possible and ignore the emperors’ order to stop the war. I went for Neferneru (before being patched), Zara Nitu and Tarragon. You then prepare your defenses and ready yourself for the invasion.

#Military strategy:

When his fleet reaches your island, his troops land on your shore and try to take down your villa. In the meantime, his fleet starts patrolling your shores and destroys your trading post and all other buildings withing reach. This is why you can only build your city away from the shore. If your walls and towers are within the reach of his catapult ships, then they destroy them immediately and his troops flood your city. The first priority is to defend against his land troops. You want to have at least one stone wall in their way and maybe even two. You are limited in how close you build towers next to each other. With gates that also fire arrows, you aren´t. Staling his troops in front your wall and bombarding them with catapults and archers works well. The first priority of your catapults should be to take out his catapults, as one hit can easily takes out one of yours (will be your most valuable unit). The second priority of your catapults is to take out his archers. At some point, there will be so many of his troops, that they will breach your defenses. For this situation you also want to have melee units. Legionnaires would be best, but they need to be researched and are expensive to maintain. Spearmen also do the Job and are easily replaced. When you know that the walls will be breached, you want to evacuate your catapults early (I can´t stress this enough. They take forever to build. If you lose too many of them, then you don´t have enough for the next wave to take out his quickly) fall back with your archers and let your melee units block choke points in the city. By themselves, your spearmen would quickly fall to his legionnaires, but with the help of you archers and catapults, you should defeat them quickly. I have experimented with cavalry, but they are worse in holding chokepoints compared to spearmen and are more expensive. They also don´t do a great job at flanking his troops in front of your gates or rushing catapults, because his fleet still lays at your shores. They take down your unupgraded cavalry so quickly.

If you have defeated all his land troops, it´s time to take care of his ships. The next wave of the invasion only starts when you have cleared the entire previous wave. This includes his military ships. Since you don´t have a fleet on your own, you can´t engage with his fleet on the water. You have to do it from the land. Your own catapults are actually very good at destroying his ships. If there are no more land units left of his, then your catapults can move pretty freely on your island. 5 catapult units can take care of a quinquereme quickly. You first want to take out the ships that have archer towers and ballistas as your catapults outrange those. After this you want to take care of his catapult-ships. They are a bit hard to get rid of. They have the same range as your catapult units and a single hit immediately breaks the moral of a catapult unit and they start fleeing. There are two things that work well for this. 1. My general tip would be to build your trading post in a walled off bay. His ships will be drawn to it while your catapults have a good angle and the highground (I think we all know that this means that it´s over) to attack from. 2. Spearman are mostly fast enough to dodge catapult fire when running and are easily replaced. Use them to kite catapult fire and use your own catapults to destroy his ships in the meantime.

The last thing to mention is that the emperors’ troops land on different beaches of your island with each wave. This makes it necessary to have defenses in all possible locations that you can be attacked from. As mentioned, catapults are your key defensive unit. The thing is that they are slow as heck. You won´t be having enough time to move your catapults from one line of defense to the other in between waves. This is why you need to have small armies positioned at every location that you can be attacked from. Your archers and spearmen are more mobile and can reinforce the location that is being attacked in the current wave, but you need to have a group of catapults stationed at every access point to your city. For my island it was 3 defensive positions.

#General Tipps

1. After every wave you have a short period to breath. You want to use this time to replace troops and rebuild everything that was destroyed. For this you need to have a strong supply of concrete, planks, weapons and ropes.
2. I think I started the invasion with around 100k gold and a slightly positive balance. This is a good buffer for replacing troops, rebuilding and tanking a negative balance if one of your production chains goes down.
3. Oversupply fish. His fleet will destroy all of your fishing huts during a wave. You can quickly rebuild them, but you don´t want to run out of fish, during a wave, lose the population that you gain from it, lose the workforce and have your production chains downspiral.
4. Skorpio Towers are surprisingly good. If you place them strategically so close to the shore that they can attack troops that land on the shore but are not in range of archer towers of the ships, then they just need one hit to take out enemy catapult units.
5. Have at least 3 siege workshops and barracks as units take some time to produce and you want to be able to produce several at a time if you need to replace units quickly

Some Screenshot from my game:

total city

Defensive position 1

Defensive position 2

Defensive position 3

Trading post in protected bay area

military

playing time

pro consul status

After playing around 200 hours of Pax Romana, which I had fun playing, I picked up the base game of Anno 1800 without any DLCs and spent another 200 hours with it. I did this because so many people were comparing the two games, and Anno 1800 is widely considered the gold standard of the genre. Because of that, I think I’m in a good position to compare them directly and I feel like I understand what people are missing.

Soooo, Anno 117 is a beautiful game and as someone who enjoys building cities, that are beautiful looking and optimized to a certain extent, I really enjoyed a lot of the new features of 117. I think that the buffs that production buildings give to the surrounding area, incentivize cities that look more authentic and at the same time provide a nice puzzle mechanic to optimize your cities. Connecting the city status to the attributes of your city I think is also a great move (it just feels a bit misbalanced), as you have to adapt how you build your growing city and decide what goods to provide citizens first, depending on which attribute you want to address. The religious system is neat, the idea behind a research system I like (even though I think it is poorly implemented, but more on that later) and I love land combat.

The biggest difference for me between Anno 1800 and Anno 117 base-game is their late-game. In the late game of any Anno, you try to build a huge empire and (beautiful looking) cities. Naturally, if your city becomes 20 times larger than your starter settlement, it will need roughly 20 times the amount of goods. The crucial difference is how both games handle this scaling. In Anno 1800, you can leverage certain late-game mechanics that allow you to amplify your economic output instead of simply multiplying your early-game production setup by 20. What I did in my first game, was to colonize the New World, set up an oil supply, ship that oil supply to the Old World, where it is turned into electricity, which then boosted production chains. I absolutely loved this aspect of the game because it interconnected the two maps so elegantly. Expanding a city didn’t just mean “more of the same” (which inevitably becomes tedious at some point) but engaging with entirely new mechanics. The output of your economy no longer scales linearly if you integrated these systems intelligently. I didn´t like Items in Anno 1800 as I thought they were overpowered, but I understand why people do. They just added to this feeling that the productivity of your economy exploded. And I think this is what many frustrated Anno 117 players are missing, even though they might not be explicitly aware of it. In Anno 117, there isn´t really a late game mechanic that would allow you to leverage your economy in a way that feels equally rewarding as in Anno 1800. This is why supplying a big city in 117 felt a bit laborious at certain times. Sure, you can boost your fields with aqueducts and have a few specialist, but it just doesn´t really compare to the thrill of scaling up your economy as in 1800. It probably is the same amount of work, but in 1800 it feels catchy and rewarding and in 117 it tends to become monotonous. When in the late game of 117 you want to supply a big city, you basically search for island with the respective fertilities, build a settlement that you devote to the gods, that boost your respective production chains, produce there and then ship the goods to your capital. How you approach building up these islands is pretty repetitive and at some point in my playing time (while building up number 6 of one of these islands) I literally found myself saying, “I’ll continue tomorrow,” and then never really felt motivated to return to that save.

Anno 1800 also managed to give you this sense of progression in other aspects of the late game. It was so cool to build this new class of ships that felt entirely different to the ships, that you build in the early and mid-game. In 117 the quinquereme just feels like a bigger version of the starting boat. The world fair gave you access to specialist, the colosseum gives you some temporary buffs that you don´t really want to base your economy around as they are temporary. I understand the game design choice of optional needs in allowing new players to progress without having to deal with much complexity. But if the two maps can be completely autonomous, they also become somewhat irrelevant to each other. In the late game you are rarely having money issues. If you supply your patricians with goods that boost your balance a bit more or move your fire safety from minus something thousand to some other negative number, this just doesn´t motivate you as much to interconnect these regions. As I said, I understand the reasons for making needs optional, but then I feel like there should be game mechanics or other aspects of the game that make integrating the two regions more beneficial than what it feels like right now. And yes, there are more needs to be fulfilled in the base-game of 117 than in 1800. But I don´t think this necessarily makes the game more interesting. It´s not like producing some late game good feels fundamentally different than producing any midgame good. I much rather have an Anno where there are 10 needs to be fulfilled, but all come with interesting mechanics and interconnections, than an Anno where you have to fulfill 1000 needs that work by the same production chain logic. While I agree with people that Anno 117 in its base-game is having more resources, needs to be fulfilled and a second map that has way more content (and that looks absolutely beautiful) than Anno 1800 in the base game, Anno 1800 managed to interconnect its fewer parts in a very elegant way, which resulted in a late-game that felt way more extensive an catchy to me. The “more” content of the Anno 117 base game just doesn´t interconnect as well in the late game, which is why its late game just felt less “alive”. It was just more of the early and mid- game at a bigger scale, but nothing really new.

This is already a long post, but for those of you that are interested, here is my opinion on other stuff of the game, where I felt like potential of the game was being wasted.

The research tree: While I think the idea is great, I am having two specific problems with the research tree. 1. I never really base any strategic considerations around pushing the technological advancement of my empire. This is because you gain research points by either building a Grammaticus or a Library, (which are needs of my citicens anyway, so why would I not build them) or just by having a big city. In the late-game, your city status contributes the majority of your research points. This is why I am progressing through the game just like I would if the research tree wasn´t a thing and never actively base game-play decisions around it. I just do what I do in any Anno before that didn´t have a research tree and click the technologies in the order that seem the least road-blocky to me. 2. The research tree itself doesn´t really capture the sense of technological progression of my empire for me. I can build big buildings without ever having to have researched something like “advanced construction techniques”. I might just have a few equites, and I can build a huge ass bathhouse, but I can´t upgrade my warehouses? I haven´t checked but I think it´s even possible to build the colosseum without having researched warehouse upgrades. Also, when you research the technology that lets aqueducts boost your plantations or mines, let it be another module than the cistern that has people bathing in it. It looks great in the city but weird in a mining setup. My recommendation would be: make technological advances less specific. Have an upgrade that is necessary to build big buildings or upgrade stuff. Make the upgrades feel more technological and less like a battle pass. And don´t tie research point to the city status (and make them cheaper). It robs the gameplay of any strategic thought regarding this aspect of the game.      

Items: As I said before, I think items in Anno 1800 were overpowered and there wasn´t much skill involved in utilizing them compared with other mechanics like electricity. In Anno 117, I feel like the rare ones are well balanced. The green and the blue ones feel useless. I am not going to spend money on a specialist and an officium if the specialist is gonna safe me 20 gold in balance and 5 liberti in workforce. I would be surprised if anyone is using green or blue items frequently. You see that there went a lot of effort in designing these specialists, which is why its sad to know that this aspect of the game is mostly irrelevant for players.

Celtic vs. roman way: Another game mechanic that I like the idea of. It just doesn´t really translate into any strategic gameplay decisions. If I decide for the one way, then 1 hour later I´m going to have both tiers either way. Sure, some NPCs have an opinion about the way you decide first, but does anyone consider this while playing? Maybe have riots, of either the celtic or roman population, if one group is supplied more heavily with goods than the other. Or have celts have a belief bonus for their respective gods and vice verca. The devs have proven in 1800 that they are creative, I´m sure they can think of a game mechanic or two that makes this feels like an actual decision or consideration.

Gold and Silver: When I watched the trailer for Albion and the narrator was taking about “the riches running through the mountains” I was loving the idea of having this valuable resource that you only get in Albion and that is worth pursuing. The way it is right now is that silver is an input in some production chain and feels equally valuable than any other input material. I said before that I am missing game play mechanics in the late-game, that makes connecting the regions feel worthwhile. Maybe silver could be used to hire mercenaries or bribe Rome, so that when you attack other NPCs, the servants of emperor don´t report to him for one hour and he/ she doesn´t interfere in your conflicts. Or have this be a resource with which you pay day laborers that act as an additional work force for islands where you need the workforce. 

Final comment: I understand the idea behind “decomplexifying” an Anno, to make it more appealing to a more casual and less “obsessive” Player base. Also, in times in which Ubisoft is feeling financial pressure, I can imagine that a lot of this pressure is being put on the shoulders of their studios. Manuel Reinher who seems to be in charge on the one side of talking to Ubisoft and on the other side to manage the affairs at the studio, seems to be striving for a game that caters to everybody’s needs and doesn´t offend anybody. But by doing so, I also feel like the game is somewhat losing a bit of its identity. I think this is why a lot of diehard Anno fans feel like their interests are being sold out and I understand their frustration. But especially from a business perspective I would encourage the studio to again focus more on these core players. Because they are the ones paying a premium for a new Anno and its DLCs, they are the ones with crazy high net promotor scores, they create tipps and tricks series for Youtube, try to speedrun the game or set up a world record in some way or the other and develop mods for it. I think they really are the ones that got the flywheel spinning and that made the brand as big as it is today. Anno 117 has sold very well so far. But I wouldn´t misread into these numbers. I think Anno 117 is a good game, that sold well, because Anno 1800 is a great game. I myself have for the first time in my life preordered a game, just because I knew how much people loved Anno 1800. Now for the first season pass, I have already moved to waiting until the price of it drops eventually. If the base game of Anno 117 would have drawn me in as much as the base game of 1800, then I would have been willing to also pay that premium for the first season pass. I think Anno 117 has huge potential, the devs just need to start being a bit more creative again, do what they´ve proven they are capable of in Anno 1800 and not be so afraid of steping on someones toes.