Anno 117 announces major changes to city building and needs – here’s what you need to know

In a livestream, the developers reveal lots of exciting news about population levels, needs, and production chains.

Anno 117 is still a few months away from release, and the announced gameplay reveal won’t take place for another few weeks. To sweeten the wait, the developers have announced some exciting new features in a livestream. You can already read about the most important points in our news section, but now we’ll show you everything in detail so that you’re fully up to speed:

• Optional needs
• Attributes
• Building buffs

Optional needs

Whether you were playing endless mode or a campaign, your path to development in Anno was always pretty much set. You had to meet all the needs of a population level before you could upgrade residential buildings to the next level.

But these strict rules are being relaxed in Anno 117: Instead, there are now optional needs, as the developers have temporarily dubbed them. This means that needs such as food, clothing, and public buildings are divided into categories. However, you do not have to satisfy all the needs in a categoryin order to advance to the next population level.

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An example is the first population level: it requires food, but is satisfied with fish or porridge. So you can produce one of these goods or both – in which case you get additional benefits. (More on this in the next section!)

While the first example is mainly about space requirements, the decisions become more important later on: Then it’s a question of whether you settle a new island or even set out for a new region to develop a specific production chain. So you generally have the choice of how you want to progress. If you want, you can completely ignore the other region and still move forward.

Attributes

The new attributes also play a role in deciding for or against a particular production chain. For example, if you feed your residents fish, the population and the income generated per residential building will increase. If, on the other hand, you produce porridge, the population per house will increase even more, but there will be no additional income.

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Of course, you will reap the most benefits if you produce all available goods, with one caveat: some products, such as wine, also have negative effects when you make them available. So you need to think carefully about whether it is really worth investing in the production chain.

Building buffs

But it’s not just fulfilling a need that has additional effects on your city’s residents. Production buildings themselves also give surrounding buildings certain advantages and disadvantages.

For example, if you build a hatter’s workshop in a residential area, it will generate additional income from nearby houses. On the other hand, building a charcoal kiln will have a negative effect on the health and fire protection of nearby buildings.

Here, too, there are two sides to the coin: a bakery around the corner makes your citizens more generous and increases your income, but it also increases the risk of fire in the neighborhood. In any case, you need to think carefully about where you place buildings, because most advantages and disadvantages affect all buildings, not just residential ones.

Editor’s conclusion

Of all the new features announced so far for Anno 117, the new approach to needs and production chains intrigues me the most. The optional needs loosen up the gameplay loop a bit: if I don’t have much space on an island, I can simply forego growing oats or grow the grain later on a new island.

This also provides additional motivation to start a whole new game and focus on different products this time around.

But I find the building buffs even more exciting. Until now, production and residential buildings in Anno cities were usually strictly separated from each other. Now, for the first time, there is an incentive to place my bakery where people want to buy their bread. This isn’t just a cool mechanic, it could also make for a more varied cityscape, which I’m particularly excited about as a fan of beautiful buildings.