Anno 1800 just won’t stop getting bigger. Now it’s getting a fourth season and scenarios as well. Have they gone mad?
You should take a break, you’ve been playing for four years. It’s about time Anno 1800 also got that warning message for our advisor. Because the building game will continue to be supplied with new content in 2022. Somewhat surprisingly, Ubisoft announced Season 4 for their highly popular building game a few months ago.
You can read the comprehensive preview with even more info on Season 4 in our cover story:
Table of Contents
Anno 1800 – exclusive info on Season 4: “Our DLC philosophy has changed “
All info on Anno 1800 Season 4
When is Season 4 coming?
Season 4 will start on 12 April 2022 with its first DLC Germ of Hope and Game Update 14, followed by the other DLCs and Game Updates.
What is Season 4 about?
For Season 3, the developers refrained from imposing another session (i.e. a new area) on us. After all, with Old World, New World, Arctic and Enbesa there are already enough of them. That’s why Season 3 primarily expanded the Old World. Season 4 will now mainly revolve around the New World.
We talked to Ubisoft Mainz about Season 4 of Anno 1800 and learned many details about all three DLCs that you won’t find anywhere else.
Anno 1800 is an exceptional game. It was already that at release and becomes a little bit more so with each new season. At a time when the service concept seems to be in crisis, especially in strategy games, Anno 1800 shows how to do it right.
Of course, this raises the question every year: How massive is this building game supposed to get? And it seems that Ubisoft Mainz has found a very elaborate answer to this highly complex question: Yes.
We naively thought we had already reached the end after rooftops in the city. We thought even bigger was simply impossible. But as with Land of the Lions, we were wrong and will simply leave this prediction in the future. Instead, we are finally taking a closer look at the DLC future of this exceptional game.
On the occasion of the big reveal of the three new expansions from Season 4, we spoke exclusively with Senior Brand Manager Marcel Hatam from Ubisoft Mainz and asked him about how their work has changed in the last three years and, above all, what exactly Annoholics can look forward to in detail in the coming months. Here you will find information that is not available anywhere else.
A general overview of the release dates and contents of Season 4 can also be found here:
The Big Goal of Season 4
The developers at Ubisoft are well aware that the Anno account is slowly threatening to overflow with DLCs. Even the world’s best logisticians simply lose track at some point if they have to extend their attention to too many areas at once. But the team already faced this problem in Season 3.
The answer: no additional region. While the first two seasons introduced two completely new island worlds with the Arctic and Enbesa, full of exotic goods and a completely new ambience, Season 3 did not take this step. It would simply have been too much. Instead, they decided to give us all even more toys to play with in the Old World.
The result was grandiose, but – well, not necessarily less complex than a whole new session. Just travel time and rooftops of the city made the administrative effort feel tenfold. Personally, I am now almost dependent on the co-op mode in order not to sink completely. Nevertheless, for the time being the team is sticking to its assessment that one more area would not be expedient. Although there are exciting ideas from the community, such as East Asia or India.
However, since the Old World is already creaking under the feature load, they let their eyes wander to the West. To the New World, which has also existed since the release. Marcel Hatam explains that many players had the feeling that the New World had been comparatively neglected in the previous seasons.
There was the feeling that the New World was treated a little stepmotherly. Not much happened, many new elements could not be used in the New World. The other thing, of course, is the space issue. A lot has been added in the Old World, but it hasn’t reduced coffee consumption, for example. These are two things that we want to address in a very concrete way.
When Hatam talks about the space issue, he doesn’t just mean the possibility of generating more or larger islands in the New World. The team has also been thinking about how to use the available space more efficiently. And there it is, the magic word that makes every Anno fan rejoice: Efficiency.
A seed of hope
The first of the three expansions in particular is completely dedicated to efficiency. Germ of Hope it shall be called and is basically the content counterpart to Palaces of Power. That DLC kicked off the second Season in early 2020 and brought a modular Dominion to the Old World. Once you activate Germ of Hope, you’ll be allowed to construct a similar building in the New World as well.
Wait, wait! Shouts an excited investor now, no doubt, as his monocle splashes into his hibiscus tea. What, after all, does a new magnificent mansion in the New World have to do with saving space and efficiency? The palace is the opposite of that. But don’t worry, dear financier, in the New World this building has many more functions than mere ostentation.
Here you build a so-called hacienda. You can even choose one on each island. By the way, hacienda means estate or manor, but also tax authority. And its functions in Anno 1800 are just as varied as the translations. A hacienda is supposed to become the new centre of life, as Hatam says.
The centre of life
For one thing, a hacienda, like the palace, allows various edicts with which we trigger effects throughout the associated island. With the palace in the Old World, similar directives can, depending on the ministry, for example, increase storage space, increase attractiveness or or promote production. Similar effects will also occur with the Hacienda in the New World.
But for this, we have to expand this estate piece by piece. Most likely, the new wings of the Hacienda will not take up as much space as the palace. After all, it’s about saving space. The Hacienda does this by providing living space, for example. So basically we save some residential areas.
At the same time, it is worthwhile to build fields and animal farms near the hacienda. It is, after all, a “country” villa that is intended to improve agricultural operations in particular. On the one hand, modules can ensure that buildings such as the cocoa or coffee plantation require less space.
On the other hand, the hacienda also collects the droppings of alpacas or cattle and turns them into effective fertiliser. Fertiliser, in turn, is built directly to the farms in the form of silos, thus increasing their production. This also works in the Old World, as long as the fertiliser is imported. A real shit … Bone job.
The Hacienda should also give all the Jornaleros and Obreros of the New World greater independence. Depending on the module, this building can produce goods that previously had to be imported. This way, the Obreros can finally enjoy local beer and no longer have to wait for supplies from the Old World.
More content thanks to new scenarios
A special feature of Season 4 for Anno 1800 are the scenarios. They didn’t exist at all in the building game for years, until a few months ago when the first scenario Eden was added at the end for free. Now every new DLC will also introduce a new scenario. This suggests that the content for the endless game will be somewhat less extensive. At least in direct comparison to Palaces of Power, we do not have this impression with Germ of Hope so far.
The first scenario is called Silver Cage, comes into play together with Germ of Hope and unsurprisingly takes us to the New World. Here we embody a former adversary. Vasco Oliveira will be familiar to some from the DLC Sunken Treasures, where he tries to outwit us in the search for the Queen’s Sceptre. Of course he doesn’t succeed and as punishment he now gets to dig for silver for his king Joao.
Silver does not actually exist as a resource in the main game and will remain an exclusive part of the new scenario. The same goes for the seasons. Oliveira will have to deal with capricious weather on the new islands. Depending on the season, rain can flood the lands or the sun can cause a drought. Incidentally, there will also be desert-like islands that we have to make fertile with canals, as in Land of the Lions.
Eden at the End was already quite a complex scenario and designed for players to fail and try again with better resources. However, this roguelike approach is not the most important aspect in the new scenarios. According to Hatam, even more experienced Anno fans may fail at the beginning or at least not get the highest score.
Into the realm of the air
The second DLC Realm of the Skies sounds like the most exciting of the three so far. On the one hand, because it focuses entirely on airships and airships are just cool. On the other hand, because it makes an older DLC lose a little of its value.
Airships already existed in Anno 1800. They were one of the big end goals of the Arctic. Incredibly difficult to unlock and even more difficult to produce. After all, gas is needed for this, which had to be laboriously mined from glaciers. There is nothing there except gas deposits. Nothing!
With the new expansion, airships become much more accessible. Here you can build these imposing transporters without exception in the new world. However, the resources required for this are still a secret.
Unlike the airships from the Arctic, there will also be different types of ships. Among them are warships, which was categorically excluded at the time of the release of The Passage. As a kind of counter-reaction, the DLC will also enable anti-aircraft guns. Together with Roofs of the City, one could really think about whether it shouldn’t slowly be called Anno 1900 – checksum 9 or not.
Marcel Hatam, by the way, shares the assessment that with Empire of the Skies, Airships of the Arctic loses much of its appeal. Nevertheless, he does not believe that this makes the DLC seem completely useless. According to Marcel, many players don’t like the Arctic at all because of the airships. Much more exciting, he says, is the survival aspect, the story of the DLC and the unique atmosphere of this region.
We agree with that. The Arctic airships are usually so expensive to produce anyway that only very few people want to afford a whole fleet, let alone can.
The Rise of the New World
Little is known about the end of the fourth season, and Marcel Hatam hasn’t told us much about it either. But this will definitely be the DLC that makes the New World stand out much more from the other sessions. That is why it is called Ascension of the New World. The word “Ascension” was chosen well in several respects.
The DLC is meant to symbolise the new self-confidence of the inhabitants of the New World, who are striving for greater things. They rise together with their New World and take on a more important role in world affairs. At the same time, the inhabitants of the New World are literally ascending. A new population level is introduced. It does not end with the Obreros.
(Colourful cityscapes with Caribbean flair are promised by the cities of the New World with the last DLC. But it has some very exciting implications. There must inevitably be new buildings and very probably new resources. This will definitely increase the complexity of the New World a good deal.
More space will then also be imperative. And that is exactly what will be provided. The New World will grow with the third expansion, thanks to new and larger islands. Even if you have already occupied all the islands of the New World in your current game.
According to Hatam, the DLC will expand the session at the edges, so that the large islands will first appear. So any DLC should still be able to be added to a game in progress without any problems. This is one of Ubisoft Mainz’s DLC principles, for which they only made an exception with The Anarchist.
The challenges and a new philosophy
Even without a new session: Anno 1800 will undoubtedly become even more complex and extensive at the end of Season 4. It will also become more and more exciting to see where the balance might start to bend under the load. Because for the development team it becomes more and more difficult each time to find the perfect mixture.
After all, that’s what Anno lives on. That every cog meshes and the DLCs have to work in conjunction with all the other DLCs as well as on their own. Hatam admits that balancing is a very big challenge. Especially since the team has now abandoned the philosophy that each DLC stands on its own).
In the early seasons there were no major interactions. So if you settle in Enbesa, you don’t need goods from the Arctic to do so and vice versa. As before, of course, one DLC must not presuppose another. Nevertheless, players with many DLCs should get a small bonus.
This could already be seen in Reisezeit. Here there are restaurants or bars that fulfil luxurious cravings of tourists. The recipes can demand goods from the main game, but some also rely on resources from Enbesa. We expect Season 4 to benefit from previous DLCs again as well.
According to Hatam, this is not a bad thing, as long as no one feels they are missing out on an essential gameplay component.
No more really big updates
It is also becoming increasingly difficult to find content that comes with the free updates. There have been some pretty big chunks in the past. Think of the co-op mode, the statistics screen or most recently the new scenario.
No such major additions are planned for Season 4. So far, Game Update 14, 15 and 16 feature rather unspectacular innovations such as the option to switch through tips in the loading screen or a better organisation of the ships. That is not earth-shattering. On the other hand, Anno 1800 doesn’t need such big changes anymore.
Sure, you can always improve the balancing and if you improve the quality of life, you might even learn something for the next game. But otherwise, this game is already in a very safe harbour.
Anno 1800 is an exceptional game that has only rarely disappointed with its DLCs. The innovations of Season 4 sound ambitious, maybe some of them will fall apart. Who knows. In the meantime, we expect everything. Except for one thing: that Anno 1800 is finished even after Season 4.
We won’t make that mistake again.
Editorial conclusion
Airships! Sorry, but I can’t think of anything else at the moment. I really liked the fact that airships made their way into Anno 1800 with The Passage. What I didn’t like so much was that they were so incredibly difficult to build. Most of the time I really lack the ambition for glacier colonisation. So much the better that Season 4 will soon introduce many more airships into the game. Personally, I think that a slight steampunk touch is quite good for the game. As long as you can decide to leave it out voluntarily.
And that is fortunately possible with the DLC. But let’s wait and see how well it all works. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to play it yet. I can actually imagine that the flying ships could be a big problem from a pure balancing point of view. Just think how difficult it gets as soon as ships at sea are attacked. Is that even possible? Would be strange at least if it wasn’t.
Oh, and the other DLCs sound nice as well in my opinion. My feeling is that Germ of Hope won’t knock our socks off for now. For that we’ve already gotten DLCs that have done significantly more. But the haciendas certainly sound practical. I’m also really looking forward to Rise of the New World. More space and a new population level – I can already see how this DLC will keep me in front of the monitor for hours. Must. Yet. More. Rum. Burn.
