u/Basic--Annual

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?

I absolutely love the addition of land troops and land combat to 117 and I think it’s one of the aspects where to me personally it improved on 1800. It always made sense to me that military should be part of a game that simulates the expansion of an empire, so I always liked this holistic approach where you have to take care of expanding economically, but also military wise. There are some aspects that I think deserve criticism (e.g. I would like to have more insight into what the specific stats of my troops mean and how they matter in combat), but overall, I think they did a great job with it. The system is more RTS like compared to 1404 but not as complex as in a Total War – this is the sweet spot for an Anno IMO.

Land combat in my games tends to play out two ways: I either conquer enemy islands or defend my own islands against AI opponents or the emperor. When I conquer islands of an opponent, I need the most amount of military for their main islands that themselves have a lot of troops stationed on them and that are fortified the most. AI opponents and the emperor likewise tend to attack my main islands. This results in land battles that happen mostly in an urban setting. This is cool, but what I am missing is big armies clashing in the open field. Battles that capture the sense of roman expansion and conquest and not just local Governors clashing with each other.

## The concept

Anno 2205 had a very unique approach to the military aspect of the game. You couldn´t attack anything on the main map but there were dedicated battle maps on which ship fighting took place. 117 does a way better job at this but maybe the concept could be repurposed for a DLC. It would start with a new mechanic (maybe scouts) that would allow you to discover armies of other nations, foreign cities or settlements that would all be located on different maps  than Latium or Albion (these dedicated battle maps). The maps would be smaller than Latium or Albion and you also wouldn´t be able to build anything on them. They would show up on the “world view” and you could send ships to them, just like you can with the region maps right now. Some of them might just be ocean maps, where you can have your fleet clash with an enemy fleet and have a dedicated sea battle. Others might not be much larger than Cinis with a bit of ocean in one corner where your fleet enters the map. On the mainland, you would then find a foreign city, a settlement or an encampment of an enemy army. You can then have big sieges (the difference to sieges in Latium / Albion would be, that the cities are so much inland, that your ships can´t provide fire support and that you have to conquer the islands solely using land troops) or two armies clashing in the open field (the AI should again be so smart, so that you can´t just bait enemy troops in the fire range of your ships). Maybe it would be possible to resupply your troops, maybe it would be cooler, if you could only send one fleet and then you only have one shot at battling it out at this dedicated map. Maybe there could also be a challenging mechanic that you have to send goods along, like weapons, food and planks, that keeps your conquest going. Maybe ships only repair if they have planks loaded which are consumed while repairing. Maybe troops consume bread that is loaded at some ship or sth. like that. This could maybe also give further value to the new DLC Aegyptos as the breadbasket of your empire, because you need the overproduction in agricultural goods to fund your military interventions.

The incentive for having these battles (I would just do it for the sake of it) would be relics or trophies, that you bring home from battles. Maybe there would be a dedicated building (like the museum in 1800) or just the Villa, where you can display/ slot these. They then provide powerful islandwide buffs (just like completing a museum set did in 1800). If you are not successful in battle and your army gets wiped off the maps, then you would maybe get negative reputation with the emperor/ other governors. Or you get temporary debuffs to happiness for your islands and maybe an increase in uprisings for some time. And maybe the enemy even retaliates and you have to defend from enemy retaliation (mini versions of a rebellion).

I really like the military aspect of 117 and next to the city building aspects it is one of the highlights of 117 to me. I hope that in future DCLs they don´t just add new military units to the game but expand it a bit in depth. Because new units are maybe cool to play around a bit, but they don´t really add to how much time I am spending with this aspect of the game. I know that there are some people who don´t care about the military aspect of the game and who would be disappointed by “wasting” DLC content on something that they don´t care about, but maybe there could be a way of getting the relics and trophies even without going to war. These relics/ trophies could also directly address some current weaknesses of the game (patricians being not worthy of pursuit/ certain attributes of your city not really being influential for the gameplay experience). And I feel like there are a lot of people out there who enjoy having a rebellion against the emperor, which I think means that they are enjoying the military aspect of the game and would also enjoy an expansion of this aspect of the game. Would like to hear your thoughts:)

### The Concept:

Pretty much what the title says. The basic idea behind the mechanic is that an island’s health and happiness status would directly influence how productive its workforce is. I think this makes perfect sense from a gameplay and authenticity perspective, as a workforce that is healthy and happy is also more productive. A workforce that is sick and unhappy is not able/willing to work.

Somewhere in the game setup settings, there could be a new option - something like “Workforce Productivity & Public Wellbeing” - with a dropdown menu next to it. Clicking that dropdown would give you three different options that determine how strongly this mechanic affects your game.

1. Inactive: The health and happiness status of an island has no effect on the productivity of production buildings on it. This would essentially preserve the current gameplay experience for players who do not want to have this mechanic be part of their game.

2. Positive Effects: Only positive island health and happiness matter. If your population is healthy and happy, your production buildings receive productivity bonuses. If conditions drop into negative values, there is no punishment, you simply lose the bonus. For example, every certain amount of positive health or happiness could grant production buildings on that island a productivity increase. A well-managed island would be economically stronger because its workforce is thriving. The exact balancing would obviously need proper testing, but just to illustrate the concept: every 400 points in health or happiness could provide a 10% productivity bonus. That would mean an island with 2000 health and 1600 happiness would receive a total productivity bonus of 90% for all its production buildings. The exact numbers are less important than the underlying principle: healthy and content populations should feel economically beneficial.

3. Dynamic Effects: Health and happiness affect productivity in both directions. Strong health and happiness conditions improve the productivity of an island’s workforce, while disease and unhappiness directly reduce output. If conditions deteriorate badly enough, productivity could eventually drop all the way to zero, because at some point a population that is sick enough or unhappy enough would realistically stop functioning as an effective workforce altogether. Using the same example scaling, an island sitting at –800 health and –1200 happiness would only operate at 50% productivity.

To make this system fit different playstyles, the default implementation could also be tied to the difficulty settings. Easier difficulties could automatically default to the “Positive Effects” setting, rewarding good management without introducing harsh penalties, while harder difficulties could default to “Dynamic Effects” for players who want a more demanding economic simulation.

For clarity and usability, the system should also be transparent in the user interface. Just like clicking on a shrine or temple gives you an overview of your island’s religious status, clicking on a Medici or Custodia building could open a dedicated overview showing the current health and happiness values of that island, as well as the exact productivity modifier resulting from them.

You could also implement this feature in another way. But let’s first look at how this game mechanic could influence the gameplay experience. I put the alternative way to implement this feature at the end of this post.

In the Screenshot you can see my Albion capital btw. I tried to integrate public service buildings, production buildings, farms and resident houses, as the game incentivizes you to do so to a certain degree and because it looks gorgeous. To me it just makes so much sense that a workforce that is thriving is also more productive and would love to be incentivized to bring even more industry to the island.

### How would it change the gameplay:

I have never had that much fun building beautiful looking cities in an Anno and to me 117 is the best city builder game of the genre yet. At the same time, it feels to me like a worse resource management game than its predecessors. The aspect that I so far regarded as the core strength of Anno. The criticism of 117 that I tend to hear most often is its flat late game. I think the game mechanic change that I am suggesting could address this by affecting the following aspects of the game:

1. It would make the happiness and health status of your island feel consequential:
The happiness and health (and fire safety) status of a city tend to be pretty irrelevant for my game experience. I mostly try to keep them positive for the sake of it and so that there are no severe outbreaks. But I really only care that they are above 0. If they are much higher than 0, then you increase the likelihood of festivities happening on that island. But those bring you mostly money and at some point, I don´t really care about that anymore. In the late game, when I have a lot of islands, I tend to just click the notifications away that tell me about a festivity that can be hosted somewhere. I can´t be bothered. Whenever I´ve watched a streamer or a gameplay of someone building at a large scale, then you basically see -4k happiness/ health on every one of their islands. Both stats just don´t feel that consequential. If now, on the other hand, happiness and health would yield productivity gains for my production buildings, then those stats are something that I would want to optimize for. It would increase the puzzle factor for my cities so much. Suddenly, you want to optimize big cities for those stats but also have enough space to add industrial districts. The best way would not just be to have one big city on one island and then some production islands, where you just spam production buildings and enough houses to support those (all with detrimental health and happiness stats), but more big cities that also feature industrial districts. This does feel very authentic to me.

2. You would be much more incentivized to fulfill your citizens´ needs
In a previous post I was writing about why Patricians feel somewhat lame as the highest-tier population: (https://www.reddit.com/r/anno/comments/1tde5uy/anno\_117\_why\_do\_patricians\_feel\_somewhat\_lame\_as/) One of my arguments, is that I don´t feel like the game incentivizes you in a very good way to fulfill all their needs. This is partly because needs are optional and partly because the bonuses that they provide don´t feel that strong. One of the reasons why they don´t feel that strong is because they provide bonuses to the health, happiness and fire safety stat of your city (also other stats that don´t feel consequential to my personal gameplay like prestige and knowledge but that’s another story). As I just said, I don´t very much optimize for these stats and therefore don´t feel particularly incentivized to fulfill my Patrician’s needs. If, however, fulfilling those needs would mean that they would indirectly increase the productivity of my production buildings on that island, then I would find so much more value in fulfilling them. It also has some intricate dynamics as fulfilling a need could boost the health stat of an island which in turn could increase the productivity of the production chains that produce that respective good if produced locally.

3. The Colosseum would become more impactful:
It looks beautiful and I love being part of the crowd watching a game, but right now, the Colosseum doesn´t feel that impactful to me. It gives you some temporary buffs, that themselves don´t feel very strong and that you also don´t really want to build your economy around as they are only temporary in nature. The strongest effect that it has is the +3 boost to population. The other effect that it has is the boost to happiness. This again just doesn´t feel that strong because again this stat just doesn´t really seem that important. If this mechanic were to be implemented, the Colosseum could single-handedly indirectly provide a strong productivity buff to all your production buildings.

4. Your late game economy would feel more complex
In another post of mine, I was comparing the 1800 base game with that of Anno 117 (https://www.reddit.com/r/anno/comments/1tagcer/feedback\_and\_thoughts\_on\_anno\_117\_vs\_1800\_basegame/). My argument was that they feel different because they handle the scaling of your economy very differently in the late game. The 1800 (base) late game to me felt catchier as it provided so many parts to integrate, that if done well, made your economy just so productive. Supplying a late game city just didn’t ‘feel like X times the amount of work as supplying an early game city but rewarding and challenging. If the mechanic I´m describing in this post were to be implemented, then I think this would help 117 in this regard. Supplying a big city would not just mean more of the same work but integrating different aspects of your game with each other to make your workforce and therefore your economy more productive. Optimizing your cities for a healthy and happy workforce to make your economy more productive could be an equally viable way compared to just building more of the same. An alternative way in the late game to increase your economic output could be diplomacy. Being allied with Tarragon gives you a 10% boost in happiness for all of your islands. This would translate into increases in global productivity and might provide an interesting new way for scaling your economy in the late game.

5. Items would feel more powerful
A lot of people liked them in 1800, some people didn´t. I myself thought they were overpowered, but I do agree that 117 specials feel somewhat weak. If you want to boost a production chain, in Anno 117, the best way is to build that production chain on an island, where you worship a god, who boost that respective production chain. With a small city, you can easily get enough belief for a 40% productivity boost. With the right specialists, you can get another 60% and then have your production buildings produce at 200%. If now, you move your production from a designated island to a big city island, with the right gods you can easily boost productivity to 300%. Specialists would play a bigger role in that. You would not only want to use specialists that directly boost productivity but also utilize a lot more specialists within Officiums (probably not the plural) within your city to boost happiness and health directly and thereby productivity indirectly. Specialists would still be weak compared to 1800. But if you have a game mechanic where you can indirectly leverage specialists to boost productivity of your production buildings, then you could utilize a lot of those weaker specialists to have a similar result in the end.

6. The game on the hardest difficulty setting would become more of a challenge:
If you play on the hardest difficulty setting, then having a positive balance does become quite a challenge. Managing the other stats is also challenging, but it just doesn´t feel that important to address them. If you would play with setting 3 “Dynamic Effects”, however, then you would have to work very hard for keeping these positive. Otherwise, you would have to deal with a decrease in your island’s productivity. Instead of mainly focusing on one stat, you would now need to more actively manage different aspects of your city. I am genuinely excited by the idea of having this be part of my games.

There are probably a lot more aspects of the game than the ones that I mentioned that you would approach in a different way. Some aspects of the game would need to be rebalanced around this change (maybe now the happiness buff of the Colosseum would be too strong, maybe the alliance buff of Dorian and Tarragon would be as well). But apart from that, no immediate downsides came to mind. If you would want to approach the game in the exact same way as you approach it right now, then you could. To me it doesn´t really seem to interfere with any of the people’s save games. (Something that I know Ubisoft pays a lot of attention to before changing anything about the game). The more I think about this mechanic, the more excited about it I get. I think it would connect so many aspects of the game that feel a bit isolated right now and give so many aspects of the game more meaning. I think this simple change could honestly motivate me to spend 2x the amount of time with the game that I have so far. Sure, Ubisoft Mainz could wait to find a way to implement this with one of their DLCs, but it feels to me like such a good core mechanic, that I would love for this to become part of the base game. It would be a great message to those diehard Anno fans, for who the game didn´t have much appeal (the reasons I mostly heard were the flat late game, which I think the game mechanic that I am suggesting could partly address). If you are afraid of implementing such a core mechanic this late after release, then ask people what they think of it first. You do have a big social media presence. If you would get a lot of positive feedback, then I wouldn’t expect there to be any backlash. I know that people from the Dev team also read posts in this community (Oli for example, that you see in most official life streams). I would love to get a response and hear what you think about it! Same goes for everybody else reading this.

# Alternative way to implement the feature

Instead of having the health and happiness status of an island independently influence the productivity of production buildings on that island, it could also function as a combined effect. They would function like a logical AND function. The lower stat of the two determines the productivity boosts/ decreases that you get. This would make the mechanic feel a bit more authentic. Your workforce is only more productive if they are healthy AND happy. You can´t just balance out a -4k happiness stat with a + 4k health stat. The increase/ decrease in productivity that you would get if your island has minimum of X points in the health/ happiness stat would be doubled. If your island has 400 health and 400 happiness, then you would get 20% increase in productivity. If it is 400 health and 300 happiness, then you get no effect. If you have 400 health and -400 happiness, then you get -20% productivity. Maybe Fire Safety would also be part of this mechanic. Otherwise, Fire safety would again feel relatively inconsequential as a stat. It also makes sense that if your population has to worry about their home burning down, then they are not as productive as they could be.

To me, the highest population tier feels less worthy of pursuit than in previous Annos. I don´t find myself incentivized to have a lot of them. I just have as many as I need to. And for those I also don´t feel particularly incentivized or challenged to fulfill all their needs. Does it feel different to you guys?

Following are the reasons that came to mind, when thinking about why I feel they way I do about Patricians being a bit dissapointing as the highest population tier:

1. What you see in the Screenshots: The patrician house is inhabited by 36 people, the Liberti house by 22. I am missing supply of caviar, so the patrician house should max out at 39 inhabitants. This means that the highest tier house isn´t even housing twice as much population as the starter tier house. This is because the strong population boosts of public service buildings like the Forum, don´t just apply to the tier, which has the Forum as its need, but to houses of all tiers. On the one hand I like this feature as I regard Liberti and Plebeian Workforce as the most valuable resources in the game and this allows you to generate a lot of those. I have done my fair bit of criticizing 117 for the missing depth in the late game. I feel like this aspect helps with that as only in the late game, you are able to generate that much workforce to sustain the according army or fleet. On the other hand, it does devalue the patrician tier. One of the late-game goals of every Anno was always to pursue a big total population. The highest tier house would always give you much more than twice the amount of population than the lowest tier house. Patricians in that regard are somewhat inefficient.
2. The goods which you need to supply your Patricians with to fulfill their needs don´t provide particularly powerful buffs. They give you better boosts than a lot of mid game goods, but not significantly better ones. The more efficient ways to address your balance or population size or what not, I feel like, is to just build an Equites city on another island. In Anno 1800 the upkeep cost of a lot of late game production chains/ ships was scaling hard. You could only afford them if you supplied your engineers or investors with the goods they needed, because they themselves scaled crazy in how much money they gave you. In Anno 117 you don´t have such scaling. I don´t mind, but I am kind of lacking the incentive to supply my Patricians with all their needs. I mostly do it to address certain attributes of my city.
3. The goods which you need to supply your Patricians with to fulfill their needs aren´t particularly interesting or challenging to produce. A lot of them need to be produced in Albion. Because of the optional needs system, you don´t necessarily need them to progress. Where there used to be a challenge, because you had to integrate regions in order to fulfill your people’s needs, you can (and it does give you some buffs), but you don´t need to anymore to progress. The production chains are a bit more complex than mid-tier production chains, which is nice, but they don´t involve any other game mechanic like electricity as in 1800 but follow the same production-chain logic as any other good.
4. Patrician workforce is not very valuable. You only need it for the production chains of a few of their own needs.  Other than that, I haven´t found any use for them.
5. Reaching patricians or having lots of them doesn´t really give you access to any new aspects or mechanics of the game like in 1800 where engineers gave you access to electricity/ steam ships or investors that gave you influence.

To me the Equites Tier feels more exciting to reach. They have the Bathhouse and Forum as their needs which at least involve connecting said buildings to a water source. They also introduce aqueducts and give you access to more military units. Their houses also look somewhat like the Patrician houses.  

P.S. In my posts so far about Anno 117, I have been very critical of the game. I don´t want to sound too negative. I am having fun with the game and in no Anno before did I enjoy the city building aspect of it as much as in this one. It has the setting, it has the looks and to me personally, it is the best city builder Anno yet. All the criticizing I only do in the hope that the things the game isn´t good at become visible to the dev team one way or another and become addressed in the coming years by patches and DLCs.