r/anno

The goal for the island was Ceres devotion for Vervactor's Plough, while also making the city feel alive by blending with the environment decent flow from luxury core to rural areas. Fertilities are Lavender / Resin / Olive / Oyster / Marble / Gold. Normal difficulty consumption game with maximum fertilities and building slots. The island massively overproduces on Amphorae, Olive Oil and Gold. Medium overproduction of soap, and supplies all T1 & T2 goods for self sustain and passive selling. T3 I have to import Togas, Sandarac and Glass. T4 I import all goods except Standing Lyres, since I already import Sandarac for Writing Tablets

Island income around 15k with profit of 5k after expenses. Devotion 12k. Population 16k.

### 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.

Total population: 37k
Cinis population: 18k -> post eruption down to 16k

Just some thoughts and things I've noticed over the last few weeks:

• While I enjoy restarting Anno 1800 from time to time, with Anno 117 I used the DLC to start a second playthrough and that's when the game really grew on me. However, I believe that I'll keep this savegame long term for any future DLCs - hence the dedicated open space I've reserved on Cinis. When not playing too seriously, it takes a ridiculously long amount of time to unlock the entire tech tree and I don't think I have the patience to put in the effort again.
• I love the intricate details and choreographies at amphitheater events!
• Volcano mechanic and the major incidents that occur post eruption are pretty cool!
• To me, story matters - Sandbox not that much (I know this will probably put me in a minority of the player base): Still bummed that the game released with a obviously unfinished main story....
• .... but did anyone notice Caecilia's comment after fulfilling one of her requests? Something along the lines of: >!"I believe you're a descendant of [forgot who exactly], which means your claim to this province supercedes even the Emperor's"!< -> Very curious to see how the story will continue!
• Also, a somewhat funny surprise after finishing the story with a peacefull approach to Voada: After some time, that ghastly woman >!started to extort taxes from me under threat of a declaration of war. That's when I knew she had to go, lol.!<
• Hippodrome and Delta can't come soon enough!