Hello Anno Community,
As you might have guessed from the title, today’s DevBlog will focus on modular ships in Anno 117: Pax Romana. If you watched our segment at IGN FanFest, you have probably heard Manuel Reinher, Creative Director, talk about this new feature; therefore, let’s have a closer look at modular ships!
Anno & ships: a 27 yearlong cruise (and counting)
Since 1998, ships have always played a key role in Anno games: whether you were transporting tools after desperately buying the whole stock from the travelling merchants in Anno 1602 or efficiently coordinating trade routes in Anno 1800, you certainly have sailed the high seas in some shape or form while playing Anno.
It should not be a surprise to you all, then, to see ships play a key role in Anno 117: Pax Romana. However, unlike earlier Anno games, Anno 117: Pax Romana will change things up a bit with a new feature: ships will be modular, and you will be able to select different types of modules to customise and specialise them for economic or military roles.
We spoke to Markus, Game Designer on Anno 117: Pax Romana about this new feature: “The idea of introducing modular ships to the Anno was going around already for a while. With the Roman setting we had the perfect platform to do it, since it is very true to how the Romans themselves built their ships. In Anno 1800, we made good experiences with the ship items and wanted to build on the experience of customizing your ships to the specific tasks you had in mind for them and represent your choices also in the visuals of your ships this time.”
Thus, just like Romans, in Anno 117: Pax Romana you’ll build your ships modularly: this design is historically inspired by their building techniques. Romans typically constructed their ship hulls with a flat deck and then attached different modules to them.
Ships: how do they work?
“They float on water”, you might answer. That’s true, however, we are not here to discuss physics.
Just like previous Anno games, you will build ships in the Shipyard. When opening its menu, you’ll be offered a list of pre-designed ships. Upon selecting and clicking on a ship, you will initiate the construction phase and consume the resources needed; the ship production, of course, will also require time. During this phase, the Shipyard will cost workforce and money; if the workforce is insufficient, the construction speed is reduced, resulting in longer production times.
In the Shipyard construction menu, you’ll be able to choose between three different types, based on the size of their hull, that you unlock throughout the game:
- Penteconter – small ship
- Trireme – medium ship
- Quinquireme – large ship
It was interesting to see how the Romans built their ships. Roman ships had no straight lines, but they had fluent shapes, quite curved – and it’s really hard to model this into the game. So, we needed to simplify them in order to make them work.
-Rolf, Expert Artist
The new modular system
If you feel that none of the predefined ships quite suit your needs, then it’s time to customise them based on your preferences and requirements.
When it comes to the customisation of your ships (aka modularity), the hull will influence the number of modification slots your ship gets. Slots determine the cargo capacity of a ship and can be used to install modules. However, larger ships also mean slower acceleration – something you’ll need to keep in mind when preparing your fleet!
- Penteconter: 2 modification slots
- Trireme: 3 modification slots
- Quinquireme: 4 modification slots
By adding modules, you will influence different aspects of your ship: its stats (e.g. health points, speed), its function (e.g. naval combat) and, of course, its appearance.
There are multiple types of modules that you can use, each one with a different feature:
- Mast: additional speed when sailing with the wind on long distances, reaching higher max speed and higher speed when sailing between regions
- Rows: additional speed, reaching higher minimum speed and acceleration, with smaller turn radius; it’s perfect for short ranges and combat
- Reinforced Hull: additional HP
- Archer Tower: shoots many small arrows in all directions on short range
- Scorpio: shoots high-precision spears and deals high damage mid-range, only on the sides
- Onager: Shoots rocks with high range and highest damage, but low accuracy and towards the front
With the construction menu, we wanted to show the player a preview of the ship configuration while setting it up. However, it was not feasible to only use regular 2D elements like Icons in the UI, as it would either look too simple, by just listing the elements, or too complex, by trying to show a preview in 2D which follows the exact same rules as the ship would follow in game. Therefore, we tried to show the full 3D model of the modular ship in the UI, the same as it would show up in game when built. That worked quite well, and we are going with that approach since then.
-Jannis, Gameplay Programmer
When building your ships, there will be some limitations in place. Each module can only be built a limited number of times per ship; for example, on a trireme you’ll be able to build only a maximum of 2 catapults or archer towers. If you like numbers, you might be interested in knowing that for a penteconter there will be up to 16 different combinations of modules, 60 for a trireme, and 114 for a quinquireme.
Once you finish adding modules to your ships, the cargo slots will be calculated from its original capacity minus the used modification slots. Each module always takes up exactly one cargo space slot. However, to ensure that ships always retain some cargo capacity, we have made sure that a certain number of cargo slots remain free and cannot be used for modules.
Be careful, though: you can choose and modify modules for each slot only during ship construction – once the ship is built, you won’t be able to modify its configuration anymore. And if you’re wondering: yes, you will be able to save your ship configurations! Each Shipyard has 2 slots per ship type, this means 6 slots in total. If you want to have a third custom ship, you will need to build a new Shipyard.
Modular ships and Items
We know what you’re about to ask – what about Items? Yes, just like in Anno 1800, you will be able to equip Ship Items. For example, each of your ship can have its own Captain equipped on board! But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, we’ll talk about this in more detail in the future.
Dev insights: some behind-the-scenes about the modular system
As you can imagine, implementing this feature came with its fair challenges – from different points of view. When it comes to Game Design, for example, Markus mentioned that it was crucial to design the system in a way that it as flexible as possible without breaking any logic or visuals, while keeping it simple and intuitive for players to use.
For the art team instead, one of the challenges was to understand how big a ship module should be in order to be compatible with the beloved Anno grid. It might not seem obvious at first, but just like roads and buildings, the grid applies to the ocean too – that means that ships move within the grid. “This required a lot of back and forth: first we prototyped by building simple grey blocks and figuring out if that measure worked in the grid, then we made it work visually.” – Rolf, Expert Artist
Jannis, Gameplay Programmer, told us about the challenges they faced to create a system that is flexible and at the same time easy to maintain. “The placement of modules on the ships is dynamical. As the number of possible combinations is quite high it is not possible to create static files for all combinations, but we have to create the ship dynamically on runtime in the game when a ship is created, as in we calculate on which positions which slot gets installed and place it visually and logically at that slot index.
How this happens is defined by a few rules that we had to iterate on a lot. Furthermore, we had to split the system into a logical part: ‘where and how should modules be linked to?’, and a visual part: ‘which 3D models are used in which situations?’. For example, a mast at the front of the ship has to look different than a mast in the center of it. This allows us to efficiently set up modular ships, validate each possible configuration and create different visual variations e.g. for special participants such as pirates.”
This means that, not only does each module have a different feature, but they also have a different priority in relation to other module types. This priority influences the slot the module will occupy when the ship is configured: each module has a preferred slot to be on; however, if the slot is already occupied by a module with higher or same priority, the module is placed on the next open slot that is further outside. If all slots further outside are occupied, it will move to the next open slot towards the middle of the ship. This is to make sure that placement of the modules will result in a nice, good-looking structure on the ship.
Workforce, construction and maintenance costs
Unlike previous Anno games, ships will now require workforce not only during the construction phase, but also to function. “We moved away from the more artificial and abstract influence limitation established in Anno 1800 to the more grounded and realistic workforce approach. This will lead to a much tighter tie between your economy and your Naval capacity.” – Markus, Game Designer. However, this is a bigger topic that will be addressed in a future blog – so, watch this space if you’re curious to know more!
The construction and maintenance costs of the ships change depending on the installed modules. For example, rows will be more labour intensive then sails – this means they will require more workforce. Same thing for the Archer Tower compared to the Onager, as there are more soldiers involved.
Well, we hope you enjoyed reading through this (quite long) blog on Modular Ships! As mentioned above, expect more to come on the ship topic, in which we’ll focus on naval combat and the ship system in general. In the meantime, if you have any questions, never hesitate to reach out!