Sometimes playing Anno feels like being a bird parent trying to fulfil the needs of the ever-demanding offspring: Your citizens want clothes, they want sausages, beer, carpets, pasta and energy drinks. Let’s also not forget the marketplace, tavern, laboratory or the concert hall.
Granted, your citizens pay taxes (usually) to make up for the hassle, but they really make you work for that.
In short: needs are a core aspect of Anno gameplay loop, you fulfil them to make money, to make your people happy and to level up residences in order to progress through the game.
Needs in general
This hasn’t changed much in Anno 117: Pax Romana, on first glance: We still separate needs into two types: consumption needs and service needs.
The former require the player to produce goods (e.g. Porridge) in certain quantities which are then consumed by the residence. As long as enough goods are produced, the need fulfilment slowly rises to 100% and the need is considered fulfilled.
As in past Anno games, the consumption is always calculated for the whole island (“island demand”) and goods are consumed directly out of the island storage. Like in Anno 1800, you can also pause needs (which also pauses the consumption of the respective good).
Service needs are fulfilled via public service buildings. Accordingly, they are fulfilled by the residence simply being within the radius of the service building.
If you’ve played any of our previous games, all of this should feel familiar, just like the next part: Fulfilling needs is how you advance through the game. If you fulfilled enough needs, residences can be upgraded to unlock the next population tier, as well as new buildings and production chains.
The actual activation of a need (i.e. when the people demand for it and start consuming it) is tied to the amount of population of each tier of an island.
Making things optional
Alright, so, but what has changed?
A quick look into the object menu for any residence building will immediately make our Anno veterans stop: needs are ordered in categories! Let’s compare the needs of the Farmers from Anno 1800 with the needs of the Liberti from Anno 117: Pax Romana.
These changes in Anno 117: Pax Romana we sumarised under the feature name “optional needs”.
The different types of needs now all belong to one of multiple categories, for example food, fashion or public services. Higher population tiers have additional need categories that unlock as you progress.
Providing a residence with any kind of good will contribute to the overall supply value of a category. Reach the required supply threshold in all categories and the residence is ready to be upgraded.
Let’s dive a bit deeper into these supply values with two colleagues from the Game Design team: Christian, Senior Game Designer and Jan, Game Director.
Each need has a certain supply value for a category. For example, delivering porridge OR sardines to our residents is equal to a supply value of 1 each. Luckily, the supply threshold for food for the Liberti tier also is exactly 1, meaning we can already consider this category “done” by simply supplying one of the two food needs. If we now also fulfil the “fashion” and “public service” category, we can level-up this residence.
The food category of the Plebeians, however, has a supply threshold of 3. Even if we supplied both sardines and porridge, it wouldn’t be enough. We will have to set up at least one of the new food production chains to reach this threshold.
As a general rule, the supply threshold of a category is always lower than the sum of all supply values of a category – and it will increase with each upgrade of a residence. That means, you will not need to provide all the needs of a category and not setup all the production chains at your disposal, but you also can’t just stick to only providing the lowest (and easiest to produce) type of need in a category.
To visualize this a bit better, have a look at the object menus of a Libertus and Plebeian residence side-to-side. You can see:
- Each needs category has a certain minimum threshold, split into multiple bars
- Each need has a certain value, also represented by bars, which feeds into the category threshold
- The food category of Plebeians has a higher threshold than the Libertus food category
- Fulfilment is represented in green (regular) and golden (more than minimum)
As you might have guessed from the context already, however, upgraded population tiers keep the needs of all previous tiers. Your early game goods and public buildings will therefore continue to be useful, and you can decide if you want to reach the supply thresholds of the different categories by also fulfilling multiple lower-level goods or fewer higher-level ones that each provide higher supply values.
You can’t provide lower-level population tiers with higher-level goods or services, though.
What happens if you provide a residence with more than the required supply threshold, you might ask.
Well, let’s first take a closer look at the individual needs: Each need, no matter if a consumption need or a service need also provides certain attributes.
For example, providing your residents with sardines gives you +1 income and +1 population per residence, while providing them with porridge gives you +2 population for this particular residence. Garum (a need of the second population tier in Latium) gives you +2 income and +1 happiness for said residence, just to name another example.
Accordingly, assuring more than the minimum supply for a category means the respective residences also receive additional attributes – providing both sardines and porridge nets you +3 population and +1 income from the food category per residence.
When a consumption need is only partially fulfilled, you also only receive a part of the attribute bonus (e.g. only +1 population instead of +2 when fulfilling the porridge need only to 50%). At the same time, however, this also means you can reach the supply threshold of a category by combining several partially fulfilled needs.
These “needs attributes” in Anno 117: Pax Romana encompass more than just income, happiness and population and require some more explaining. Today, we’ll leave it at this since it’s enough to understand the basics of the “Optional Needs” feature – and go into more detail in a separate DevBlog soon.
Implications
So much for the “how”, let’s take a look at the impact of these changes on the game and the answer to the “why” question.
Firstly, something we have already alluded to earlier in this blog: choice and flexibility.
This was especially important since we wanted to let players choose the level of complexity for the game themselves. The goal here is to give enough choice that both veterans as well as newcomers can enjoy Anno 117: Pax Romana, and for the latter to slowly grow into their role as governor.
With a lucky combination of fertilities on your starting island, you might even be able to continue to progress through the population tiers there for longer, allowing you to stick to fewer islands and only expand later, if you so desire.
This focus on choice also impacts the type and complexity of production chains you can pick: how many complex needs do you fulfil? Will you go for fewer but more complex production chains or more but less complex ones? Which ones take up more space?
Another point of choice also related to the provinces: As already announced last year, you will be able to start in either of the two provinces at the start of a new game. With the optional needs system, you will be able to remain in a single province and still reach the highest population tier by solely relying on providing needs that you can produce locally.
Higher population tiers mean more needs – and more choice! Let’s compare the needs categories of a Libertus with that of a Plebeian. As mentioned earlier, there’s also a fourth category added now: household goods.
As mentioned, it was equally important to us to provide challenges and reward experienced players if they provide their citizens with more than the minimum of needs category. The additional attribute bonuses will help you sustain ever larger cities and militaries, compete more effectively against opponents and strategically grow your influence in both provinces by, e.g., taking key islands.
Making use of both provinces will therefore provide different rewards and options. As will Romanising your population in Albion – if you manage to provide them with goods imported from Latium – and following both the local and the Roman path at the same time.
Lastly, this system also gives us as developers more flexibility: new content and new needs can be integrated into the game much easier than it has been the case in Anno 1800. It gives you more choice and makes expanding the game easier for us, if we’re looking at the topic of “postlaunch”. And we already have more different needs in the basegame compared to Anno 1800!
Outro
We hope this has given you a good idea of the changes we have done to the needs system and how it gives you, the player, more flexibility in terms of how you want to set up your islands both in Latium as well as Albion and how you can scale the challenges of the game to a degree you feel the most comfortable with.
Additionally, there’s a cool new puzzle aspect to city building that will hopefully also motivate you to build more than the minimum required production chains. What that is? Well… that’s a topic for a future DevBlog.
Until then, leave all your questions and feedback below, we’re looking forward to your comments!