Anno 2070 Message Board

ANNO 2070 - Patch-Notes 1.06

Most important changes:
- Some formulas require less prototypes to be researched.
- Appearance probability of tornado reduced even more.
- Recyclable materials can now be mined endlessly at Underwater Recycling Stations.
- Overall game stability was improved.
- Saved games with more than 600 hours of play time are reacting normally again.
- Potential campaign dead ends have been fixed.
- An exploit was fixed which allowed building material being credited whilst demolishing building in pause mode.
- The impact of rare global ark items was increased.

Further changes and bug fixes:

- A bug in the achievement with The Entire Tech Tree.
- A bug when inviting players into a multiplayer coop game was fixed.
- The missing ornamental Small cross-hedge was added to the construction menu.
- A bug concerning express delivery in coop mode was fixed
- When a host has set a game session to „public during a running invitation and confirmed this by clicking „OK, he was excluded (from the session) and the session was closed. An error message appeared telling the player he was already part of this session. This bug has been fixed.
- By accepting an invitation to a multiplayer session during an intro video, the mouse pointer disappeared. This bug has been fixed.
- The effect of some items concerning ornamental buildings has been adapted.
- Guardian 1.0 and Sentinel 1.0 are no longer neutral buildings. Faction bonuses are having an effect on these buildings now.
- A bug concerning vehicle holograms has been fixed.
- The ship limit points for the Erebos submarine were lowered.
- The single player mission Free Market Economy was missing two diplomacy actions by Rufus Thorne. This has been fixed.
- In some scenarios several underwater islands incorrectly had coal as a resource. This has been fixed.
- After unlocking Researchers the resource tab for the fourth civilization level was shown. This has been fixed.
- Several text bugs have been fixed.
- Several icon bugs have been fixed.
- Several smaller issues have been fixed.
- Smaller balancing adjustments in diplomacy action, construction and research costs as well as expansion speed of third parties.

Domination Mode:
- New maps added with additional bonus points for very hard missions.
- Team chat implemented.
- Replay function was added.
- Several interface improvements implemented.
- Usability was improved.
- Balancing adjustments on existing missions.

The good thing about always online DRM is, well, nothing. The problem with always online DRM is, well, everything. Perhaps the silver lining to the cloud that is Ubisoft’s UPlay system – the infrastructure for its DRM, DLC and other faintly sinister words which begin with D – being offline for a large chunk of the weekend is that it might cause important people to worry, no matter what their paranoid personal philosophy of IP protection might be, that singleplayer games having a total dependency on remote servers is inescapably flawed in a practical sense.(more…)

Research at the RPS news desk means someone asks a question in chat and the others ignorantly speculate. Google is right there, but you don’t get good responses to keen, incisive questioning, in this case about the newly announced Anno 2070 Deep Ocean expansion pack: “Anno 2070: I’m trying to find out if the main game has water, or if the additions bring watery goodness to it? I mean to live under?”

John: I’m fairly sure old screenshots had wet bits. Adam: I think the new expansion just has a new even deeper watery bit

Adam is correct, and it allows Ubisoft to legitimately claim that it makes it “A deeper game experience”, which makes marketing copywriters froth like a windy sea. The main game is a rather watery real-time management game, where you raise a happy empire in a world ravaged by global warming. What will the expansion bring? Does it have hidden depths?(more…)

Updates to Anno 2070 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

The most important changes in overview:
- Notepad function implemented
- Rival Third Parties will got to war against one another
- DLC-related awards will only be included in the overall count if the corresponding DLC has been activated
- The "Dock" building is now much cheaper to both build and operate
- The sawmill produces more slowly
- Goods depots' Surface-to-air missiles do more damage
- Tornadoes occur more rarely
- Skylar Bane's World Council actions have been rearranged and significantly increased
- Seamus Green's World Council actions have been rearranged, with some weakened and some strengthened
- Underwater Oil fields have been significantly increased at all levels of difficulty
- A bug was fixed which led to own games being flagged as „Other game and therefore certain achievements not being unlocked.

Further changes and bug fixes:
- NPC Ark Trading ships destroyed by tornadoes now respawn after some time, ensuring that the player still has a partner for passive trade
- Fixed an exploit occurring during trading with third parties per Drag&Drop
- The lumberjack now being correctly processes the "Summer Tree" decorative element
- A bug which led to interface elements being shown in the main menu whenever the game was paused has been fixed
- Ships on trading routes no longer automatically take on quest-related items such as the boarding crew
- Sound effect for placing a Summer Tree was corrected
- In the description of the ornamental building "Reflection", the statue is now properly referred to as an "ornamental building"
- Collision detection has been optimized for ornamental buildings
- The Keeper and Guardian buildings are now correctly referred to as "Ecobalance buildings" in the building interface
- Quests in the "Friendly turn" category designed to support the player when at war with any other third party now count as failed as soon as the player makes peace with that third party (Applies to - "Fleet expansion," "Reinforcements", "Cannon fodder" and "Asymmetrical warfare")
- After a multi-player game had been lost, the button "Start new scenario" was mistakenly displayed, which led to subsequent errors. This has been fixed
- An error in the loading screen which occurred when players joined a multiplayer game directly from another multi-player game has been resolved
- A rare error was fixed where the mouse pointer was not displayed while loading certain scenarios and world events
- Ark contents were sometimes lost when switching between online and offline mode, and when loading a saved game from the other mode. This bug has been corrected.
- Contents unlocked using Tech Career points no longer bear the Eco Symbol in the "Bonus Content" menu
- An error in the visualization of sequenced movement and attack commands has been fixed
- A bug was fixed which could lead to the game looking as if it were accelerated when a player had enabled time acceleration while simultaneously inviting a co-op partner to their game
- The volume of the Related Designs Jingles at the start of the game has been reduced
- It is no longer possible to move the camera during the introductory sequence of the Bonus Mission "Return to C.O.R.E."
- Animation of the damage to the pirate base when bombarded by a long-range missile has been improved
- Diplomacy menu improved in co-op games
- A rare error has been fixed which led to the population not consuming any more tea after a savegame loaded
- Audio feedback revised for certain quests
- Several small quest bugs were fixed
- Several text errors have been corrected
- Several improvements in chat and when adding contacts
- And much more.

Updates to Anno 2070 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Main changes:
- Additional ornamental buildings added
- Implemented Instant pickup feature
- Military balancing refined
- The feature that lets you choose environmental influences in the Continuous Game settings does now work properly
- The single mission Return to C.O.R.E. does not support Coop play anymore, due to complications with the NPC slots
- Increased the probability of a tornado disaster and the interval at which they can occur

Additional changes:
- Refined license balancing
- Rebalanced diplomatic actions Stock trading, Research money, Investment and Shady deal
- Improved residence interface
- Improved rewards for Disaster Quests
- Explosions that are caused by disaster rather than player actions, do not destroy roads anymore
- Considerately increased the effect of the media channels Check Up The Consultation, Neighbourhood Watch and Safety in Research
- Increased building costs of the River sewage treatment plant
- Rebalanced energy and building costs of the Deep sea warehouse
- Fixed a graphical issue in 1600x900 resolution
- Fixed an issue where a Production Chain was still displayed in the Building Menu after the Ornament tab was opened
- Fixed an issue where Keto reappeared hours after she was defeated
- Fixed an issue with the display of the amount of inhabitants the Warehouse interface
- Fixed an issue with the build blocker of the Offshore wind park
- Fixed several minor text issues in tooltips, menus and achievements
- Fixed a minor graphical issue with the numbering of stacked items
- Fixed an issue where two items that affect all buildings of a certain faction had no effect on some buildings
- Fixed an issue where the ingame chat of a previous session was occasionally still displayed in a later session
- Fixed an issue where the camera would not change the zoom from under water to above water after clicking on a newsbar entry that related to an above water event
- Fixed a minor graphical issue with mobile buildings that occurred when the player did not have enough resources to build them
- Fixed a wrong mini map ping in one of Hiro Ebashis quests
- Pressing the shift and u while selecting another players residence buildings does not prompt the Cheat discovered! message anymore
- Fixed an exploit that let you infinitely stack item effects on a single ship
- Fixed an exploit in the single mission ‚Free Market Economy
- Fixed an issue where the wrong portrait picture of another player was displayed in multiplayer
- Fixed several issues in the Mission Ranking screen
- Improved third party reactions to trading with foes and friends
- Fixed an exploit that allowed unlimited gain of Influence with Tori Bartok by building and demolishing the same Academy building
- Multiplayer stability further improved

Ubisoft are issuing apologies after it seems their server migration isn’t only taking down the games they warned it would. Reports of both Driver: San Francisco and Anno 2070 also not working properly are coming from gamers (cheers EG), as Ubisoft acknowledges more games than they’d planned are being affected. Once again it’s impossible not to observe that if they hadn’t tied single-player games to such draconian, useless and self-defeating DRM, none of this would be happening. To find out the details of why the games are down, along with others, read our earlier coverage here.

If making a fuss keeps working, it’s only going to encourage us. In the last week we’ve – among others – reported on the extremely peculiar choice in Ubisoft’s chosen DRM for Anno 2070, to have it use up an activation every time you do something so simple as change a graphics card in your PC. Assuming this was a mistake we contacted Ubi, who genuinely surprised us by coming back to say it was completely intentional, wasn’t a problem, and that was that.

Well, after attention was brought their way, co-developers BlueByte got in touch with Hilbert Hagedoorn at Guru3D – who first brought the issue into light – and gave him more activations for the game. And now it’s just been reported that they’ve changed the DRM such that the game will no longer spit up if you switch a PCIe slot.

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On Monday we reported the strange discovery by Guru3D that something so simple as changing your graphics card could use up an activation on Ubisoft game, Anno 2070. At the time I suggested that this was perhaps a bug in the DRM Ubisoft uses, Tages, meaning it was overreacting to hardware changes. It seems I was wrong, and Ubisoft have confirmed to us that this is how they intend the DRM to work.

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Ubisoft have managed to go a month or so without anyone loudly throwing their hands in the air and despairing at their DRM ways. They’ll be relieved to know the drought is over, with tech wizards Guru3D discovering that Ubisoft’s limited activations of their games are not just limited to specific machines, but specific graphics cards.

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Updates to Anno 2070 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Main changes:
- First Ornamental Buildings for Ecos and Tycoons implemented.
- Stability and performance improved for several system specs.
- Unit limit increased.
- Fixed an issue in the winning screen of several campaign missons.
- Fixed a severe graphical issue that occurred on Windows XP with graphics cards of the ATI-Radeon-HD 2000 and 3000 series.

Additional changes:
- Fixed several small text issues, such as typos and overlappings.
- AI behaviour improved.
- Fixed an exploit that allowed the player to sink Keto as well as Trenchcoat using the EMP.
- Fixed performance issues related to toll items.
- Fixed an issue with the Start button.
- Fixed Achievements: "Floating Clearance ", "The Latest Technology", "The Entire Tech Tree", "Back to Nature", "Too Good to Throw Away".
- Fixed smaller issues in several quests
- Fixed smaller issues with the interface.

Dave and Drew find out what the people of the future really want: burgers.

Trading in gunpowder kegs and fields of wheat for missile turrets and high tech underwater algae farms, Anno 2070 brings the popular civ-building strategy series into the modern era with a much-needed twist. With humanity recovering from a global ecological meltdown that leaves much of the world's l...

Blue Byte and Related Designs recently finished their latest trading and building game, Anno 2070 – this time set in later part of the current century, in a world where climate politics underlie the tale of commercial striving – and released it onto the wild seas of the internet. I’ve been wading through its depths for the past week or so and I am now able to tell you Wot I Think. (more…)

This year has been unusually rich in the kind of game that I most enjoy: those that are open-ended, or provide a sandbox world for me to mess about in. We usually get a couple of these every year, but in 2011 we seem to have run into a minor bounty of the open stuff, which is good news for explorers and meanderers alike. I’ve gone into a bit more detail about why this pleases me below.

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Anno 2070 came out on Friday. Did you see? It’s Anno, but in the future! Although I’m now so used to having ridiculous year names from science fiction like “2011″ that I can no longer register “2070″ as sounding that far away. Heck, it’s reasonably likely I could live until 2070. I think futuristic sounding things now require at least a “2200″ century, if not ideally the third millennium. Please take note. Anyhow, the Anno launch brought with it an Anno launch trailer, which is below. And I believe one of our number is currently playing the game in order to let you know what you should think about it.

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Anno 2070™ is Now Available on Steam!

2070. Our world has changed. The rising level of the ocean has harmed the coastal cities and climate change has made large stretches of land inhospitable.

Build your society of the future, colonize islands, and create sprawling megacities with multitudes of buildings, vehicles, and resources to manage. Engineer production chains such as Robot Factories, Oil Refineries, and Diamond Mines, and trade with a variety of goods and commodities.

Hot on the heels of my Anno 2070 ramblings from last night comes a demo for the game, so you can produce ramblings of your own! You can get it in various languages here. It apparently contains the first two missions of the campaign, which should at least show you how it plays to some extent. Go take a look…

Blue Byte’s futuristic take on their competitive trading and town-building series, Anno 2070, is just a couple of weeks away, and I’ve had a chance to play with some of the sandbox elements of the game to get a taste of it. Head below for some thoughts on this near-future near-strategy! Or don’t. YOU DECIDE.(more…)

Eight player competitive/co-operative multiplayer sounds pretty good to me. Hell, it looks pretty good, judging by the options laid out below. Extensive statistics! But yes, I am all over this. Ubi reckon we might be able to get some hands on time with the multiplayer before release, so I’ll try and let you know what it’s like.

Blue Byte’s trading and building game Anno has leapt from the past into the future for its next instalment, Anno 2070, which is due to arrive on our shores on November 17th. We thought we’d have a chat with the game’s lead producer, Christopher Schmitz, to confirm a few details of what to expect from the sci-fi reworking on the classic strategy series.(more…)

Anno 2070 is a vision of what cities will be like when I’m either dead or an incredibly doddery old chap with a cybernetic toupee, and I’ve been pleased by the promise of its glistening underwater cities. Despite the terrible lack of resources facing our fragile globe, I’d quite enjoy retiring to one of those sea-bubbles. But, of course, someone had to go and spoil my future by bringing war into it. This newest trailer for the city-builder sim shows the military of the future, all sleek submarines, whirligig rocket-crafts and submersible death-platforms.

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The surprise futuristic entry in the Anno citybuilding series – Anno 2070 – has got a new video, showing off 3 minutes of mostly game footage. I hope you don’t think I’m crazy when I say I’m picking up a vague (very vague) Alpha Centauri vibe from this trailer. Sure, there’s no mind worms or nerve-staples on display, but it’s still pushing some of the same buttons. (more…)

We were pretty gosh-darned excited when we learned that excellent trade and building series Anno was going to continue its exploits in the near future, but the glimpses of futuristic island cities were only half of it: the full game of Anno 2070 will contain underwater colonies, too. This game is all about painting a portrait of a (frankly fairly likely) near-future of scarce resources and adaptable strategies towards surviving in a changed world. You’ll be asked to choose between “industrial power” and “renewable energy” routes, and deal with the trade-offs that each of them are forced to make.

No precise release date for this as yet, as Ubisoft are still quoting “Winter”. I’m hoping to find out a bit more soon, as it’s the Ubisoft game I’m most interested in right now.(more…)

Previous games in the Anno franchise have always been rooted in the past. But the popular strategy/simulation series if time travelling with Anno 2070, challenging players to take on new challenges in a world ravaged by the consequences of global warming. The question you have to ask as you set out ...

The first trailer’s arrived for Anno 2070, the futuristic reimagining of the city-building strategy series which previously covered the years of 1701, 1602, 1503 and 1404, making 2070 an excellently mad choice. The below footage is pretty exciting- it seems we’ll have the choice of making either a sustainable city that operates in harmony with its environment (with what looks like Apple doing the architecture), or a dark, Blade Runner-looking city that extinguishes all natural resources. Take a look.(more…)

Anno 2070's first trailer feels so much like a pharmaceutical commercial that we keep waiting for the voice-over to tell us the side effects of playing the game. You know, beyond: sense of lost time.

A new era of civilization begins in this planetary strategy sim from Ubisoft.

#climatechange For years now, Ubisoft has carved out a small but dedicated market for its Anno series, strategy games based on European colonisation in the 15th-18th centuries. It's now leaving all that behind. More »

San Francisco - Today, Ubisoft announced Anno 2070, the latest iteration of the award-winning real-time strategy and simulation franchise. Set to release in Winter 2011 for PC, Anno 2070 moves the Anno franchise into a new era, taking players into a world inspired by today's challenges and tomorrow'...

Having released Dawn of Discovery in 2009, German developer Related Designs is producing a follow-up to its city building / strategy game which shifts the timeline several centuries forward. Co-developed by The Settlers studio Blue Byte, Anno 2070 is due out on PC this year, promising some twists on the core mechanics of its predecessors as the result of its near-future setting.

Ubisoft says that the results of global climate change depicted in-game will require players to take advantage of "architectural breakthroughs" in order to grow their nations. By setting the title in the future, "the development team wasn't restricted by historical boundaries and was able to dream bigger than ever before."

You'd think eco-disasters would have put the kibosh on industrialization, but in fact, players will get to side with either the "pave the planet" Tycoons or the "the greener the better" Ecos from the outset. A third faction, one that can't be bothered to separate the recycling or install compact fluorescent light bulbs, was deemed too apathetic to make the cut.