Anno 117: Pax Romana: In the new Anno, the diagonal paths also lead to Rome

Anno 117: Pax Romana: In the new anno, the diagonal ways of Rome also lead 6 comments

Image: Ubisoft Mainz

In Anno 117: Pax Romana, buildings will not be aligned in a 90 degree grid for the first time, but at 45 degrees. With the paths, more happened: With a completely new road construction system, the cityscape in the new construction game should become much more organic and therefore prettier.

Summary :

The iconic Anno grille is actually open

The streets are firmly part of the Anno series, so far no room has been unemployed without them. This is obviously also true for the strict Chess Board Grid, on which all objects that can be placed in the game world had to orient themselves firmly at 90 degree angles. With Anno 117: Pax Romana, the well-known system is actually smoothed into a 45-degree grid, as the developers now confirm. Already in the summer of last year there were rumors about a truck screenshot, but the changes went a little further.

In fact, the Ubisoft Mainz team has often considered breaking the grid in the past; Previous approaches have always been rejected. However, a fixed chess pattern in the structure strategy genre seems to fall more and more out of time, even independent productions such as Pioneers of Pagonia or Lords Manor can make it much more dynamic and classy today, without a grid. And for example, the farthest border proves that, despite an underlying 90 degree grid, paths can at least look nicer.

New grid and paths as graphics

Ubisoft Mainz also remains with a grid for Anno 117, but it breaks down twice. On the one hand, via an additional angle of 45 degrees, so that in the future eight instead of just four orientations are possible for paths and buildings. This is made possible by new submasters: a quadratic tile is decomposed into four triangles, through which the diagonal construction is carried out.

As a result, the city and, above all, the landscape can appear much more organic, which in particular will be expected in Schönbauer. Additionally, on the other hand, there is a completely new system for building roads and paths, as corners and intersections should also look much better with smoother transitions. This works by rendering the paths very differently in the future. So far, and therefore also in Anno 1800, it has been the case that the path developers have dropped a selection of rigid tiled textures. Depending on what the immediate vicinity of a street tile looked like, a different image was prompted so that the road was visually continuous.

With only four possible orientations, the number of textures needed was still manageable, but with the new 45 degree option the system would have reached its limits. Therefore, the developers have gone further: the streets are no longer set to Kachel, but always curved or graphically with a starting point and an end point that are automatically connected to the way.

However, this also means that paths must have at least two grid fields. Other than that, road construction should largely be handled as usual. Paths continue to adapt to the terrain and bridges can form where needed. There will also be different types of streets again. If you prefer to keep a classic raster city, you can continue to appease the developers.

GIF New comfort function Framed buildings on request (image: Ubisoft Mainz)

Ubisoft wants to reveal more details soon

A future blog entry by the developers is expected to go into detail about the technical implementation and challenges when implementing the new system. Open questions about the buildings mentioned so far can also be expected to be answered. It is also debatable if and how Ubisoft Maypied manages to close the potential for under-tiled gaps when transitioning from “straight” to “diagonal” structures.

It’s also interesting that the revised route system is apparently not just for streets: the developers indicate that other buildings could also be used – like perhaps aqueducts.

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Province of Latium in Anno 117: Pax Romana (image: Ubisoft) Image 1 of 4 Subjects: Anno Structure Strategy Gaming Strategy Games Ubisoft Source: Ubisoft Mainz