Various suggestions, criticisms and praise | Forums

[captbeagle]

EDIT: Revised list later on in this thread


I just finished playing the beta for several hours with a friend and wanted to provide my feedback on the gameplay thus far as an experienced Anno player (though I skipped 2205 for lack of multiplayer). To start with, I'm playing on a relatively high-end system:

AMD 1950X processor
48 GB DDR4
Nvidia 1080 Ti
Game is running off a Samsung 850 Pro


General Observations

• It's odd to me that DirectX12 isn't selected by default in the graphics options
• It'd be nice to be able to tweak options while sitting in the multiplayer lobby waiting for the game to start
• There appears to be no way to reassign the "close window" button in the controls, as well as several others
• When setting the graphics to use DirectX12, I find that my computer becomes unresponsive up for a good 30 seconds upon launching the game. This is despite running on a high-end system as described above. I don't experience this same lock-up if I set it to DirectX 11 per the defaults.
• Closing of windows and cancelling of actions is inconsistent - I can cancel out of building placement and diplomatic screens with escape, but I can't collapse the building selection UI or close a trade window in the same manner.

Apparent bugs

• When right clicking objectives that are out of immediate pick-up range of a ship, there's no audio or visual cue present.
• I had a harbormaster with 3 slots available, but the game wouldn't allow me to place but two items in it
• When right clicking objectives for a ship to pick up, the ship doesn't always navigate close enough to the item to pick it up, often requiring manual approach and then a manual pickup
• When I had two warehouses placed relatively close to one another with many buildings, I frequently found that one warehouse would receive the vast majority of the traffic, with carts going out of their way to visit the farther destination instead of attending to the warehouse beside them.
• It was odd to find that when the AI felt like being friendly to either myself or my buddy, they would do so (e.g. provide a gift) identically to both of us, even if we weren't in a shared diplomatic arrangement with them.
• It was odd finding that AI I was in an alliance with didn't care that I bought out the shares to their islands, though that would normally be tantamount to a war declaration for anyone else.
• Oddly, I could see the building recipe for Rum in the Old World once unlocked in the New (though it did indicate that it would have to be built in the New World). If it can't be built, I'd suggest it shouldn't show up in the list of possibilities.
• The game would oddly allow me to select resolutions that were greater than what my monitor is presently set to, meaning that the game would look fine and crisp until it reloaded, at which point it would scale off the screen.

Wish list

• Allow me to link sliders in the trade route UI between pickup and drop-off so that I can change a quantity in the pickup and it automatically reflect in the shared item's dropoff for a simple pick and drop between two places.
• Set WASD as the default camera navigation keys
• Allow me to configure what comes up filtered as an alert or a notification. I found that I was receiving far too many alerts about fires for which I had ample coverage and no distinction between those and fires (or explosions) for which I had no existing coverage.
• Provide some identification in the interface showing what items are more practical for different aspects of an expedition without requiring the use of a lookup to an external wiki or the like. It's fine to leave it as vague as "Coal = Good" and "Glass = Poor" for Hunting applications, but there is presently little clue that any item is suitable to any particular aspect without an external lookup (or guessing and looking for random checks).
• The visitor harbor could use more clarification as to what inspires people to visit. It indicates that my island should be the most attractive to attract visitors, but it doesn't show any metrics I could identify to indicate my relative attractiveness to other islands.
• It'd be great to see more of a table-based spreadsheet with graphs to better understand both the income and expensive of my budget and item usage. All too often, I find myself seemingly stuck at some low cash threshold despite a +200 or more supposed income, leaving me perilously close to the negatives frequently when playing at harder cash difficulties.
• When starting an expedition, my ship eventually leaves either the world maps and is lost in the intermediate travel zone between the old and new worlds. It's hard to identify in the UI where the ship is at that point until it ultimately starts the expedition eventually. It'd be great to have an indication of this in the ship UI at the bottom while the ship is navigating to an expedition and when it's engaged with an expedition event (as opposed to just seeing the icon in the expedition list), like those icons used to indicate an idle ship, a ship assigned to an active trade route or one in motion.
• It'd be nice to see the path that the ship is planning to take somewhere so that when there's an island between the starting and ending points, I can know ahead of time if the ship is planning to take the side closer or farther from the pirates.
• While ship damage and health are listed when building ships, it'd be nice to be able to review these values (especially when the values are augmented with items) when selecting the ship itself. Similarly, while a health bar is shown when taking damage in combat, I'd like to see the actual numerical health remaining so I can more easily understand the remaining differing hulls for a fleet at a glance.
• Short of setting up a trade route and cancelling it, I could not identify any way to transfer a ship from one world to the next. The above note regarding UX for ships between worlds applies here as well in that the ships migrating between worlds would simply vanish for some time until reappearing on their route in the next world.
• When a ship is selected (e.g. by hotkey or clicking its tile in the bottom UI), there's nothing on the mini-map that highlights the selected ship.
• Multiple ship waypoints didn't appear to be supported, especially with regards to queuing up the pickup of several items (e.g. for a quest).
• When trades were completed at the trading center on the harbor, a notification would appear indicating that the trade successfully occurred, but there's no indication or log of what I bought or sold or how much I sold it for or received for the total sale.
• If I change the happiness/productivity slider for a given building, it'd be ideal to have some sort of overlay that would show me the levels I have each similar building set to on the same island and across the world, for reference purposes.
• Anno 2070 (or maybe it was 1404 - I don't recall) had a note-taking feature built into one of the buildings that was invaluable to keeping track of my objectives between plays. It'd be great to see that make a comeback.

Praise

• I rather like the new mechanic requiring attachment to the harbor of any new warehouses. It forces a slightly more realistic take over older Anno games by preventing the old placement of a mine warehouse in the middle of nowhere and magicking those resources into civilization.
• The new trade route UI is an improvement over past games.
• I like the expedition mechanic and its utility to acquire items in place of the old researcher mechanism.
• The new freeform placement for farms (e.g. hops and grain) is fantastic. I can finally maximize utilization of those jagged beaches and the base of each of those mountains.

It crashed twice while playing and I submitted the crash reports as indicated, so it'd be great if you could resolve those errors before launch!

I'm looking forward to playing the full game next week during the release. Thanks!

[Mantie87]

+ 1,000,000 over here! Hope the development will take care of this post.

---> Anno 2070 (or maybe it was 1404 - I don't recall) had a note-taking feature built into one of the buildings that was invaluable to keeping track of my objectives between plays. It'd be great to see that make a comeback. <---- The building you mean is from 1404 and it's called "Bailiwick" and reduces the maintenance costs of all industrial buildings on the island. And indeed, there's a function to make a note (for yourself or a teammate in multiplayer)

Cheers!

[Hiro_Persephone]

[*]Provide some identification in the interface showing what items are more practical for different aspects of an expedition without requiring the use of a lookup to an external wiki or the like. It's fine to leave it as vague as "Coal = Good" and "Glass = Poor" for Hunting applications, but there is presently little clue that any item is suitable to any particular aspect without an external lookup (or guessing and looking for random checks).

[...]
[*]It'd be great to see more of a table-based spreadsheet with graphs to better understand both the income and expensive of my budget and item usage. All too often, I find myself seemingly stuck at some low cash threshold despite a +200 or more supposed income, leaving me perilously close to the negatives frequently when playing at harder cash difficulties.

I agree with a lot of things but I have to answer those two in particular :

Expeditions
Everything is shown : Glass (10 hunting), Bread (5 faith), Windows (why not ?), everything is written. You have to select your expedition, choose the ship and then load it with supplies from that screen. It's supposed to be written on all materials. Someone else on Reddit had this problem too, so I don't know if you did it wrong or if it's a bug.

Graphs
YES. I need them too. Everyone needs them. Please make it happen. It's so important, Anno is a management game, please let us have GRAPHICS.

[PhasmaNL]

Apparent bugs

• It was odd to find that when the AI felt like being friendly to either myself or my buddy, they would do so (e.g. provide a gift) identically to both of us, even if we weren't in a shared diplomatic arrangement with them.
• It was odd finding that AI I was in an alliance with didn't care that I bought out the shares to their islands, though that would normally be tantamount to a war declaration for anyone else.

I agree. Also I'd like to have an option to somehow charge an ally a protection fee. I allied the weakest AI, and they benefited from my way superior naval power, but I never got anything in return.

Wish list

• While ship damage and health are listed when building ships, it'd be nice to be able to review these values (especially when the values are augmented with items) when selecting the ship itself. Similarly, while a health bar is shown when taking damage in combat, I'd like to see the actual numerical health remaining so I can more easily understand the remaining differing hulls for a fleet at a glance.
• Short of setting up a trade route and cancelling it, I could not identify any way to transfer a ship from one world to the next. The above note regarding UX for ships between worlds applies here as well in that the ships migrating between worlds would simply vanish for some time until reappearing on their route in the next world.
• When trades were completed at the trading center on the harbor, a notification would appear indicating that the trade successfully occurred, but there's no indication or log of what I bought or sold or how much I sold it for or received for the total sale.

1. When you select a ship, those numbers are visible at the bottom right. Shown is the current number of hitpoints, and when you hover over it, it shows the maximum hitpoints.
2. When you select a ship the're a button in the middle of the ship panel to send a ship to the New/Old world.
3. When you select your harbor, there's a button on the top right that shows history of orders/sales completed. It shows the amount and type of goods, an how much money you got/payed.

[Gnrl-Patrick]

Hi, i have played the open acces beta and now i have some suggestions that should be implemented if i compare it with anno 1404.


1. If i sail to a harbour and i click on the goods in the ship i want them automatticaly to move the my storehouse like in anno 1404. Now i have to click a extra time on the trading button.

2. if i have selected a ship and then click on the store house i want immediatly to go the trading screen to load goods or unload goods from my ship. In comparison with anno 1404 i have to do extra clicks and steps now.

[captbeagle]

Revised suggestions, criticisms and praise

I've played the release now across for nearly 30 hours, mostly in multiplayer with a friend, and after seeing several of the replies on this thread and generally poking around the game, I'd like to submit a revised list of observations, bugs and proposed gameplay changes.

General Observations

• The game continues to lock up my system briefly (~10 seconds) while launching the game with DX12 selected.
• Closing of windows and cancelling of actions is still inconsistent. I can't tell you how many times I've hit escape to close a window to find that sometimes it works, and sometimes it opens the Escape menu.
• It's still not possible to change the Close Window button from Escape to anything else (in an attempt to remedy this inconsistent closing behavior)
• It would still be nice to tweak options from the multiplayer lobby (even if you didn't allow the user to change any of those that would require a game restart).
• While this may be improved in a future DLC release with the addition of the arctic area, there's no real point to starting with any island not against the bottom left of the map in order to shorten trade routes to the new world (similarly in the New World, no point in picking islands anywhere but along the top right side). This should either be randomized (which side goes to the new world) or there should be benefits to going to the other sides of either map.

Observed Bugs

• When right clicking objectives that are out of immediate pick-up range of a ship, there's no audio or visual cue present
• It's possible for the ship to be just out of range of an objective to pick up and right clicking will not pick up the item, nor will the ship approach to pick it up. Rather, I have to manually move the ship closer, then do the pickup. It should do this behavior all the time.
• I started a separate thread about this already at https://forums.ubi.com/showthread.ph...ltiplayer-game, but I have a saved multiplayer game in which I cannot view the worker or jornaleros counts on any islands on subsequent reloads (as memorialized at https://imgur.com/a/tDoBbzZ). Each of the other workforce counts is there and I still receive notifications about lacking workers or jornaleros on their respective islands, but I cannot view the actual shortages anywhere.
• AI ships occasionally appear out of nowhere just to take single pot-shots at ships that have no health and are limping back home. Far too often I've had ships nearly at a repair crane when out of the blue a ship appears, takes a shot, sinks it and sails away.
• I've got a multiplayer game in which firestations on the island built after obtaining investors don't load the graphics within the building details pane properly and the button at the bottom contains gibberish.
• The host in my multiplayer game frequently receives duplicate notifications (e.g. I see two as the guest, he sees 4).
• When a cease fire ends, the host sees an incomplete notification, e.g. "Ceasefire with <playername> has ended." without indicating who the ceasefire was with. As the guest, I can see the complete notification properly, reading "Ceasefire between <playername> and <aiName> has ended.".

Wish List
Diplomacy

• The pirates never seem to have anything but a zero chance of a trade relationship, so why is that even an option?
• There aren't presently any downsides to maintaining a positive or a poor relationship with the non-island dwelling AI (e.g. Archibald, Eli or the other goods/items traders). I'd propose that prices go up or down with a better/worse relationship or that the count and availability of items be impacted by this relationship. Otherwise, there's no real point to turning down missions and suffering a relationship penalty when you can just go trade with them with no impact.
• Especially in the late game where you're making $20k/minute, there's no real downside to spending $5k on swapping items with an AI. This should either be a sliding cost (ideally relative to current influence) or there should be a timeout between switching out options.
• The AI are oddly friendly to multiple people at the same time. If my buddy and I are both in an alliance with an AI, they will occasionally send a charitable gift to one of us, as well (same amount) as to the other within a minute of each other, seemingly regardless of actual relationship.
• Alliances need some work. It's odd that an alliance is necessary before a non-aggression pact. I'd expect something more where you have a mutual pact not to aggress one another prior to having an alliance (which loops you into their own separate wars) instead of this approach. Specifically, I'd like to see something more comprehensive here, such as the following:
  - Trade Deal: Opens entity up to trading goods and items
  - Commercial pact: Enhancement of trade deal, maybe you get better deals on your trades or can buy ships at a more favorable rate
  - Defensive pact: If entity is attacked, you're roped into their war
  - Non-aggression pact: Can't declare war on each other
  - Alliance: Must vote as single members in the alliance (>=50% wins votes) on whether to go to war or not, overrides individual diplomacy, otherwise embodies commerical, defensive and non-aggression pact internally within membership. War against any member ropes in all other alliance members.

Influence

• The influence page indicates with a progress bar just how many units one can place for free before having to spend influence for it. I'd appreciate a numerical value instead (e.g. I can place 6 more zoo dwellings before having to pay X influence) for planning purposes. It'd also be great to see in that one place just how many I'd already placed.
• I'd like to be able to see relative island influence compared to others. As it stands, I have some islands that manufacture goods and apparently have no visitor interest, and others that are just wonderful lands. Rather than visit each of my half dozen islands to identify which is more desirable than others (and to learn which need more fancy parks), I'd like to see a ranked list with the current attractiveness of each island, and ideally those of allies.
• The beauty of an island can be improved just by jamming a bunch of expensive trees in hard-to-reach portions. The system should ideally be smarter and note whether you're just spamming trees for influence or if you're truly using a diverse set of beautifying items towards some end.
• Given the vast number of people you get for trade unions, harbormasters and town halls, the influence cost of these buildings is grossly disproportionate to the cost of say, trade routes (and the relatively rarer counts of items for those ships). As a result, I have dozens of people I'm not using because well, I need to trade, use propaganda and settle islands, so I'm thus out of influence.

Configuration

• Set WASD as the default navigation keys.
• Allow me to configure what comes up filtered as an alert or notification, and what I want to get notified about. Especially in the late game, I don't care to know when my ships make it across the sea to the other world because I've got more important things to focus on. Similarly, there isn't a notification made when I'm low on specific supplies at a given location or when a ship is lost. There's way too much other notification spam now about issues I don't care much about.
• The counts for expeditions, alerts and notifications on the left side indicate how many are in their respective lists. Ideally, this should show in a different color for unread, new notifications that you haven't yet opened the panel to observe (even if you didn't click on it) and then switch back to white when it's at least been observed. As it is, I frequently miss that an expedition encountered an issue and thus wind up taking in-game months to get back to the crew on decisions for lack of opening that pane to look at what's in there.

Buildings

• If I change the happiness/productivity slider for a given building, it'd be ideal to have some sort of overlay that would show me the levels I have each similar building set to on the same island and across the world, for reference purposes.
• Anno 1404 had a note-taking feature (Bailiwick) built into one of the buildings that was invaluable to keeping track of my objectives between plays. It'd be great to see that make a comeback.
• When selecting an individual adjacent-type field for a building, such as a grain farm (e.g. to delete it), there's no selection indicating which part of the field I selected.
• It'd be useful to have a better idea of the range of a power plant prior to building it or some way to extend the poles (particularly down paths I prefer instead of just a broad circle around the facility. Ideally, there should also be some way to improve this range (e.g. with a substation or the like) as it's quite small today.
• Rails need some work as the train pathfinding often can't tell that you have multiple paths to take to get to a destination and will instead claim the track is in use.
• Commuter piers should have a negative impact on productivity. They have an immediate beneficial impact today on utility of workforce between islands (e.g. don't have to wait for a ferry), so while useful, their cost is relatively cheap for the benefit. This should be tweaked for balance reasons.
• Hospitals should be able to cure plague on ships.
• Rebuilding after an island emergency should have a toggle to be automatic (instead of randomly tanking my influence until I happen to notice the burnt building) - even better, make this a building that I pay maintenance on, with a large range.

Trade

• More versatility when setting up routes would be nice. Right now, I can put a cap on how many goods are bought or sold to AI/player traders that come to my island, but these limits don't apply to my own trade routes. I'd like to ensure that if I'm moving rum from this island to another, the trade route ideally takes as much as is available, but always leaves at least X tons at the pickup island each trip.
• Trade route issues merely indicate that there's a minor or major issue with the route, but only open the trade route configuration. They never actually say what the issue is.
• If a lose a ship due to pirates or the like that is assigned to a trade route, I don't get a notification about it until well after it happens, meaning that I'm usually in the middle of diagnosing why a supply run didn't complete as expected.
• Need more graphs showing current acquisition and utilization rates of the goods of each island. Ideally, this would also show a breakdown of how it was acquired (e.g. imported at what rate/trip or manufactured on the island) or utilized (e.g. consumed at what rate by which class of people or exported at how many per egress trip). Notably, count per trip as well as egress/ingress per minute would both be useful here.
• More visibility into the taxes (both what I'm getting from the island and what I'm paying to the royalty would be great). There was another thread in which someone identified this rate as being tied to an anti-spam mechanism to avoid having an unbalanced number of units per island, but I'd suggest that it shouldn't be calculated on a per-island basis, but on an overall population basis. So what if I choose to have an island of nothing but farmers? If they're doing nothing but farming and another island of nothing but investors is doing nothing but complaining/investing, that shouldn't be penalized by the game.
• I'm frequently trying to identify where my ships are in trade routes (while diagnosing why I'm running low on resources). Too often, the answer is that the ship is in the great ocean between the worlds, but there's no way for me to know that from the trade route screen without looking at the name of the ship, closing it, opening up the world map and mousing over the ships to look for it. If the ship is in either world, I can select the world from the right side and mouse over the ship and see it highlighted. I would propose in that large gap on the right size of the screen that you put a current location marker. At a minimum, it would list "Old World", "New World" or "Great Big Sea", or ideally, it indicates the world and an X/Y coordinate of where, or a progress % of its current travel across the intermediate sea instead of requiring me to hunt it down through each map.
• It's unclear what a "Character item" is and how or what it's used for.
• I'd like to be able to view the warehouse and trade history for the island from secondary ports in addition to the original port warehouse.
• While it's possible to look at the trade history for the main port on each island, I'd like to see a longer history available.
• When a ship is trading at the port, in Anno 1404, I could see an icon of the good exchanged and the value received or paid for it in a graphic above the port rather than looking at a brief historical listing in the harbor. I'd like to be able to see that graphic again.
• Charter routes should have an option to be more expensive. Ideally, this would be something where I could pay a base amount for a third party ship to move goods for me, but could pay a ranged premium in order to "insure" the route with a convoy of defensive ships (for those more expensive goods that I really need to get somewhere). Think of paying for something with Fedex. I could buy a car and hire someone to go get and deliver the good on a regular basis. But, most people use Fedex for just that purpose because it's cheaper and there's some measure of guarantee that it'll get there by such and such time. Charter routes should ideally work more like that (be priced based on the relative value of the good, quantity and some measure of the risk involved in the trip).

Expeditions

• I've noticed the little notes on each item when starting an expedition at this point. It'd be useful to be able to filter the items by expedition type. Just as I can filter to agricultural goods or raw materials in the warehouse, so too would I like to filter by All, Hunting, Crafting, Force, etc. categories for an expedition. Ideally, the items would also be sorted in ascending order by value for that category.
• I frequently have expeditions that offer decisions that require things that weren't listed at the start that end poorly. Given the limited item slots for these trips, this isn't exactly a fair twist to add.

Ships

• In addition to active or passive defense, ships should have a Hold Still option, meaning that if they're in range of something to attack, they'll rotate and fire their guns, but will not leave their position. Too often, I have a pirate that meanders by during passive defense and the ship will chase them all the way back to the pirate den and get destroyed. They're far too happy to waltz into total destruction.
• I'd like to see the proposed path a ship is going to take from its current point to its destination. Especially when the pirates spawn in the middle of the map, too often my ships opt for a beeline through danger. I'd like to know that if it's going to go around an intermediate island, which side it's planning to take so I might waypoint my way around to a safer route.
• When getting attacked, I can mouse over the ship picture and see the current hit points and I can see a health bar for the other ship indicating it's damage. Ideally, I'd like to see the numerical representation of the other ship's current hit points. The current bar has no scale, so while both ships might have a similar fraction of the bar left, that's no indication to me that we actually have an identical number of remaining hit points.
• For items that are required to be activated, it'd be great to see some symbol indicating as much. Today, I have to just read the mouseover for each item or memorize it as there's no clear distinction at face value.
• It'd be great to see some distinctive symbol between items that are single-use as opposed to perpetual. As with the other bullet, without reading the mouseover or memorizing it, it's not clear at face value.
• The position of the switch region button on the ships is in a different place on trade and military ships. Ideally, this woulde be in the same place on either.