Anno 117 tries to encourage mxing up residential / civil areas with production buildings with the production AOEs they introduced. However, I still build the old-fashioned way with segregated production districts and a huge redidential / civil core. I just find that the game overall still does not encourage you to build that way - why?

1) The only useful stats to boost with secondary effects are: population, fire and health. The first one just for bragging rights /efficiency, the latter are actually pretty important, especially with the Prophecies of Ash DLC as the vulcanic winter will plummet most mega-cities into (very managable) chaos. But ultimately only health and fire become values that you actually have to manage during endgame, as they become worse the bigger your cities grow. Income, wisdom, reputation and faith are kind of useless to boost in endgame, as you will "max them out" simply by scaling up. During late game, happiness mainly comes from monuments (even more so with the hippodrome DLC).

2) Very few buildings provide net positive buffs for population, fire and health. In practice you will find most production buildings are a fire hazard or affect happiness stats negatively. That's why most often you will find that production zones close to your residential areas are responsible for tanking secondary stats (looking at you pig pen and dye works). So the way they designed the mechanic is actually asymmetric to what they initially tried to achieve: adding production buildings to cities CAN sometimes provide a nice little buff, but you absolutely HAVE TO make sure "bad" production buildings are built away from the city and don't affect your residences.

3) Trading posts are relatively large and a waste of space in cities, which only block positive AOE of civil buidlings, which are meant to boost residence stats. -> That's why I use shrines for buffs instead, as they are smaller and don't need trading posts.

4) The efficiency buff of having connected production buildings of the same production chain next to each other (to allow direct delivery and not clogg up trading posts) is more valuable, than the tiny AOE buffs of production buildings.

5) I've not done a full assessment, but IMO the only production buffs worth integrating are Epicure of Water and Lavendula farms (on the outskirts of your city, to fill the more rugged contours of your island), which I only ever really paid attention on my first main island. Cinis is so large that you will end up spreading anyway just to access all the mines and river spots.

Do you agree or am I missing something?

PS: This of course mainly applies to min-max players, which I feel the vast majority of Anno players still are.

I love it that there are so many mods already out for Anno. Some of them the size of a small or even mid-sized DLC. Props to everyone who is contributing to the game content. I really love it. And its one of the biggest strength of Anno 117 compared to 1800: first day mod support. And to the people on consoles: just hold out a bit longer! You will get them, too as far as I know!

"Some" time ago (more like 20 years) I talked with a game dev of a city builder game (dont know what game it was) and he told me that there is a whole mathmatics around how to balance games. Not about introduction or removal of features but number tweaking.

There are so many cool mods that I have the feeling its a bit "risky" to cripple the balancing if you want to have all the additional production chains, goods and cool buildings. And its also a bit out-of-scope for all the mod developers to consider that some other mod in the game might "exploit" (by accident) something the own mod introduces.

So I wonder if anybody is here who has deep knowledge about this field? I would like to dig into it and maybe have a look if the multi-mod balancing problem can be solved with a (configurable) mod. In the end, its "just" optimization problems and nothing "magic". But those are partially hard to grasp ... and fix. (a friend from univeristy found some more optimization sweet spots with pure mathmatical tools based on extracted values from game files ... so funny things can come from this)

I guess this whole topic is also a reason why its more difficult or challenging to develop additional content from the game developers: if their new content messes with balancing, they get backlash ... which is absolutely valid.

Yes, an AI research would be a proper introduction into the fiels as well and this will be a part of it. But I like to start digging into a new field by talking someone who already has the domain knowledge.

One thing I’d really love to see improved in Anno 117 is the religious aspect of the game. I’m a big fan of Roman and Greek civilizations, and one thing that has always fascinated me is just how many gods and deities they worshipped. Their pantheons were enormous, with gods for pretty much every aspect of life, but I feel like this isn’t really reflected in the game yet.
I’d love to see more temples dedicated to different gods, but also smaller shrines and sanctuaries dedicated to minor deities. The Romans had so many of them, and I think it would be really cool to have little places of worship scattered around the city, near houses, crossroads, markets or even out in the countryside. And I don’t mean just smaller versions of the same temple model. It would be great to have different designs, like small stone altars, roofed shrines, little aediculae or sanctuaries built into niches, so that religious buildings could actually add more visual variety to our cities instead of looking repetitive.
There could also be some interesting gameplay benefits depending on which deity you choose. For example, Terminus could provide bonuses to land management or buildings near province borders, Cloacina could improve sanitation and reduce the risk of disease, and Cardea could increase household security or residential happiness. Concordia could help keep the population happy and reduce unrest, while Annona could improve grain distribution and Fornax could make bakeries and other food-production buildings more efficient.
These are just a few examples, of course. There are so many other Roman and Greek deities that could be added, and I think this could make religion feel much more meaningful than simply building a few major temples. It would give us more freedom to develop our cities, both visually and strategically, while also making them feel more authentic to the ancient world.
I’m not sure how much of this could be added through mods, but I really hope the devs consider expanding this aspect of the game in the future. I think it would be a great addition!

A little visual I made to quickly find the fertilities that can be upgraded to 100% and 100%+50%productivity.

Those whose specialist are limited to 75% and it is more important to find an island with the correct fertility from the start.

Those with a research that unlock 50% Fertility on all island, and a common specialist is enough to get to 100% Fertility.

Still in awe with this game