In December 2003, a spin-off of the
Anno franchise was announced under the title of
Anno War. Unlike previous entries in the series, it was developed by Mainz-based
Related Designs, and the idea was to make the game more combat based. The team increased their number of employees from 10 to 25, with an active support from
Sunflowers Interactive. The game was put on hold. Related Designs instead focused their efforts on a sequel to
Anno 1503. The new installment was initially codenamed
Anno 3. Due to a dispute between Sunflowers and the developer of the first
Anno games,
Max Design, Related Designs was not able to access the program code for
Anno 1503, and thus had no technical basis. Therefore, the studio had to develop the new title from scratch. During the development, Anno's creator and one of the
Max Design's founders, Wilfried Reiter, joined the team in an advisory capacity. On May 9, 2005, Sunflowers officially made the game's title as
Anno 1701 and released in late 2006. The game was presented along with
ParaWorld on the Sunflowers' booth at E3 2006. In August, the release date was marked as October 26, 2006 for the Germany, while the game went gold in early October. A multi-core processors support was added to the engine's implementation to improve the efficiency. In addition, numerous shaders were built into the game in order to achieve a better performance on as many hardware configurations as possible.
Anno 1701 was the most expensive German game ever made at the time of its release, with a budget of €10 million.
Soundtrack After using music samples in the two predecessors, Anno 1701 is the first to use specially composed orchestral music. Tilman Sillescu from
Dynamedion was responsible for the game's soundtrack and produced it in
5.1 surround with the
Brandenburg State Orchestra in Frankfurt (Oder) under the direction of
Bernd Ruf. ==Reception==