Anno 2070

What works

Playing the game, managing my Anno profile, using boni I unlocked back in the day on Windows. I did not encounter anything that wasn't working.

What does not

Installation, but that doesn't work without the same workarounds on Windows either

Workarounds

See the additional comments section for a full guide describing workarounds for all the problems that arose during installing the game

What was not tested

A proper multiplayer game

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Nvidia
• Driver: proprietary

Additional Comments

Anno 2070 is a game that is a pain to install at the moment due to it switching DRM-systems during its lifetime and it took me many hours to finally get it running. If you own the game on Steam, you may already have access to the most recent version through Steam. If not, then register the game's key on UPlay and follow this guide

This guide assumes you are owning the game either on UPlay or on disk.

1) Set up a 32-bit wineprefix

2) Install corefonts and winhttp through winetricks. Do NOT install crypt32 as recommended in other guides. Recent versions uf UPlay will be unable to log in with that

3) Install UPlay. If you bought the game on disk and haven't done so already, register your key there (as UPlay is now the sole DRM-System for Anno 2070)

4) Install vcrun2008 and d3dx9 through winetricks, then install msxml3 using winetricks -q (for some strange reason installing msxml3 without the -q flag fails. see https://github.com/Winetricks/...)

5) Install the game. This happens either from disk or from UPlay. UPlay actually downloads the installer that was put on the original Anno 2070 disk to your HD and runs it and does not contain any update functionality for the game itself.

6) This is where the fuckery starts. Anno 2070 in the past had its own account system and used Tages SolidShield DRM which was then migrated to UPlay. Since the migration has been executed poorly (one might say horribly), the Anno installer now leaves you with an unusable installation. In some cases the AutoUpdater shipped with it MAY update your game partially which will result in the game hanging in a reboot loop, in all other cases the AutoUpdater will simply refuse to update your game at all. To update your game to the version working with UPlay anyway, go to your Anno 2070 folder and delete both the Anno5.exe as well as the AutoPatcher.exe, then download the autopatcher.zip from this forum thread https://www.annothek.net/wbb5/... and put the autopatcher.exe(NOT the AutoPatcher.exe) from the archive to your Anno 2070 folder. Do not extract any other files from the archive yet.

7) Quit UPlay if it is still running and then run the autopatcher.exe in your prefix. It will update the base game to the most recent version. If the ETA doesn't change for a few minutes, the patcher propably hung up. Simply quit the autopatcher and retry. From my experience the autopatcher has a tendency to hang up when it isn't the active window, so propably keep it as the active window and make something like a cup of coffee in the meantime. After it is done, the autoupdater will attempt to launch the game on its own which will may result in you getting a broken activation window and dozens(I ain't kidding, prepare for LOTS of error windows) of error messages. At this point the update is done and you can safely kill the process.

8) This step is only necessary if you own the addon "Die Tiefsee"/"Deep Ocean" or any package containing it(like the complete edition). Open up the wineconsole in your prefix, navigate to the Anno 2070 folder and run "autopatcher.exe addon /autostart". This will download the addon files. While you can run this without actually owning the addon, it will just litter your hard drive as the addon contents won't unlock in-game unless you actually own it. The same as in step 7 applies as in that the autopatcher may hang, and may give you a broken activation screen and dozens of error messages after finishing at which you can simply kill the process.

9) Delete the autopatcher.exe and the anno5.exe and extract the AutoPatcher.exe and Anno5.exe from the 92 folder in the autopatcher.zip to your Anno 2070 directory

10) Start UPlay and launch the game through it. If you installed the game from disk, then select Anno 2070 in your UPlay library and click on that "Locate on hard drive" button under the install button and point it to your Anno 2070 folder and then launch it through UPlay

11) Congratulations. Anno 2070 is now running on your machine

12) I personally found the game to be quite unstable when not running in DX9 mode (both using DXVK as well as Wine3D). To force the game into DX9-mode, open up the Engine.ini located in drive_c/users//Application Data/Ubisoft/ANNO 2070/Config and set DirectXVersion to 9. After which Anno 2070 should run nice and stable