Ubisoft and Blue Byte have announced some new updates to city building browser title ANNO Online. This is in the form of new Monuments, namely the Amphitheater, Imperial Cathedral and Castle. Each Monument has its own benefits to help speed up the development process. Check out the trailer above to see what they look like.

The Amphitheater is available for those who unlock the Library, while the Imperial Cathedral and Castle are unlocked after you get the Library and Amphitheater along with the right amount of knowledge points. While both Monuments increase your population capacity for each building, they do so in different ways. The Cathedral needs a crossing tower and bell for the population bonus while the Castle will need a cistern and tocsin.

Blue Byte has also changed public buildings to be “attractions”, with more these attractions influencing a building and motivating people to move in. What are your thoughts on the new additions? Let us know below.

Anno Online, Ubisoft’s free to play browser rendition of its long running city sim franchise, that is somehow surprisingly excellent, will be getting support for monuments, the publisher announced today.

Building these monuments will give the players some extraordinary bonuses within the game, so getting them is going to be sufficiently difficult- players will need to complete a quest chain, that gives them access to the Library, which is the first monument they can build. Building the library will unlock other buffs for players, which will subsequently allow them to build other monuments, such as the Botanical Gardens.

In full support of the game’s multiplayer mode, players will also be able to visit each other’s cities and help them to complete their monuments, either by helping them with the necessary construction materials, or by cutting short the construction period of the monuments.

Anno Online is a free to play browser game; last year, we at GamingBolt quite liked what we played of it. If you are getting the itch for some new city sim action, and don’t want to put up with EA’s newest SimCity, check it out.

Anno Online’s closed beta has been getting a good response, especially since players would have their characters carried over into the open beta (along with a nice deco statue to thank them for their participation). Players who still play the game during the first of the open beta will also reap the rewards with a premium in-game ship, that allows you to carry more freight at greater speeds.

Head here to create an account and start playing the game.

Over time, Anno has experimented a lot with setting and with gameplay styles, and now it tries a new one: an in browser, free to play game game, that Ubisoft ambitiously refers to as the ‘next generation’ of browser based gaming. And while the words ‘free to play’ and ‘browser game’ are generally deterrents to all but the Facebook Farmville loving crowd, what Ubisoft has accomplished here is nothing short of staggering.

Anno Online is a beautiful looking game with incredible depth that should, via some great game design, manage to impress both the casuals who’d want to fire it up during lunch time, and those OCD gamers who spend hours ensuring every last detail of their city is right.

That’s an incredible feat, no matter how you spin it, and not a whole lot was sacrificed in getting there. Well okay, so there’s no more wars or disasters, occurrences that were staples of the series. Instead, in a clear attempt to adapt a more sedate pace, we have a game that lets you build your own city and manage it on your own time, whether you want to play five minutes at a time, or whether you want to play for hours at end. Well, at least once you’re done with the awful tutorial.

It’s probably understandable why there is a tutorial so long, and so exhaustive. Anno Online’s audience will chiefly be the demographic that doesn’t expect complexity beyond Farmville and Mafia Wars in its games, so it is necessary to walk them through the nuances of Anno’s deep city building.

So you’re told to build a house first, walked through every step, one click at a time, down to where you actually build a house. You’re also told to build a market, and then a road connecting the two. Soon, things are spiraling out of control as you’re building more and more, laying down the infrastructure of your city, managing population growth, and also managing income and resources. It’s insane, because you don’t realize how deep the game is until you stop to think about it.

And that’s probably the beauty of it. A lot of that probably also has to do with the interface, which is a thing of beauty. Seriously, it’s so simple and so intuitive. Why can’t we have more of these in every strategy and sim game?

There are social features too, now. You can interact with other players and trade resources, apparently. I wouldn’t know. I didn’t do it. Because I wasn’t forced too. And again, that’s the best part: the social gaming aspect is there for players who want to check it out, but if you want to play by yourself and build your own city, there is nothing stopping you from doing that. Rather than actively impede your efforts like SimCity did, Anno helps you. Anno helps you no matter what you want to try and do, actually.

The scope is incredible too. With over 200 different kinds of buildings, and support for over 1500 buildings per city, and the fact that the game is actually built on Anno 1404’s engine- an incredibly impressive feat, considering it’s an in browser game that requires no download whatsoever- it’s actually a technical marvel.

Yes, it’s always online. But you know what? It’s always online done right. I didn’t have to pay $60 for this game. I’m not being not-so-subtly shepherded towards microstransactions.

I’m not being forced into using social features. It’s always online because it’s a browser game, it’s a browser game to reach the widest audience possible, and it’s a browser game that is a hell of an achievement. Ubisoft BlueByte has achieved something I didn’t think was possible- a browser based game that would actually appeal to the hardcore PC crowd, as well as the traditional browser gaming crowd.

Based on mechanisms from ANNO 1404, ANNO Online has players creating cities with a ton of buildings and essentially creating some really cool islands. You can trade by ships and invest in the complex economic system and there will be ton of multiplayer opportunities. Being a web-browser based MMO, ANNO is intriguing for the graphical style which looks quite good despite its limitations.

Published by Ubisoft, we suspect that ANNO Online will debut some time later this year for PC. Its free to play, so there’s also that. Ubisoft Blue Byte also has a ton of experience with these kind of games, having created the acclaimed Settlers franchise, along with many other games in the ANNO-verse. So it should be worth a look.

Anno Online is a free-to-play strategy simulation game that lets you build and develop big medieval cities. No download is required; you can experience a complex city simulation directly in your browser!

Tell us what you think in the comments section below.