Read our interview with Creative Director Manuel Rheiner where he discusses attracting new audiences, honoring hardcore fans and, of course, diving into mechanics, and building for the future.
After 25 years of the Anno franchise, Ubisoft Mainz is heading to Italy. In the upcoming latest installment of the franchise, Anno 117: Pax Romana, players will have the chance to build their very own Roman Empire. Anno 117: Pax Romana will be the 8th game in the long-running game franchise and the first since Anno 1800, which was released in 2019.
We got a chance to go hands-on with Anno 117: Pax Romana and see some of the new features coming in the new game. The game will have all the bells and whistles that players are used to seeing from the franchise. However, building your Roman Empire will be more dynamic than in previous iterations, as player choice seems to really be at the forefront of Anno 117. This is apparent in multiple areas of the game and systems, from the campaign to any sandbox mode.
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At the media preview event, the Anno 117 team talked about wanting to give players a more robust campaign experience. This includes giving players plenty of options and choices. This starts right from the start, as players are able to choose between two different characters with different backgrounds and differing stories. Players will also be able to choose an Emperor to “support” throughout the story and their own advisor, who can decide whether to listen to them or not.
In addition to choosing your leader, there are two major zones in Anno 117 where players will build their empire. Latium, which is inspired by Italy and what people think of as a “traditional” Roman city of the era, where you serve the Emperor. And, the other is Albion, which is a Celtic-inspired province that stands in defiance of joining the Empire. More importantly, unlike in Anno 1800, players will be given the choice of their starting zone in Pax Romana.
Players will also be deciding on a variety culture aspects in a local vs global loyalty. Players will have options to support the Roman empire and their beliefs or the Celtic culture and their beliefs. All of these player decisions will lead to differing playstyles and city planning. This also means there will be multiple stories for players to experience within the campaign, and hopefully some more replayability.
Anno 117: Pax Romana is about choice and letting the player guide a more expansive narrative campaign.
There are eight main attributes within Anno 117. Players of the series will be familiar with most of these attributes. The more common attributes are Income, Population, Happiness, Fire Safety, and Health. Three other attributes will really hone in on this player choice and flavor, along with the dynamics of your Empire. They are Knowledge, Belief, and Prestige. Unfortunately, within our preview, we were not able to see the full potential of Prestige, and interaction with it was very limited. Knowledge and Belief, however, seem to really be where Player Choice is really showcased.
New to Anno 117 is a Discovery Tree that will use the Knowledge attribute. This works like any research tree within the strategy genre. Players must build buildings and add buffs to gain more Knowledge that works like “research points”. Players will then use this Knowledge to unlock features within the Discovery Tree.
There will be 150 discoveries to start in Anno 117 for players to choose from. So how you choose your discoveries will dictate how you build your empire. However, it was noted that if a player’s game goes long enough and players build enough, they will be able to discover all of the discoveries within a single game.
There are three main trees in the Discovery Tree of Military, Civic, and Economic. Economics will focus on storage and trade. Civic will focus on Religion, part of the Belief attribute, diplomatic options, and public services. Military will focus on the military aspects of the game, which include new ship models and fortifications. These discoveries consist of various things, such as buildings, buffs, and units. Some examples of these that we saw in the hands-on were increased ship speed, warehouse storage, and repair cranes.
Now, Knowledge will not be the only thing players will need to unlock all these discoveries. There will be “Research Gates” that are sort of like challenges that players must complete to unlock the next section of the Discovery Tree.
The Belief attribute is the other new major attribute in Anno 117: Pax Romana. Religion is the base for the Belief attribute, and these will give players bonuses. Players will get to choose a deity per each island they inhabit within their empire. Each deity has a different set of buffs that they grant to the island that worships them. Like with generating Knowledge, players will need to build temples, shrines, and other buildings to generate belief. Ultimately, the more belief a player’s people have in a deity, the larger the buff is granted.
Belief and Knowledge are two central attributes to Anno 117’s progression.
Each island can have a different deity, and thus, the Belief attribute is divided into local and global beliefs. Local is within each island, and Global is within the player’s empire. These different deities will also play a role in the cultural aspects of Latium (Roman) vs. Albion (Celtic). So, players’ belief in specific deities will play a role in diplomacy.
All of these aspects and choices will play a vital role in shaping each player’s empire. Player choice doesn’t stop there, as it seems to be expanded to some mechanical parts of the game and how players build their cities and armies. Anno 117: Pax Romana added more modular features that players can utilize. The main modular features are the Governor’s Villa, ship building, and river and mountain slots. These modular features will really allow players to be creative with their city building in terms of both beauty building or optimization.
Each island has to have a Governor’s Villa for a player to build anything on an island. For players familiar with Anno 1800, this villa seems to work like the Palace, from the Seat of Power DLC. As players gain more Prestige, they can build more villa modules to expand their villa. All the modules must be connected to another module to be built. These modules also seem to come with “Specialist slots,” so the more modules you build, the more slots you have. These Specialists give buffs either to the island or specific buildings in the villa area.
During my playtime, I was only able to build a few modules of my villa. So, the exact range and area of effect for the villa still need to be seen. This was really the only engagement with the Prestige attribute during the preview. So, the full effect of the Prestige attribute and all the ways the villa can be utilized will be something players will have to wait and see for themselves.
The next modular feature is shipbuilding. In previous Anno games, players had to build various ships for each of their tasks. While players will still have a diverse fleet for trade and combat, how it is obtained has changed. Each ship will have a basic “shell,” and players will then pick and choose components to place within their ships. These components will give each ship a different set of stats.
Players can choose to add an archer tower to improve combat or maybe some rowers to increase ship speed. The basic shells have a specific number of cargo slots, and then as players unlock ship modules through the Discovery Tree, they can be mixed and matched within the ships. All of the choices will allow players to really make an interesting set of ships with a variety of bonuses tailored to their play styles.
Modular building is a solid foundation for expanding the already large world even larger post-launch.
The last main modular feature that I want to mention is one that I think will really change how players build their islands. That is, the river and mountain resources are now designated to mountain slots and river slots. Players will not get to choose where or how many slots are located on each island, but they can choose where they wish to place the resources, as well as which ones they are. While we were limited in the preview of seeing all the available options players will have as far as resources, we were able to see the functionality of these slots.
Being able to choose not only what you mine or extract from each slot but also where you choose to mine or extract resources is huge and should make building more manageable. This will change how players can do optimization and also whether a player is more interested in beauty building their island.
This was really apparent with making an aqueduct, as it requires a mountain slot to obtain the water and then a “endpoint” fountain that needs to be placed near both production and residential buildings to provide water, fire safety, and any buffs that come with that. So, being able to choose any mountain slot can really make it easier and/or more efficient to run these aqueducts to specific locations within your island.
This will also allow players to change out their resources as needed, as their empire expands and more advanced resources become a higher priority. Now it will be interesting to see how this feature works as players go from early to mid to late game, as one of the building challenges is having to build to accommodate where resources are located and available vs being able to select which resources you want and where is most convenient for the player.
These modular features should allow players to pick and choose the design and functionality of their islands and empires. Giving players more choices, options, and general flavor really seems to be at the forefront of Anno 117: Pax Romana. However, with all of these options and just in general, comes balancing. This balancing seems to be multifaceted in the way it was approached.
Anno 117: Pax Romana pulls building for beauty and optimization closer together.
Another feature for players to pick and choose from is residential needs. Players do not have to fulfill all residential needs to be able to upgrade their population to the next tier; instead, they just need to meet a specific threshold for each residential need category.
Residential needs are also grouped into specific categories, such as food and amenities. While not all of these residential needs are needed to upgrade a resident, each does provide something, such as additional income, population, or happiness, so providing as many as possible provides more value.
Residential needs having a threshold for upgrade doesn’t mean players should just skip out on producing other items. It does seem that these thresholds will require players to fulfill more overall needs per population tier. This means that while you can skimp at first just to get your population upgraded, eventually, players may get stuck and be forced to go back and add some of the needs that were skipped, as the next tier will require a much higher threshold.
Building buffs is another feature that has been implemented, where some of your production and other buildings give area-of-effect buffs to nearby residents or buildings. This was approached both in terms of how Rome of this time period had built its cities, such as you may find a bakery down the street from a house, and also allows for more creativity when building your overall island.
I know as an avid Anno 1800 player I usually put quite bit of my production or farms in specific locations both in terms of optimization but also to not make my city look ugly having a giant smoke stack outside someone’s window. Farms are a really good example of this, as lavender farms provide happiness to all nearby buildings, so now having to choose whether to incorporate lavender fields within residential areas can be challenging. But also, who wouldn’t want to walk outside every day to see a beautiful field of purple flowers?
Not all buildings have positive effects, as some are just negative, and others have both positive and negative effects. Stacking too many production buildings in an area could lead to more disasters, such as fires or riots. Are you going to be okay with receiving more income or population that comes at the expense of happiness in a key residential area? These building buffs will really force players to think about how they explicitly want to build their cities, especially in terms of the interconnectivity of production vs residential.
Yes, Ubisoft Mainz has added an active pause button, allowing players to build while paused.
The integration of a full on “Pause Button” and/or “Pause Time” and/or “Active Pause” or whatever you wish to call it will be in Anno 117. This means now when players pause their games they continue building and perform actions. Any players of Anno 1800 know this was a tricky ordeal, since players could only pause the game, but were unable to perform any actions.
This will make managing islands and the different areas easier for players as they are able to just pause and check things without anything going out of whack. There is some balance in the sense that if you do build too much while on pause, there is definitely potential to crash and burn your economy. I was fortunate enough not to crash my economy while playing around with this “active pause”, but I had some moments of uncertainty and can see how a player can proceed to do this. Whether by overspending or just breaking some supply chains, or even just creating supply chains that are not ready to work.
Anno 117: Pax Romana is going to be a very large and expansive game, much like other Anno games in the series. I would say my play sessions only got players to around early mid-game. If that’s so, there will be so much for players to explore and learn as they get to the full release. I came away from my play sessions impressed and excited. However, I am intrigued to see how all of these features and changes, especially from that player choice and balance, will play out as players get to mid to late game and even very late game.
This means that while land combat was announced to be coming back to Anno 117, I had no time to even mess with any of the land combat or really any combat for that matter. Players will be able to make land units, combat has a discovery tree, and fortifications to their island as the island’s Governor’s Villa will the main building that needs to be overrun in order to take over an island.
There are obviously multiple games in the Anno franchise, but Anno 1800 was and has been considered the most popular and successful Anno game on multiple fronts. It was the longest supported Anno with four seasons of DLC. It was also the first Anno to be brought to the console and for more new and first-time fans to enjoy.
It is interesting to see how the Ubisoft Mainz team has taken quite a few features that were implemented over time in Anno 1800 DLC and expanded them to be integrated into Anno 117: Pax Romana. Not to say that maybe some of them didn’t exist before in previous games, such as land combat.
However, for many players, Anno 1800 was a starting point for the Anno franchise, so it is way easier to see the connections. Anno 117: Pax Romana will be releasing on console at the same time as the PC version, so a whole other subset of players will be able to experience the game and not have to wait many years after.
With just the early game explored, it’s clear that Anno 117 is massive, and so are the choices players will get to make while building their province.
This is to say, all of these player choices, options, and changes at points did make the game feel like it had lost some of its challenging aspects for a person who has 100s of hours in Anno. However, when experiencing these points in my play sessions, there were also many points where something else became challenging or I had to make some of these balancing decisions.
It really does seem like the Ubisoft Mainz team is taking steps to introduce and help newer players get into the game more easily, along with balancing some of those changes to keep those challenging aspects of the Anno franchise there for returning players. There is still plenty left to be seen, as mentioned, my play session didn’t even fully get into the mid game, and if all of these features and balancing changes pay off for newer and returning players to the franchise.
As much as some of these features can be taken as helping players, they also really set up the Anno team to expand the game down the line. Manuel Reinher talked about the importance of building for the future in our interview, “For us, it was very important to create this more modular system of development. For example, with the religion that we showed today, or the Discovery Tree, you can imagine that we can also create new discoveries and add them, or create a new religion. Basically, those systems are created to grow as well as the modular ships.”
He continued, “A lot of these systems are now much easier to integrate into the base game. That doesn’t mean that we don’t want to also create new features in the post-launch, absolutely, we do. But we also want to have a choice, and we want to have control over it. We didn’t want to be forced to create new features because we don’t have these modular systems, which would not be able to integrate with the [base game].”
These modular components, optional needs, player choices, discovery trees, selectable resource slots will really allow the team fully utilize everything that available within the game and that is not to say won’t add new features over time, but they have ability to expand without having to invent and integrate something every single time.
Overall, there is still much left to be seen, especially when it comes to the mid and late game. Still, I walked away impressed and excited with what I could play in my time with Anno 117: Pax Romana. The future seems bright for Anno players and the Ubisoft Mainz team as the series makes player choice a priority.
Anno 117: Pax Romana is set to release in Winter 2025 with cross-play and cross-progression on PlayStation®5, Xbox Series X | S, Amazon Luna, as well as Windows PC through Steam, the Epic Games Store, and Ubisoft Connect.
Anno 117: Romana Is Putting Its Focus On Player Choice | Hands-On Preview
We got the chance to go hands-on with Ubisoft Mainz’s Anno 117: Pax Romana. Here’s what we thought. After more than 25 years of the Anno franchise, Ubisoft Mainz is heading to Italy. In the upcoming latest installment of the franchise, Anno 117: Pax Romana, players will have the chance to build their very own Roman Empire.
