Sometimes playing Anno feels like being a bird parent trying to fulfil the needs of the ever-demanding offspring: Your citizens want clothes, they want sausages, beer, carpets, pasta and energy drinks. Let’s also not forget the marketplace, tavern, laboratory or the concert hall.

Granted, your citizens pay taxes (usually) to make up for the hassle, but they really make you work for that.

In short: needs are a core aspect of Anno gameplay loop, you fulfil them to make money, to make your people happy and to level up residences in order to progress through the game.

Needs in general

This hasn’t changed much in Anno 117: Pax Romana, on first glance: We still separate needs into two types: consumption needs and service needs.

The former require the player to produce goods (e.g. Porridge) in certain quantities which are then consumed by the residence. As long as enough goods are produced, the need fulfilment slowly rises to 100% and the need is considered fulfilled.

As in past Anno games, the consumption is always calculated for the whole island (“island demand”) and goods are consumed directly out of the island storage. Like in Anno 1800, you can also pause needs (which also pauses the consumption of the respective good).

Service needs are fulfilled via public service buildings. Accordingly, they are fulfilled by the residence simply being within the radius of the service building.

If you’ve played any of our previous games, all of this should feel familiar, just like the next part: Fulfilling needs is how you advance through the game. If you fulfilled enough needs, residences can be upgraded to unlock the next population tier, as well as new buildings and production chains.

The actual activation of a need (i.e. when the people demand for it and start consuming it) is tied to the amount of population of each tier of an island.

Making things optional

Alright, so, but what has changed?

A quick look into the object menu for any residence building will immediately make our Anno veterans stop: needs are ordered in categories! Let’s compare the needs of the Farmers from Anno 1800 with the needs of the Liberti from Anno 117: Pax Romana.

These changes in Anno 117: Pax Romana we sumarised under the feature name “optional needs”.

The different types of needs now all belong to one of multiple categories, for example food, fashion or public services. Higher population tiers have additional need categories that unlock as you progress.

Providing a residence with any kind of good will contribute to the overall supply value of a category. Reach the required supply threshold in all categories and the residence is ready to be upgraded.

Let’s dive a bit deeper into these supply values with two colleagues from the Game Design team: Christian, Senior Game Designer and Jan, Game Director.

Each need has a certain supply value for a category. For example, delivering porridge OR sardines to our residents is equal to a supply value of 1 each. Luckily, the supply threshold for food for the Liberti tier also is exactly 1, meaning we can already consider this category “done” by simply supplying one of the two food needs. If we now also fulfil the “fashion” and “public service” category, we can level-up this residence.

The food category of the Plebeians, however, has a supply threshold of 3. Even if we supplied both sardines and porridge, it wouldn’t be enough. We will have to set up at least one of the new food production chains to reach this threshold.

As a general rule, the supply threshold of a category is always lower than the sum of all supply values of a category – and it will increase with each upgrade of a residence. That means, you will not need to provide all the needs of a category and not setup all the production chains at your disposal, but you also can’t just stick to only providing the lowest (and easiest to produce) type of need in a category.

To visualize this a bit better, have a look at the object menus of a Libertus and Plebeian residence side-to-side. You can see:

• Each needs category has a certain minimum threshold, split into multiple bars
• Each need has a certain value, also represented by bars, which feeds into the category threshold
• The food category of Plebeians has a higher threshold than the Libertus food category
• Fulfilment is represented in green (regular) and golden (more than minimum)

As you might have guessed from the context already, however, upgraded population tiers keep the needs of all previous tiers. Your early game goods and public buildings will therefore continue to be useful, and you can decide if you want to reach the supply thresholds of the different categories by also fulfilling multiple lower-level goods or fewer higher-level ones that each provide higher supply values.

You can’t provide lower-level population tiers with higher-level goods or services, though.

What happens if you provide a residence with more than the required supply threshold, you might ask.

Well, let’s first take a closer look at the individual needs: Each need, no matter if a consumption need or a service need also provides certain attributes.

For example, providing your residents with sardines gives you +1 income and +1 population per residence, while providing them with porridge gives you +2 population for this particular residence. Garum (a need of the second population tier in Latium) gives you +2 income and +1 happiness for said residence, just to name another example.

Accordingly, assuring more than the minimum supply for a category means the respective residences also receive additional attributes – providing both sardines and porridge nets you +3 population and +1 income from the food category per residence.

When a consumption need is only partially fulfilled, you also only receive a part of the attribute bonus (e.g. only +1 population instead of +2 when fulfilling the porridge need only to 50%). At the same time, however, this also means you can reach the supply threshold of a category by combining several partially fulfilled needs.

These “needs attributes” in Anno 117: Pax Romana encompass more than just income, happiness and population and require some more explaining. Today, we’ll leave it at this since it’s enough to understand the basics of the “Optional Needs” feature – and go into more detail in a separate DevBlog soon.

Implications

So much for the “how”, let’s take a look at the impact of these changes on the game and the answer to the “why” question.

Firstly, something we have already alluded to earlier in this blog: choice and flexibility.

This was especially important since we wanted to let players choose the level of complexity for the game themselves. The goal here is to give enough choice that both veterans as well as newcomers can enjoy Anno 117: Pax Romana, and for the latter to slowly grow into their role as governor.

With a lucky combination of fertilities on your starting island, you might even be able to continue to progress through the population tiers there for longer, allowing you to stick to fewer islands and only expand later, if you so desire.

This focus on choice also impacts the type and complexity of production chains you can pick: how many complex needs do you fulfil? Will you go for fewer but more complex production chains or more but less complex ones? Which ones take up more space?

Another point of choice also related to the provinces: As already announced last year, you will be able to start in either of the two provinces at the start of a new game. With the optional needs system, you will be able to remain in a single province and still reach the highest population tier by solely relying on providing needs that you can produce locally.

Higher population tiers mean more needs – and more choice! Let’s compare the needs categories of a Libertus with that of a Plebeian. As mentioned earlier, there’s also a fourth category added now: household goods.

As mentioned, it was equally important to us to provide challenges and reward experienced players if they provide their citizens with more than the minimum of needs category. The additional attribute bonuses will help you sustain ever larger cities and militaries, compete more effectively against opponents and strategically grow your influence in both provinces by, e.g., taking key islands.

Making use of both provinces will therefore provide different rewards and options. As will Romanising your population in Albion – if you manage to provide them with goods imported from Latium – and following both the local and the Roman path at the same time.

Lastly, this system also gives us as developers more flexibility: new content and new needs can be integrated into the game much easier than it has been the case in Anno 1800. It gives you more choice and makes expanding the game easier for us, if we’re looking at the topic of “postlaunch”. And we already have more different needs in the basegame compared to Anno 1800!

Outro

We hope this has given you a good idea of the changes we have done to the needs system and how it gives you, the player, more flexibility in terms of how you want to set up your islands both in Latium as well as Albion and how you can scale the challenges of the game to a degree you feel the most comfortable with.

Additionally, there’s a cool new puzzle aspect to city building that will hopefully also motivate you to build more than the minimum required production chains. What that is? Well… that’s a topic for a future DevBlog.

Until then, leave all your questions and feedback below, we’re looking forward to your comments!

Salvete, Anno community!

My name is Björn Frechenhäuser and I am a Senior Level Artist working on Anno 117: Pax Romana. I have been at Ubisoft Mainz for 12 years and after Anno 2205 and Anno 1800, this is the third Anno game I have the pleasure of working on. If you’d like to see some of my work on previous installments, you can check out my Artstation profile.

Level Art can mean a lot of different things, very dependent on which company, which studio and which project you work for. It can be more centric around the creation of 3D assets and textures or the visual development and dressing of levels or storytelling in the world and its locations. So, what does it mean for Anno? In short: all of the above (and more). But either way, at the heart of Level Art is always – you guessed it – the level. For Anno the level consists of the game world and its islands, which serve as canvas for players to build their cities on.

In today’s DevBlog I want to give you an insight into how islands are being created, what our processes are and how we tried to achieve the next step after an extremely successful Anno 1800.

From Anno 1800 to Anno 117 – what has changed in island creation?

At the beginning of every new Anno game, we ask ourselves: What do we want to achieve? What do we want to improve? What do we want to drop? For us in Level Art, the mission was clear right from the start: We wanted to create the best looking, most natural, most diverse, most immersive game world in the series. Sounds easy enough, right?

Of course, going forward meant more of an evolution than a revolution because the levels are still bound by the game’s rules, the balancing of its features and the performance of our target platforms – as they have always been. During the postlaunch of Anno 1800 we started researching in different directions and in this blog, you will see some of the breakthroughs we achieved.

Procedural Texturing

In the past we had already established a procedural content creation pipeline for some aspects of our island creation process, namely the generation of the island’s terrain – you can read up on it in this older DevBlog for Anno 1800. However, the texturing process of the islands (which involves adding materials such as grass, rock, sand, etc. to your terrain) was mostly a manual, elaborate but somewhat repetitive procedure back then. Furthermore, the resolution at which our textures could be added to our islands, the so-called “texture splatting resolution”, was too low. So, with the help of our Graphics Programming department we quadrupled our texture splatting resolution for the ability to splat textures with much more control and way more detail.

Now we use the so-called “splat maps” generated together with our terrain that use algorithms that simulate aspects of nature such as erosion, thermal weathering, deposition, terrain wear and many more.

Texture Displacement

The procedural texturing already added a layer of diversity and natural look that we couldn’t achieve before, but we wanted to go further to improve how the textures themselves shape our visuals. We implemented a technique called “displacement mapping” that allows textures to not only sit on top of the terrain but change the shape of the terrain and increase its visual quality without the use of actual 3D assets.

Terrain Steepness

Another lever we wanted to pull to make our islands look more natural and realistic was playing around with the steepness of the terrain and consequently the slope on which our buildings could be built. Anno 1800 had a maximum terrain angle of 12%, which presented us a significant limit for island design.

For Anno 117: Pax Romana, we aimed to increase this angle. Researching this topic was a significant collaborative effort involving multiple departments, including not only Level art, but also Art Direction, Game Direction, Graphics Programming, Game Design, 3D Art, and Gameplay Programming. This extensive teamwork was necessary because the topic is closely related to nearly every aspect of our building system. After a lot of back and forth and countless hours of testing we decided to go for it and doubled our maximum buildable terrain slope to 24%.

With these new improvements on our toolbelt – among many others – it was time to start our journey of designing and creating the world of Anno 117: Pax Romana. Below I will show you a simplified breakdown of how an island is being created from the first to the last step. 

Island creation in Anno 117 – from simple ideas to in-game islands

Setting a course

Before creating even just a single pixel of an island, we ask ourselves some questions: What should our world look like? What expectations do we want to fulfil? What stories do we want to tell? During this phase, we gather hundreds of reference pictures and explore many different ideas together with Concept Art to nail down what look and feel we want to achieve. This is when, together with Art Direction, Game Direction and Game Design we developed our two provinces Latium and Albion. We designed their look, established their uniqueness and set the ground to develop a visual direction that would serve as a guide for our creation process.

Island Conceptualisation

The first step to creating an island is always thinking about shapes, volumes and topology. Additionally, we need to establish a set of rules with Game Design: rough island size, available construction space, required beach areas, mining lode amount, etc. Once this is done and we have all the ingredients, we can start creating the first island concepts.

Unlike Anno 1800, we start our island concepts directly in 3D, using a tool called “World Machine” which has already been in use since Anno 2205. By doing this we can already get a much better feeling for an island, and this lays the groundwork for later iterations. Thanks to the procedural pipeline we set up, we can create dozens of island concepts relatively quickly. Once a batch of concepts is produced, we sit together with Game Design and Art Direction to decide which islands are fitting to be approved for further production.

Blockout

Once an island concept is approved, we create a first playable blockout version of it to further iterate its topology and the balancing of construction areas, beach locations, mining lode amounts etc. Moreover, we do a first texturing pass to check the look and feel. Besides World Machine, during this phase we work quite a bit with our proprietary tool called “Anno Editor”, to implement the gameplay features mentioned above. Still, we stay as open and flexible as possible because we might need to make a lot of changes to the island along the way.

Visual Design

After numerous iterations of the blockout version we eventually reach a state where all gameplay and balancing aspects of the island are set and approved. Now we start working on the visual aspects of the island. A lot of the visual detail already came from our procedural workflow as described and additionally we scatter vegetation assets using a tool called “Houdini”.

Once all the procedural steps are done, our base island is ready: it’s now time to start working manually on the details and flesh out the visuals of the island by adjusting textures, placing rocks and vegetation assets, adding decals, giving more character to the topology, implementing particle effects, adding waterbodies, and so on. 

Polishing

The final step of our island creation process is a polishing pass. On the one hand, it encompasses visual polishing according to feedback we receive, adding more unique details such as environmental storytelling or adding points of interest, and on the other hand it encompasses gameplay polishing to make sure all the features work as expected (e.g. buildable beaches, mining lode, forest locations, etc.), implementing audio with our Audio team and making sure that there are no bugs occurring.

We cannot wait to see your awesome cities built on our islands, read about what your favourite (or least favourite) islands are and which of the details we so carefully crafted you discover along the way!

Not long ago we gave you a first look at how we’re handling roads in Anno 117: Pax Romana and how we improved the grid with additional functionality by allowing for diagonal building of roads and buildings. If you missed it, catch up by following this link.

In today’s blog, we’ll be looking at the challenges the team faced when making the game work with these new options and how they resolved them.

We’ll also cover a few further implications of these changes, since roads aren’t the only thing you’ll build in Anno 117: Pax Romana, of course.

A quick recap

For Anno 117: Pax Romana, we upgraded the building grid with additional functionality to allow for diagonal roads and buildings. For this, we sub-divided each grid tile into 4-subtiles, which allows us to still calculate and place objects precisely into the grid even at a 45° angle.

Building diagonally does help making both streets and anything connected to them look significantly more organic and changes the look and feel of your cities, production areas and the islands overall.

Despite these new options, our focus was to still make building roads as straightforward and simple as before, where a few clicks connect two points on the island no matter how they are orientated on the grid and where buildings snap to the roads automatically when placed nearby.

The challenges

Now, let’s dive a bit deeper into what we did to get there.

There are a few different ways to bring more flexibility into a builder game like ours, and before the project went into production, we made a prototype and tested all possibilities (all angles allowed, only 45° angles allowed, different rasterizations, different connectivity logics). The most drastic would’ve been to completely remove the grid. A clear disadvantage, however, would have been that it would have become almost impossible to play “Anno-Tetris”. Like playing Tetris without a grid, it would have felt rather strange and unsatisfying and not really like an Anno game anymore.

Once we had found a solution that seemed like it would benefit the game, we went with it.

Let’s cover a few more topics that we had to work on due to the upgrade of the traditional Anno grid:

If you build a road from point A to point B, the game has to suggest a path for the road to take – but diagonal roads mean far more potential paths for the roads. In Anno 1800 a street in an open field has only two options: It can either go first vertical and then horizontal or first horizontal and then vertical. In Anno 117, there is also the option to go first in diagonal or to end in diagonal. More options are cool, but it can be tricky to know what to use when we build streets.

We experimented a bit on this topic, trying different solutions. At first, we tried to guess the intent of the player. Depending on the mouse movements we tried to guess if the player wanted to go first diagonal, or have a 90° angle, or finish in diagonal. In practice it was not reliable enough and the player had to manually change the orientation of the street.

After a lot of tweaking and experimenting, we’ve decided to try a much simpler solution: to always first use a diagonal street and then end with a vertical or horizontal one for the second segment. Sometimes the simpler solutions are the best.

And of course, if there are buildings in between, the street will automatically avoid them.

Farm fields were also adjusted to work in this new context, now able to fill gaps that aren’t the size of a full tile. This is done via a polygon tool that can take full advantage of the sub-tiles we described in the first blog. You probably already spotted this on previous screenshots, but let’s take another look:

The wider impact

We’ve only talked about roads so far but of course any changes to the grid system also impact everything else you build – from houses over ornaments to the mentioned farm fields.

It’s also important to go back to a point from earlier and state that while these changes will turn your cities into significantly more beautiful creations, the efficiency-focused builders among you will probably appreciate to know: Yes, you are losing more space by building diagonally, for a few different reasons.

Firstly – and that’s a lesson from the Anno 1800 days: building beautiful always means “wasting” precious grids that could be used for more residences or more production buildings. Making full use of the new flexibility with diagonal roads and buildings is very much a feature aimed at players who prefer a more organic look for their cities.

Also, we are actually changing the “logical scale” of objects upon rotation. Why and how? Well, let us explain:

Since the single tiles of the old 90 degrees grid are now divided into 4 sub-tiles each, we have to make buildings fit this more detailed grid-structure when turning them by 45 degrees. This can mean slightly increasing or decreasing their size – whatever value in the grid is closer. That, however, doesn’t mean that the building itself, the house (the “mesh”) changes in size, but that the space it occupies/blocks gets larger. Its groundplane (i.e. the ground the building/ornament is placed on) automatically adjusts to make sure there aren’t any weird gaps or overlaps.

Let’s make it a bit easier by visualizing what happens on rotation in our grid:

As you can see, the objects, after being rotated, do not align with the sub-tiles and have to be adjusted first to fit the grid. Of the two options, the one closest in terms of blocked area is chosen. The side length of the 1×1 object changing so much here was one of the reasons we opted for a separate solution for the farm fields, as mentioned previously.

Even if the blocked area increases, the building itself stays the same size. Below you can see what the potential impact of the rotation and scaling can look like. These are just examples for visualization, there are no 1×1 houses 😉

As you can see here, the mesh always remains the same size, even if we have to block more space to make the object in question fit into the grid. 

Non-square buildings are handled in the same way, of course, and depending on the building the blocked area might be bigger or smaller compared to it being built in the traditional grid layout. 

Additionally, we also opted to slightly increase the width of streets (visually) so that they’re a bit wider than a single grid. With both these solutions we avoid what we had internally started calling the “green gap”. 

On average, taking advantage of the diagonal option means that you will use slightly more space.

And when we’re already talking buildings: Let’s not forget a key aspect of Anno’s city building – connecting all your buildings with roads! Production buildings don’t function, and residences don’t get their needs fulfilled if they aren’t connected to a road.

In Anno 1800, at least one road tile had to connect to the building with one of its edges. Simply being in proximity and passing by the building would not count.

In Anno 117: Pax Romana, however, with the option of diagonal roads, we are suddenly faced with more ways in which roads and buildings could interact. For example, a road can just pass by one corner of the building – do we still count it as connected?

The answer is: yes, we do. The game will also help visualize this connection by adding a little cosmetic connection between road and building (marked in blue below). This way something like the below is possible, if you so desire:

As you can see, only 45° angles count for the road connection. 90° connection as in the example on the left side, still are not possible.

Well, that concludes our two-part series on the grid in Anno 117: Pax Romana! 

We hope this not only calms anyone who was worried that we’re getting rid of the grid, but also gave everyone who enjoys a little bit of a look behind the scenes some insights into our processes and the sometimes-unexpected challenges when doing changes to something so central like the grid. 

Please let us know if you liked these kind of development deep-dives and leave any open questions you might still have for us on our social channels, Discord or Reddit, so we can address them later.  

You can also expect to see the new diagonal building options in action later on in videos and livestreams. Until then: have a fantastic Friday!

Hello Anno Community,

As you might have guessed from the title, today’s DevBlog will focus on modular ships in Anno 117: Pax Romana. If you watched our segment at IGN FanFest, you have probably heard Manuel Reinher, Creative Director, talk about this new feature; therefore, let’s have a closer look at modular ships!

Anno & ships: a 27 yearlong cruise (and counting)

Since 1998, ships have always played a key role in Anno games: whether you were transporting tools after desperately buying the whole stock from the travelling merchants in Anno 1602 or efficiently coordinating trade routes in Anno 1800, you certainly have sailed the high seas in some shape or form while playing Anno.

It should not be a surprise to you all, then, to see ships play a key role in Anno 117: Pax Romana. However, unlike earlier Anno games, Anno 117: Pax Romana will change things up a bit with a new feature: ships will be modular, and you will be able to select different types of modules to customise and specialise them for economic or military roles.

We spoke to Markus, Game Designer on Anno 117: Pax Romana about this new feature: “The idea of introducing modular ships to the Anno was going around already for a while. With the Roman setting we had the perfect platform to do it, since it is very true to how the Romans themselves built their ships. In Anno 1800, we made good experiences with the ship items and wanted to build on the experience of customizing your ships to the specific tasks you had in mind for them and represent your choices also in the visuals of your ships this time.”

Thus, just like Romans, in Anno 117: Pax Romana you’ll build your ships modularly: this design is historically inspired by their building techniques. Romans typically constructed their ship hulls with a flat deck and then attached different modules to them.

Ships: how do they work?

“They float on water”, you might answer. That’s true, however, we are not here to discuss physics.

Just like previous Anno games, you will build ships in the Shipyard. When opening its menu, you’ll be offered a list of pre-designed ships. Upon selecting and clicking on a ship, you will initiate the construction phase and consume the resources needed; the ship production, of course, will also require time. During this phase, the Shipyard will cost workforce and money; if the workforce is insufficient, the construction speed is reduced, resulting in longer production times.

In the Shipyard construction menu, you’ll be able to choose between three different types, based on the size of their hull, that you unlock throughout the game:

• Penteconter – small ship
• Trireme – medium ship
• Quinquireme – large ship

The new modular system

If you feel that none of the predefined ships quite suit your needs, then it’s time to customise them based on your preferences and requirements.

When it comes to the customisation of your ships (aka modularity), the hull will influence the number of modification slots your ship gets. Slots determine the cargo capacity of a ship and can be used to install modules. However, larger ships also mean slower acceleration – something you’ll need to keep in mind when preparing your fleet!

• Penteconter: 2 modification slots
• Trireme: 3 modification slots
• Quinquireme: 4 modification slots

By adding modules, you will influence different aspects of your ship: its stats (e.g. health points, speed), its function (e.g. naval combat) and, of course, its appearance.

There are multiple types of modules that you can use, each one with a different feature:

• Mast: additional speed when sailing with the wind on long distances, reaching higher max speed and higher speed when sailing between regions
• Rows: additional speed, reaching higher minimum speed and acceleration, with smaller turn radius; it’s perfect for short ranges and combat
• Reinforced Hull: additional HP
• Archer Tower: shoots many small arrows in all directions on short range
• Scorpio: shoots high-precision spears and deals high damage mid-range, only on the sides
• Onager: Shoots rocks with high range and highest damage, but low accuracy and towards the front

With the construction menu, we wanted to show the player a preview of the ship configuration while setting it up. However, it was not feasible to only use regular 2D elements like Icons in the UI, as it would either look too simple, by just listing the elements, or too complex, by trying to show a preview in 2D which follows the exact same rules as the ship would follow in game. Therefore, we tried to show the full 3D model of the modular ship in the UI, the same as it would show up in game when built. That worked quite well, and we are going with that approach since then.

-Jannis, Gameplay Programmer

When building your ships, there will be some limitations in place. Each module can only be built a limited number of times per ship; for example, on a trireme you’ll be able to build only a maximum of 2 catapults or archer towers. If you like numbers, you might be interested in knowing that for a penteconter there will be up to 16 different combinations of modules, 60 for a trireme, and 114 for a quinquireme.

Once you finish adding modules to your ships, the cargo slots will be calculated from its original capacity minus the used modification slots. Each module always takes up exactly one cargo space slot. However, to ensure that ships always retain some cargo capacity, we have made sure that a certain number of cargo slots remain free and cannot be used for modules.

Be careful, though: you can choose and modify modules for each slot only during ship construction – once the ship is built, you won’t be able to modify its configuration anymore. And if you’re wondering: yes, you will be able to save your ship configurations! Each Shipyard has 2 slots per ship type, this means 6 slots in total. If you want to have a third custom ship, you will need to build a new Shipyard.

Modular ships and Items

We know what you’re about to ask – what about Items? Yes, just like in Anno 1800, you will be able to equip Ship Items. For example, each of your ship can have its own Captain equipped on board! But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, we’ll talk about this in more detail in the future.

Dev insights: some behind-the-scenes about the modular system

As you can imagine, implementing this feature came with its fair challenges – from different points of view. When it comes to Game Design, for example, Markus mentioned that it was crucial to design the system in a way that it as flexible as possible without breaking any logic or visuals, while keeping it simple and intuitive for players to use.

For the art team instead, one of the challenges was to understand how big a ship module should be in order to be compatible with the beloved Anno grid. It might not seem obvious at first, but just like roads and buildings, the grid applies to the ocean too – that means that ships move within the grid. “This required a lot of back and forth: first we prototyped by building simple grey blocks and figuring out if that measure worked in the grid, then we made it work visually.” – Rolf, Expert Artist

Jannis, Gameplay Programmer, told us about the challenges they faced to create a system that is flexible and at the same time easy to maintain. “The placement of modules on the ships is dynamical. As the number of possible combinations is quite high it is not possible to create static files for all combinations, but we have to create the ship dynamically on runtime in the game when a ship is created, as in we calculate on which positions which slot gets installed and place it visually and logically at that slot index.

How this happens is defined by a few rules that we had to iterate on a lot. Furthermore, we had to split the system into a logical part: ‘where and how should modules be linked to?’, and a visual part: ‘which 3D models are used in which situations?’. For example, a mast at the front of the ship has to look different than a mast in the center of it. This allows us to efficiently set up modular ships, validate each possible configuration and create different visual variations e.g. for special participants such as pirates.”

This means that, not only does each module have a different feature, but they also have a different priority in relation to other module types. This priority influences the slot the module will occupy when the ship is configured: each module has a preferred slot to be on; however, if the slot is already occupied by a module with higher or same priority, the module is placed on the next open slot that is further outside. If all slots further outside are occupied, it will move to the next open slot towards the middle of the ship. This is to make sure that placement of the modules will result in a nice, good-looking structure on the ship.

Workforce, construction and maintenance costs

Unlike previous Anno games, ships will now require workforce not only during the construction phase, but also to function. “We moved away from the more artificial and abstract influence limitation established in Anno 1800 to the more grounded and realistic workforce approach. This will lead to a much tighter tie between your economy and your Naval capacity.” – Markus, Game Designer. However, this is a bigger topic that will be addressed in a future blog – so, watch this space if you’re curious to know more!

The construction and maintenance costs of the ships change depending on the installed modules. For example, rows will be more labour intensive then sails – this means they will require more workforce. Same thing for the Archer Tower compared to the Onager, as there are more soldiers involved.

Well, we hope you enjoyed reading through this (quite long) blog on Modular Ships! As mentioned above, expect more to come on the ship topic, in which we’ll focus on naval combat and the ship system in general. In the meantime, if you have any questions, never hesitate to reach out!

Very few things in an Anno game would function without roads: they connect all the player’s buildings on an island, starting at the harbour and connecting lonely woodcutters, houses in the towns and every other little production outpost.

They enable the transportation of goods and visualize the delivery time and distance of said goods via transportation feedback units with carts or wagons. They play a key role in the city planning for players and help organize the different parts of an island.

And, lastly, all kinds of other feedback units (i.e. pedestrians, animals, etc.) spawn on them as well and make the world look livelier and more believable.

Importantly: They are sticking to the grid like everything else in the game. But… what if we expanded your options in the grid for Anno 117: Pax Romana?

In our two-part series on the Anno grid and roads, we first give you an overview of what changed and what that means for your gameplay experience. In the second blog we’ll dive deeper into the “how” and “why”, the technical details and challenges we faced in making this happen.

Roads in Anno 117: Pax Romana

To be perfectly honest with you, this was not the first time we thought about breaking up the usual 90° angle grid for Anno. Each time we ran into issues, felt that the solution would not quite live up to what we thought was important to Anno and/or decided that our time was better spent on other features, adding more value to the game and for our players. After all, one does not simply rework the Anno grid system.

Until now!

In Anno 117: Pax Romana the grid is reworked with additional functionality to allow for 45° angles of roads and buildings. This does help making both streets and anything connected to them look significantly more organic, and can certainly change up the look and feel of both building your cities and setting up your production chains.

We have also put work in making corners and street connections look smoother, creating automatically smooth curves instead of sharp corners. The streets also automatically adjust and straighten when buildings are placed near them (e.g. when players place a house directly in the corner in order to waste as little space as possible space) for a more appealing look.

As Anno 1800 veterans, you can otherwise expect similar behaviour as you’re used to: roads are adjusting to the terrain elevation, they’re creating bridges when you draw them over a river and change to a pier-style version when built on the coast. You can also expect different road types, with better versions costing more but providing some benefits.

A look under the hood

That was a VERY quick overview but how are roads working now, from a design point of view? Let’s get into the technical details with the support from Nicolas from Game Design, Christian and Johannes from Gameplay Programming, Tim from 3D Programming and David from Art.

The grid in Anno 117: Pax Romana is made of single tiles which are further divided into 4 sub-tiles, while Anno 1800 only had single tiles. This was a necessary change to allow for diagonal building, since we can now make any objects you place also correctly fit into the grid diagonally, see below:

Isn’t this now just much better looking than the zigzag from before? See below for a direct comparison when building a road from A to B:

Another change to support both diagonal roads and the improved visuals in terms of smooth curves: streets are now graphs, instead of being rendered tile by tile. This essentially allows us to render the entire section from one node to the next (see image below) which does make it look more coherent and takes any intersections into consideration.

One downside of this change is that it’s not possible anymore to build a road that covers exactly one grid tile. A road will always have to be at least two grid tiles long.

As a result of these changes and the increased number of ways roads can intersect, we couldn’t use the same way we handled road tiles on Art and rendering side in Anno 1800 where each possibility had its own complete version created by the Art team. Back then, we worked with sets of road tiles like this:

In 45° the number of possible intersections is drastically increased. Calculating that number is actually not trivial, because street intersections are not limited to one tile so they can overlap with other intersections creating something that can lovingly be described as a huge mess.

You remember the sub-tiles of each main tile? Based on them, we decided that Art would create a smaller subset of pieces which then would be assigned to the correct position (according to context) to form roads based on the code created by the 3D Programming team.

That doesn’t mean that this process is easy – this picture shows quite nicely what’s possible when building multiple pieces, curves and intersections close together – and all of that has to work and look pretty:

Building smoothly

Important for us was that players can switch between the “good old” 4 directions that served the Anno series so well over the last 25 years or all 8 directions we offer you now on the fly: you can enable and disable the option at any time.

This also meant that intuitiveness played an important role when we designed the update to the grid and road system: Despite these new options, our focus was to still make building roads as straightforward and simple as before, where a few clicks connect two points on the island no matter how they are orientated in the grid.

Accordingly, all buildings also automatically align themselves to the placed roads next to them, no matter if they are built in 45° or 90°. You can still manually rotate them to your liking, of course

On that note we’re sure you’ll appreciate another quality-of-life feature that made its way into Anno 117: Pax Romana from Anno 1800’s console version. Hovering with a road in build mode over any building allows you to build a road that surrounds the whole building with just a single click. This way you can quickly have a block of residences surrounded by a road – or a warehouse, like in the example below. Have a look!

And finally, the important question: How does the team prefer to build their cities in Anno 117: Pax Romana? And which approach would they recommend players as default option – using all 8 directions or only the “traditional” 4?

Nicolas: “I personally like having different neighbourhoods (different cluster of residences, production) and each one can have different orientation.

I also like to orientate element based on the shape of mountains, coasts and rivers. It creates very dense and optimal clusters and still feel very organic.

One of my favourite aspects is have farm field with various shape. Bye-bye angular farm fields!”

Johannes: “I usually play in a manner, where I want to reach my next goal as efficiently as possible – and for me that works best when fully sticking to a 90° angle.

However, it’s a totally different thing when playing multiplayer. My focus then switches away from building efficiently towards building more interestingly looking districts. This takes more time and space but also feels rewarding when I can delight / surprise my multiplayer-partner with the more organic look.”

Outro

As you see: While Anno 117: Pax Romana stays true to the grid (that has become central to the series and makes everyone happy who loves building as efficiently as possible) we did introduce more flexibility on top of what you’re used to. Those came with their own set of challenges during design and development but also new opportunities to change up the visual style of your cities and islands, more freedom to build your islands the way you want. Despite the added complexity through the diagonal option, building roads in this expanded grid feels as intuitive as before.

Other features in the game use a similar functionality to the roads… more on that later. Completely unrelated: Did you know that the historical Romans built a ton of aqueducts?

We did mention “challenges” a few times throughout this blog, as well as implications for other parts of the game – more on this in the second part of this DevBlog in the coming weeks.

So, for today: We hope you got a good first idea of what to expect in Anno 117: Pax Romana. If you have any questions on the grid or the topic of roads, don’t hesitate to share them with us!

Hey Anno Community,

Not too long ago we’ve released a DevBlog on the first months of our work on Anno 117: Pax Romana, how we tackled starting a new Anno project and creating the vision. If you missed it, you can find the blog here.

But how are things looking like on Anno 117: Pax Romana right now, development-wise?

While – as communicated before – you will have to be a little bit more patient until we show you our “baby” in action, we nevertheless want to give you an update on the current state of the development today.

What happened in the last months

Over the last months, we have made very good progress on the game and recently reached an important milestone which, of course, demanded to be properly celebrated with cake.

Having implemented the vast majority of features, with more content being added each milestone, we wanted to put the game in the hands of players once again and organised our largest playtest yet (a one-week diary study) in September.

We very much appreciated the input from all participants who – in this very much still in-progress version with certainly not final balancing – provided us valuable insights into topics like the progression, various UI elements (e.g. trade route setup or the location of the game speed options) and the age-old question of island size.

So, what are some of the most recent additions and improvements for Anno 117: Pax Romana?

• We have made large steps in regard to the islands and terrain, having recently overhauled many of the island designs as well as trees and rock textures and – going by the feedback from the last internal presentation – reached “I want to go there on vacation” territory.
• Since a few months, there now also are work-in-progress versions of NPCs and the diplomacy system to deal with – no more “I can grab any island I want” situations in the playtests. Time to build more Triremes and protect those trade routes!
• The life of your citizens has always been an important aspect of Anno, and Anno 117: Pax Romana is no different. Reason enough for our animator to add a completely new set of feedback units (people and animals) to the game. Plus, we went and did some motion-capture! More on this in a future DevBlog.
• We’ve also made great strides on the topic of controller support, building on the learnings of Anno 1800’s console version. Providing the best experience for each platform without negatively impacting another remains one of our key principles.

Let’s take a look at some islands!

We have just mentioned that we made significant progress on the islands in the past months. So, as a little (early) Christmas present, we’re excited to give you a first small look at the world of Anno 117: Pax Romana with some early screenshots of the two provinces: Latium and Albion!

Keep in mind these screenshots have been taken from a work-in-progress version of the game and do not reflect the final quality of the game.

This is the province of Latium, close to the heart of the Empire: wide open areas, sandy beaches, lavender fields and cliffs to stand on and watch the sunset from.

“We took strong inspirations from the beautiful Amalfi coast and the bay of Naples. Our goal was to create the typical warm and welcoming Anno feeling. A place that delivers on the fantasy of a game set in this era. It’s sunny, you feel a mild breeze – it’s a place where even the rich Romans in ancient times liked to spend their vacations.” – Manuel Reinher, Creative Director

The province of Albion, much further in the north, has its own visual design: rocky landscapes with high cliffs and mountains, marshy areas, fog and rain – a significant change in scenery.

“We wanted to create a striking contrast between the provinces and the mystic Celtic Albion is perfect for that. It’s the most alien place within the Empire. It’s wet, misty, full of marshland – a place far from home where no civilized Roman wants to be. You will face new challenges in this province, but also new exciting opportunities that these wetlands and the local people unlock in your adventure as a governor.” – Manuel Reinher, Creative Director.

These are the lands our dear Towncrier wandered through back in June in our reveal trailer (Build it!), as you might remember. We’re sure he would also really, really enjoy wandering through these lands in-game…

Anno 117: Pax Romana on Steam

In further news: We’re pleased to confirm that Anno 117: Pax Romana will be available on Steam from Day 1 when it releases in 2025 together with all other platforms: Ubisoft Connect, the Epic Store, Xbox Series and PlayStation.

Wishlist Anno 117: Pax Romana on Steam now by following this link: Steam Wishlist.

We can’t wait for you to get your hands on the game next year on the platform of your choice!

A look into the future

For the next months we have plenty on our hands, including – of course – the feedback points from the latest playtest, all the while planning our communication for 2025.

There’s work to be done on the character portraits and the quests, but also on the music side of things: it wouldn’t be an Anno game without a fantastic soundtrack!

As mentioned above already, we’re also busy working on the UI elements for the many menus that help you with your tasks , as well as the general user experience, the look and feel for Anno 117: Pax Romana.

And there’s the topic of incidents: it wouldn’t be an Anno game without the occasional fire, for example. How often and in which way these appear and how players can act against them, however, are topics the team is still exploring further.

This topic of course also plays into the general topic of “difficulty”, which we touched on above when we talked about the recent playtest.

We will continue to give you the occasional more general development updates like this in the future and – next year – will be able to show you gameplay and impressions of these topics as well.

Until next time!

How are we creating the vision for a new Anno game? Which challenges do we need to face when working on the concept of a new game? Let’s dive into the topic of designing an Anno game together with our Game Director Jan Dungel!

For this blog, we’ll first go a bit back in time to the beginnings of Anno 117: Pax Romana. Then we talk about the roles of Game Director and Creative Director in our team and about our overall approach to Game Design.

This is the first of two blogs on this subject: the second blog will go a bit more into the day-to-day work of the Game Design team on Anno 117.

First Steps

So, a little while ago, Anno 1800’s postlaunch was still ongoing and we started working on the console version, a small group of the team here in Mainz started brainstorming on the next project. Clearly, we wanted (and needed) a new project to follow after Anno 1800 – but what kind of project? In those discussions, several key points needed to be decided upon.

For example: What type of game do we want to create? – Well, that one was answered rather quickly: after the massive success of Anno 1800, of course we wanted to build on that with a new Anno title.

Part of this decision obviously had to be: What then should the setting for the next Anno game be? Now you know: it’s inspired by Ancient Rome!

Tied deeply into these discussions also was: What are our strategic goals for the new Anno game? For example, for Anno 1800 one huge goal was to go back to the roots – with the game being an answer to the feedback to Anno 2205.

Additionally, we checked if and how we achieved our goals for our last game(s) and evaluate past strategies and successes.

Questions like these set the baseline for all future discussions, therefore, let’s elaborate on the last two points a bit more.

Agreeing on strategic goals

One goal for Anno 117: Pax Romana, for example, is to provide once again a strong Anno for our fans and hardcore players after the massive success of Anno 1800; BUT we also have several points we want to improve on – a key being the experience for new players. That means tackling the topic of onboarding, for example. We are quite aware that saying things like this occasionally results in some worried faced within our core audience – but we consider it achievable, albeit challenging.

Game Designs job then ultimately is finding ways to achieve the goals we set ourselves for the new game.

Agreeing on the setting

Indeed, the setting for any Anno is one of the earliest things we decide on. That’s cause the setting itself can already answer strategic questions.

If we, for example, wanted to grow our Scandinavian audience (to use a VERY random example), maybe Vikings or the time of the Great Northern War would be well-suited.

It also immediately determines the narrative approach, as well as feature set. Anno 1800 could distinguish between sailing and steam ships, Anno 2070 could add aircrafts – and both examples impact logistics, warfare and more in these games and therefore have large impacts on many layers of the overall design.

And – as you know, we decided to set Anno 117: Pax Romana in an Ancient Roman setting. There were several reasons (and therefore also answers to strategic questions) for this, starting with the fact that (as we also know from previous surveys) Rome simply is a fan-favourite setting – something we know would go very well with our existing audience.

Rome, as a setting, also simply is an obvious choice for a builder game like Anno. Rome stands for a big empire, many different cultures, a network of trade (with plenty of trade by ship), centralised but also spread across many provinces (not unimportant when thinking about postlaunch opportunities) and the Romans themselves as builders – from towns to infrastructure to large public buildings.

The setting, also, has mass-appeal, and people know Rome and the Romans (to the point where parts of this knowledge might be considered stereotypes). That – to an extend – also provides a certain risk: we needed our own take, the Anno take, to the setting we have chosen.

There are so many aspects that appear in people’s minds when thinking about “the Romans”. The typical imperial legionnaires, political intrigue and Caesar’s murder, gladiators and all the ruins still visible today.

Self-identification

Another obvious question we had to ask ourselves, was: What type of game is Anno? And what makes Anno, Anno, from a Game Design perspective?

The first question is not that easy to answer, actually. And we see that often when following discussions between our fans as well.

Anno is a premiere builder game within the strategy genre – you’re doing far more than just building cities, though!

No, Anno goes beyond that and includes city building, deep economy simulation, 4X strategy elements and an immersive world with a narrative layer to hold it together and dive deeper into the setting. These systems interact with each other to a degree that Jan suggests Anno turns almost into a puzzle game.

It’s a unique mix and this is our specialization in the genre: we are Anno. And we call ourselves a builder game since these puzzle pieces, this complexity, is due to all the things players build in our games: cities, relationships, trading networks, fleets and strategies.

In fact, self-identification is key (we have talked about the approach by our Brand team previously), and we’re looking in detail at the evolution of our own games: Which new mechanics were introduced in past games? Which new features? Which features were tried and then never returned? Which features did we love and which ones did we not like?

That also includes putting ourselves into the place of the player, and asking the question: What are my expectations to an Anno game from this perspective? What are my needs and wishes when playing an Anno game? What excites me? What bores me? Accordingly, playing our own games, including older titles, also plays an important role for our Game Design team (and the onboarding of new Designers) in understanding what makes Anno, Anno.

In short: we need to become Anno players and remove ourselves from seat the of the developer for a bit. After all, ultimately, we’re (also) building the game for ourselves.

Let’s use one prominent example for this “Anno DNA” topic: Islands!

Islands are another unique selling point of Anno, a key ingredient since the very first game – and, phew, a much-discussed subject within our community as well. For us, islands – or at least the principle of islands: space limited areas with a logistics area between them – are core to the Anno experience. They would not need to be literal islands, but the limitation of space (through island size, number and design) and the challenges (see: puzzle!) that arise based on that are key – they create a purpose for the player and influence many other aspects of the game’s design.

Additionally, islands naturally communicate space: there’s no doubt where players can build and where they can’t. The separation between building area and logistics area is clear and doesn’t require and UI help or artificial map borders.

As many of you also pointed out in the past: islands are also a key aspect that makes us historically inspired but not historically accurate. Our real world does consist of many larger land masses, which are not present in an Anno game.

From Anno 1602 over Anno 1404 to Anno 1800 – the world is always made up of a multitude of islands with unique designs and terrain features. Easily visible by a quick glance at the minimap.

Finally, it’s important to note that we’re not working in a bubble: we’re performing quite a bit of research into what other games are doing. What are current industry standards for strategy games? (for UI/UX design, game design, narrative design etc.) And then there are of course playtests with members of our community – we’ll tackle that topic in a future blog.

Creative Directors and Game Directors – what’s the difference?

This is maybe a good time to stop for a second and ask: What does a Game Director do? And a Creative Director?

For us, both jobs’ responsibilities naturally overlap in many areas, since both are shaping the creative vision of the game.

Our Game Director Jan’s main task is translating the creative vision for Anno 117: Pax Romana into how the game is supposed to be. That includes narrative layers, Level Art (e.g. available building space) and Art (e.g. size of buildings) but also long-term plans (postlaunch) and all its implications.

He is directing the game and the team, with an emphasis on making sure the game is fun and that people are aligned on the vision and are not working in silos. For example, building size and island size need to work together for proper balancing, so, Game Design, Level Art and Art are in regular communication.

His tasks can go from high-level topics to low-level details like balancing.

The split in responsibilities is expressed in so far as that Jan is basically purely focused on the Anno team itself and on building the game.

Our Creative Director Manuel’s main mission is to come up with a strong creative vision for the project, communicate this vision to the team and stakeholders and to make sure that we stay on course over time. He is aligning, inspiring and challenging the team, mainly by providing direction on high-level topics. Off course he does this not alone, he is working closely with all disciplines of the Anno leadership team, most of the time with other Directors like Jan, to make sure that we achieve our goals and deliver a game that our fans and potential new audiences will love.

A big part of his work is also to represent the game and team outside of our studio. This can be within Ubisoft, or as a spokesman to our fans and press.  He is also working closely with Haye (Brand Director) and her team to make sure that the way we present Anno 117: Pax Romana is in line with the creative vision of the game.

It’s important to note that – as with many other aspects that we talk about in our blogs with game development insights – job descriptions are specific to Anno. Other projects and other developers might give roles with the same names different tasks and responsibilities.

Same goes for our approach to conceptualising a new game, the way our Production team (topic of a future DevBlog) works etc. Each project and team has different needs and priorities, there rarely is a “one-size-fits-all” solution to game development that can be just used for everything.

Outro

What followed these initial questions were weeks of research into the setting and potential features. Our Senior Writer Matt started outlining the world and exploring story angles, while all of them together also had to answer questions like:

• Is the setting done too often already?
• What will put us apart from other games?
• And: Do we like it and actually want to work on it?

On the topic of features, we did some first decisions on which “old” features to keep, which to change and which are mandatory – for example, because of the setting chosen.

However: now we’re already entering the development territory and leaving the original “creating a vision” space. Therefore, we’ll cover this in a future DevBlog.

To briefly summarize: We’re always starting with asking some very fundamental questions (Type of game? Goals? Setting?) while identifying and reaffirming the series’ DNA and main pillars. Only after that we start exploring narrative and feature questions to create the basis for the game and slowly onboard the rest of the team. This is when the team starts creating high concepts and later detailed design documents.

Stay tuned for our follow-up blog when we talk about the day-to-day work of the Game Design team and how we document features and mechanics.

Salvete Anno Community!

What happens when a Roman governor is sent to a province of the Empire? Well, you’ll be able to decide for yourself sometime later but let us already talk about it today: Let’s take a look at the “Romanization” feature!

Historical Context

Let’s start with a look at the real Roman Empire which we used as inspiration. It’s worth keeping in mind here that as with so many historical topics, historians are working with limited evidence on those ancient times.

“Romanization” is usually defined as a process of cultural integration of the people in the provinces of the Roman Empire.

But from what we know, the “Romanization” of local peoples in the provinces tended to vary quite a bit depending on location and culture. It often was a slower, indirect process but at the same time, we shouldn’t forget that the provinces themselves were usually established after brutal military conflict.

While cities were founded and a certain level of administration set up, the Romans main focus was on peace and – very importantly – taxation. Plenty of the local administration was left in the hand of local leaders, chiefs, or kings. Similarly, Roman intervention in people’s lives often was very limited, with no requirements to give up the local ways, culture or religion. Historians have a hard time defining to which degree this Romanization was planned but also how both Romans and locals looked at it due to limited written records on the topic.

There was a large motivator for people in the provinces to “romanize”, however, meaning: learn Latin, dress like Romans and adopt more Roman customs – career and influence! To make a military or political career, but also to stay relevant and compete with rivals on a local level, there was no way around becoming more Roman.

Of course, this was just a broad overview, and there are plenty of differences (for example between the Eastern provinces and Gaul or Britannia) and nuances that would go beyond the scope of this blog – after all, we want to talk about Anno 117: Pax Romana as well.

We’ll be adapting aspects of these historical events in Anno 117: Pax Romana – but as our Senior Game Writer Matt wrote in the DevBlog in July: “we need to cherry-pick and take liberties with the history to keep the game FUN.”

In Anno 117: Pax Romana

As mentioned above, Romanization is a process in the provinces, therefore, this mechanic will be present in Albion – and not Latium, which basically is at the heart of the Empire.

At a core level, in your role as a governor, you can decide if your subjects in Albion should embrace the Roman way or stick to their traditions. That’s of course a rather game-y way to represent this topic: an actual governor did not have such a way to decide people’s culture. In Anno 117, this decision will lead to very different needs and requests towards you that will go beyond food and clothes but will also reach into topics like culture, traditions and mentality. More on those aspects at a later date.

Your provinces will always start with the local culture, this is how you, as a governor, are finding the province upon your arrival. That was a very important element for us, since we want you to get a feeling for the region, for its people and their culture.

But after you have started setting up the basics, it’s time to decide on the next steps. Gameplay-wise, this will take the form of upgrading your residences from Tier 1 to Tier 2. Will you make your Waders (Tier 1) embrace the Roman way? Then they will renovate their houses in Roman style, with red-tiled roofs. The “Mercators” of Tier 2 are on the road to Romanization, resulting in a vastly different look for your city – and very different demands from your population.

Letting your Waders stick with tradition, Tier 2 will instead see the arrival of the “Smiths”. The level of urbanization will also increase, but smaller huts will make place for larger houses and their needs and demands will speak of a synergy with their environment and the local customs.

Both ways are valid options for you as the governor but be prepared to not only have a visually distinct look of your respective cities, but also set up entirely different production chains and public service buildings.

Beyond that, forces outside your control might also have an eye on your decision and will react according to their own interests. You will certainly see the topic of Romanization to be covered in quests and the campaign as well.

Needs and Production

Now, let’s take a look at two production chain examples.

The local, Celtic population in Albion very much prefers to live in harmony with the environment, like the swamps that have been mentioned before. Understandable, that they also prefer to wear trousers in the colder (and wetter) climate up north, far away from the sunny Latium.

Let us today take a look at the trousers production chain: local sheep and weld to use as dye come together in the “Hosier”, whose services are much sought-after.

For Romans, however, who saw more kinship to, for example, the people of Greece or Anatolia (who, like them, lived around the Mediterranean), using trousers was a weird, alien thing. It was a clear distinction for them between the cultured Roman and barbarians from the north (Gaul, Britannia, Germania). Even more in the time of the Principate, when ever more people from across Empire came to Rome and even joined the Senate.

The “official” stance on trousers blurred over the years, but remained a factor for a significant length of time.

Only logical, that in order to appear more Roman and get access to higher offices, locals had to adjust to Roman dress code. In Anno 117: Pax Romana, your “romanized” population will at some point ask for togas. Let’s also take a look at their production chain:

Flax to be turned into cloth by a weaver, snails who produce the precious Tyrian Purple and a loom to produce the togas.

However, here we suddenly have a complication: Snails and the expertise for producing the dye is only available in Latium! Indeed, not all goods will be producible locally, and will instead have to be shipped all the way from Latium to Albion.

Other goods might have to be shipped from Albion to Latium, of course, but that’s a topic for another day (and blog).

Over the course of your governorship, more decisions will be asked of you: from your people, other parties and likely also the Emperor himself!
The choice for the Roman or Celtic way affects each island independently, leaving you with plenty of choice on how you want to approach your role as a governor. Such a decision will immediately impact your next steps in setting up an island thanks to different production chains and public service buildings. Later on, you will also be able to have both ways on the same island – as long as you can deal with the increase in complexity in satisfying the demands of two rather different cultures at the same time.

Pax Romana

117 AD. A time of peace… mostly.

The Roman bubble has expanded to bursting, swallowing territory from the Atlantic coast to the fertile crescent in the east. Rome has absorbed countless societies and cultures through conquest, that it is now obliged to call part of Rome, whether or not it is able to govern them.

Gone are the days of powerful voices in the Senate on such matters—ambitious officials gather instead around the Emperor’s throne; a seat easy to fall into, easier still to fall out of. Under the Pax Romana, these Emperors look to consolidate and build. Great projects are now no longer just for the city of Rome. In distant provinces, new cities (neapoles) are springing up to gather local taxes, feats of engineering are undertaken— walls, bridges, aqueducts. This is a global roman template, urban and geometric, to be unboxed wherever Rome is sovereign.

Ambitions for the provinces such as these, fuel decadent fashions back home. Like blood around the body, the heart of the empire controls the flow of goods, luxuries, technology. Its people have demands that must be met!

But some of these fringe provinces, Albion chief among them, are like the wild west. Governed by displaced indigenes, washed-up soldiers, outlaws, and you the player, the freedoms on offer here, don’t yet outnumber the dangers.

To the Romans, Albion is a land of both poverty and opportunity— underdeveloped, but strong in horses, metals and metalworking expertise. As a Roman Governor, you preside over a wilderness, and a people whose culture long pre-dates your own—how will you rule? How open will you be to their ways?

Inspiration vs. Authenticity

The broad outline described above shouldn’t be too contentious to historians, but how much do we stick to history in the actual game? In short, the answer is: we need to cherry-pick and take liberties with the history to keep the game FUN.

Anno is a world of islands. It has no real-world place names, no real-world people, no strict measure, even, of the passing of time. This immediately paints a picture of a parallel universe that does not necessarily have to follow the rules of our own world – while still feeling real!

Roman buildings you’ll see in game are both meticulously researched by the artists, but also products of artistic liberty and design requirements. As for Celtic buildings, sometimes an artist’s guess may anyway be as good as a historian’s. We must always remind ourselves that we are dealing with a period of history about which evidence is often limited.

Still, we designers are committed to sound research, and keen to incorporate as much detail, large and small, that we think creates a true (and fun!) impression of the time period. From beliefs to technological exchanges, we aim to show how Rome’s provinces began to invert the identity of Rome itself.

Naturally we invest in creating plausible historical characters too. We decided, for instance, that we want female characters to play a greater role in our parallel version of history than they did back in Roman times (Everything in the history points to a deeply patriarchal society in which women had very little power or freedom). Nevertheless, we strive to make them appear in roles that have some credibility, though in at least one case we break the rules entirely, simply because we like the idea of doing so. This is the trump card in Anno, reserved for the moments a better version of the game needs us to let go of realism.

The Provinces

Latium

With its serene breezes, azure coves, fields of wheat and lavender, Latium is a forgotten treasure of a province, close to the heart of the empire. Years ago, a volcanic eruption devastated local cities, driving people away from the province, allowing nature to take over.

Now, in the time of the Pax Romana, many officials, including the Emperor, question why such a gem should remain deserted for old superstitions. In their view it is time for renewal: for new cities to spring up where nature ran riot, for the curse of history to be buried once and for all. Surely, with its beaches, villas and marinas, this place will make the perfect retreat for the wealthy of Rome, and be the perfect opportunity for an upcoming Governor to make a name for themselves.

Superficially, it’s paradise, the epitome of Roman Italy— tranquil, restful, a place of luxury and for pleasure-seekers looking to swim with the dolphins. Still, the brighter the summer, the thicker the shade: mysterious forces operate below the surface here, that may at first go unnoticed.

Albion

Roman invaders first encountered the white cliffs of Albion generations ago. Several times they attempted to master the marsh-ridden land and its warlike people, never entirely managing to do so.

When they want to prove themselves, Emperors always look to Albion for triumph and trophies because expeditions to Albion are like mythic quests to Romans. To them, the Celts appear as far removed from civilisation as anything in the imagination.

Still, on paper, they call Albion a Roman province, and exports of strange culinary delicacies plucked with grimy hands from its muddy mires are becoming ever more popular back home—call it a taste of the exotic.

Celts just do everything differently, and while the Romans consider some of them beastly barbarians, they are at the same time fascinated by their craft and ideas, and have no compunctions taking what they need from them, if it works.

As for the Celts, those who come to your cities in Albion in search of shelter may no longer have a tribe or a place to call home. For although the Romans have brought destruction to their door, they also offer peace (a very rare thing in those days), education, warm baths and best of all…wine!

We hope this article also sets your imagination loose and we’re curious: What was your first thought on seeing the announcement of Anno 117: Pax Romana? Which event, theme or even personality was your first association for the Roman Empire and its provinces? We’re looking forward to your comments!