Anno 117: Pax Romana – Final Preview
Blog Andrew Joseph 21 Aug , 2025 0
My first hands-on practice with Anno 117: Pax Romana has excited me for Ubisoft Mainz’s latest work on the city builders, which has allowed the players to build a thriving metropolis in the Roman Empire. But I don't necessarily say I'm interested in it. The studio made great strides in the 2018 Anno 1800 competition focused on the Industrial Revolution, and after the success of the 1800s, 117 people were wary of the swing boat.
While Pax Romana shows some interesting ideas such as enabling production buildings to impact the mood and prosperity of nearby buildings, forcing you to think more carefully about the layout of the city, it otherwise feels a little safe and a little familiar. This is not necessarily a huge problem, it would be enough to build a Roman city with the core system of 1800, and I would happily play that game. But I still wonder if further diving into the past will stop Ubisoft Mainz from pushing the city builders forward.
Again, I only watched half of the competition. The initial preview session focused on building the city in the province of Ratrim, one of two provinces you can manage in Anno 117's vague, historic Roman representatives. Latium offers all the lush green hills, lavender fields and terracotta roofs that can be expected for you to be everything the city builders set by the Roman Empire would expect, perhaps because of that, it is not surprising.
In contrast, my recent matches have players choosing between Latium and Albion. The second province of Anno 117 is very different from the Mediterranean paradise in Latium, where Anno 117 has the opportunity to stand out and portray other games of Roman heritage.
Interestingly, you can start the game in either province, build yourself there, and then expand to another province. This is a big change with Anno in 1800, where you always start with the old world of European themes and then build colonies in the tropical new world, exporting exotics like cocoa and bananas to the industrialized Hoi-Polloi for enjoyment at home.
How this starting choice will affect the trade structure between the two provinces of Anno 117 is unclear. It is clear, however, that building a city in Albion feels very different than building a city in latium.
For beginners, the appearance and fields of Albion are far from Latium. The undulating landscape of Latium is vivid green and tempting, while the Albion is wild, weird and wet. Its landscape is full of tan bushes, dark evergreen forests, and glittering swamps constantly damaged by wind and rain. From a Roman soldier's perspective, it feels appropriately alien, and it's a percentage point for any centurion who will think of Italy wanting to end (and then, as someone who lives in Scotland and starts melting in any temperature above 18 degrees Celsius, it feels like home, and feels a lot like home.)
Settlements were established roughly the same between the two provinces. Your basic building material is still wood, which is loaded into the building material by placing the log camp in the forest and then transporting the logs to nearby woodcuts. The roads are still simple dirt paths, and all production buildings require nearby warehouses to effectively transport goods around your settlement.
Similarly, the economic fundamentals are the same. Basic income is generated by the house, but only when you meet the needs and desires of the citizens living in that residence. Once all of these needs are met, you can upgrade the building to accommodate taller citizens. This generates more revenue, but involves meeting more complex needs that require an indexed production chain.
In the new members of Anno 117, you can also increase the income of your home (as well as other statistics like “happiness” and “health”) by placing certain production buildings in your residential area. For example, establishing a tunic rotator between your homes, providing +1 income for each home within the radius of the rotator. Other buildings (such as charcoal burners) may negatively affect these statistics, so you want to distance these statistics from the core reconciliation. The purpose is to fold the extra strategy and reward more thoughtful city planning, which works from my experience on both sides of the game.
However, although the basic system is the same, the actual production chain vs. Latium’s chain is very different. Your lowest class citizens in Albion named Waders live in the diet of eggs and eels, digging out of the vast amount of water around you. Your second building material is not Roman brick, but a Wattle and-daub created by mixing dirt with dry reeds.
Many of these resources are harvested from environments you simply don't see in latium – swamp. Its wetlands are not just the theme influence of Albion, but a key part of Celtic civilization. Many Celtic buildings could be built on the swamp itself, some of which (such as reed farms and cow pens) could only be built inside lanterns, standing upright on the poles in the dirt and strung together with the squeaking network of slats.
Strangely, although these buildings provide Albion with a distinctive flavor, the difference is the most mechanically. These are built in the same way as the road; by dragging them onto the landscape with a mouse. However, the road is just a place where coins are spent on building, and the boardwalk requires wood. Since each major structure requires wood at the beginning, this means that your initial demand for building materials is higher than in Latium, making the up and running of your settlement more challenging.
In addition to greater resource pressure, the boardwalk can cause several other complications. Like ordinary buildings, the structure of the swamp requires access to the warehouse, further increasing your timber costs. In addition, many production buildings in specific wetlands require sufficient additional space for reed crops and cattle paddles, which can easily erode each other and reduce productivity. Therefore, laying the boardwalk to maximize the space without erasing the supply of wood is an unexpectedly challenging space puzzle.
Even in this early stage, the result was a highly unique settlement, a half-diet village with one foot soaked in prehistoric history. However, what Albion really starts to fascinate is that it happens when you start these basic buildings to accommodate higher tiers of citizens. After upgrading your first house, Albion’s Anno Map offers you the option: Do you want your structure to accommodate “Romano-Celts” (i.e., native Celtics converted to the Roman lifestyle), or do you want to maintain the culture and architecture of your hometown?
Which one you prioritize will lead to different needs and desires, resulting in different production chains. The taller Celtics wanted to eat cheese and decorate themselves with exquisite bracelets, while Romano Celts wanted to eat more imperial cuisine and maintain their appearance by using a manual mirror. Most importantly, the two cultures received improvement bonuses for different characteristics. Romantic Celtics have a more formal education system and are therefore better at acquiring academic knowledge, while the Celtic people keep the old ways and get greater benefits from beliefs.
The choices you make are also designed to influence the appearance and layout of the city. Adopting Roman culture encourages players to build a large metropolis, supporting you that you might drain the swamps to create more building space and arable land instead of relying on aqueducts instead of natural bodies of water to keep the city hydrated. On the other hand, sticking to the Celtic tradition will see you continue to use wetlands and forests to build in nature and around the world without making large-scale changes to the landscape.
It seems that during the game, you won't be forced along one of these cultural pathways. After reaching the next layer, the upgrade path is unlocked again. If you decide you want to switch from Celtic to Romano-Celtic or vice versa, you should do it.
I can't say how these decisions work in practice and the impact between one or the other on your solution repeatedly. This match was much shorter than I had at Latium, enough to build a basic solution and a quick overview of the second Celtic Civilization layer. Although there seems to be some overlap between all the Anno cultural variants, I can’t say how different the resources and structures of the Celtic and Romanesque are, nor are there, nor any differences, and how the mixed Roman lifestyle differs from the pure Ratrim-style Roman culture.
Still, there is a clear development here compared to previous Anno games. Anno 1800 and the futuristic Anno 2205 see your colony as a secondary issue – Setrin, whose purpose is to support your major metropolis. In Anno 117, architectural settlements that will also involve Latium and Albion. Indeed, given the opportunity to define its culture at multiple stages of evolution, Albion might even have a larger number of layers than dedicated Roman settlements, which would theoretically be the center of the empire. I'm interested in coloring me.