Anno 117: Pax Romana Preview
Rome wasn't built in a day. It takes more like 4 hours.
My Emperor needs me.
My task: revive a previously devastated patch of the Empire. Not with the might of legions, but with savvy city planning.
Anno 117, an upcoming game in Ubisoft’s venerable Anno series, is one of the rare games about Rome that prioritizes trade and domestic affairs over conquest. It’s also graphically gorgeous and extremely open-ended. While Civilization 7 narrows each historical epoch down to tidy win-conditions, Anno strolls through blooming cities and ever-expanding economies. It appeals to people who want to hum along to a beautiful machine of their own making.
I brought only superficial knowledge of past series incarnations to my Ubisoft preview session. I knew the fun fact that the digits in each title always add up to nine, and the broad strokes of Anno 1800 that my bro-in-law had shown me. 117 follows a similar arc — you begin on a random island with little more than a governor’s mansion and a dream. Then, you construct worker housing and start climbing up a tech-tree to assemble more and more fancy trade goods.
First, you can only attract crude manual laborers, Liberti, who speak in inexplicable cockney accents. Once you invest in special buildings, you can upgrade your houses for higher tiers of citizens — from Plebeians to Patricians and beyond.
Fundamentally, Anno 117 is a game about social stratification. Each population type requires different goods to keep them happy, but they also generate higher and higher incomes to continue your city’s expansion. Social complexities and economic sophistication grow hand-in-hand.
Then there’s the seafaring. You’ll encounter other Roman islands with rulers who each have their own trade preferences. By the time I sent my little ship out to explore, I was barely keeping pace with my home settlement, and had to shuffle my farms around to build more housing.
Anno 117 is a pleasant (and pretty!) sandbox — you might even call it cozy. I barely plumbed its depths in the hours I had to play, however, and look forward to seeing it unspool in the hands of veteran city-builders like my bro-in-law.
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