I have previewed Anno 117: Pax Romana not once, but twice for CGM, and each time I felt like I was introduced to a whole new game. I have been playing some version of city builders since I was a child, way back to Sim City for Super Nintendo—though I will admit I had no idea what I was doing back then. More recently, I have fallen in love with ancient builders, exploring titles like Citadelum, Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown and more. With multiple titles like this under my belt, I have to say, Anno 117: Pax Romana might just be the king of the city-building genre.
When you load up the title, Anno 117: Pax Romana offers a few different ways to experience the game. You are offered sandbox or campaign, and I would highly recommend starting with the campaign for your first playthrough. In the campaign, you can play through as Marcia or Marcus, siblings and children of the emperor, Decimus. This is the first time you will be able to host your campaign as a woman, which I obviously ran with.
It was interesting to see how a game set in ancient Rome plays out with a woman at the helm. Of course, much of that story surrounds her husband and having to rule in secret, but I still appreciated the option. While I was enjoying my city-building experience, the game’s story would often pull me away for some very dramatic story beats. It felt like I was in a soap opera at times. The more I played, however, the more I found myself curious about the characters, and considering they aren’t much more than a floating head and a voice, I applaud Ubisoft for making me care.
In my last preview, I mentioned that I felt like the campaign in Anno 117: Pax Romana was very slow-moving, and I was learning more as I played through the sandbox mode. However, as I pushed on through the campaign, I was able to understand more about the way certain mechanics affect your city, where I was probably just guessing in the sandbox game. I was able to get further faster, but I don’t think I really grasped how things worked together.
For instance, you can choose to play in Albion or Latium in sandbox. During the campaign, you actually end up playing in both, and they are drastically different. Not only are there different visuals, but the types of people you can host are also different, which means their needs, such as food, clothing, and entertainment, are different as well. Though the mechanics are the same, it feels like two completely different games. There are land challenges in Albion, too, and as you push forward with your research, you will be able to unlock ways to mitigate
As you enter Albion as a Roman, you are faced with choices like pushing your heritage and values on the Celtic people or embracing them and melding the cultures together. I started with Waders, but as I was able to upgrade residents, I had the choice between Romanised or Celtic. This can affect how other leaders see you, as well, which can make things complicated. I tend to be a people pleaser in games like this, as I want to avoid going to war at all costs, but Anno 117: Pax Romana really pushes you to make choices that won’t please everyone, which can get complicated.
As I mentioned, war can take place, but it is a bit down the line during the gameplay in Anno 117: Pax Romana, and I have to say it is my least favourite part of the game by far. That isn’t to say that my hatred of combat is based on this game, specifically, however. I genuinely dislike facing battle in any city-builder sort of game. I would rather face internal conflict and natural disasters. Sailing the seas to battle is not my idea of a good time, and I wish it were more optional here.
“Anno 117: Pax Romana really pushes you to make choices that won’t please everyone…”
That being said, Ubisoft has implemented a lot of auto-battling to make it easier for people like me. Technically, you should even be able to create peace with most people, but I was very stuck in the campaign when Voada declared war on me. There is no real guidance on how to create peace, aside from sending money. I was just starting to get the hang of a thriving world, blending Celts and Romans, seeing my population rise. But to go to war, you need a minimum of 44 of your lowest-tier residents per infantry unit.
That number doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you are on an island with limited space, and you’ve built a well-oiled machine in terms of homes, workers and needs, it can make things incredibly difficult. I was regularly dipping into the negatives for workers, meaning needs were not being met, and people were unhappy. During my preview, I was genuinely stuck at war, unable to move forward in the campaign, even with everything automated.
The beautiful thing about Anno 117: Pax Romana, though, is that you learn something new every time you jump in. Because I didn’t have enough people to fight, I focused on ships, which can hit towers or people on an island from the shore, within reason. And while I worked on those ships, I dug deep to understand why I couldn’t meet the numbers I needed for an army. This game is rich with mechanics that you may not even notice, and barriers like this really force you to work hard and figure it out.
Even on normal difficulty (the easiest), Anno 117: Pax Romana does not hold your hand. My Wader homes were all occupied by around 3-4 people, which only offered two as part of the workforce. Even though my land was covered in homes, it still wasn’t even close to what I needed. All of their needs were met, and then some, but there were no bonuses from special effects, so I needed to experiment and see what worked.
A building like the Spinner would give a bonus to income and knowledge, but a bakery would provide a bonus to population. The caveat is that the bakery will also offer a decrease of two to fire safety, and then it becomes a whole new balancing act. At about 30 hours into Anno 117: Pax Romana, I still don’t think I am anywhere near an expert, and I just want to keep starting over and trying new things.
And that leads me to my biggest complaint about the game, it really doesn’t want to explain anything to you. It definitely gives you a “make sure to watch out for bonuses” sort of comment, but it doesn’t help you understand what any of it means. Even beyond war, the biggest hurdle was Island Health, Island Happiness and Island Fire Safety. It seems like this would be simple to understand, but the numbers never really made sense to someone who hasn’t been playing Anno titles for years.
In my case, I really struggled with the “City Status” numbers. I would have positive numbers because of the Medici buildings for health, the Vigiles and Wells for fire, Custodes and Watchtowers for safety, and then a pile of numbers in the positive hundreds for happiness, but that City Status number would tank me into the negatives.
As of writing, I am still completely unsure of how to improve it. I understand it would be counteracting the negative number, but I have ensured that little green arrows are covering everyone, and every area is tended to, to no avail. I even looked at guides for past Anno games, and all the advice was the things I tried, but that number just never improves; it continues to dip as my world expands.
With that, though, I find that every time I play Anno 117 a little longer, I get a little better. I started a new game to play co-op with my partner, and right off the bat, my residents were thriving. I was up to five people per household without even thinking about it. Anno 117: Pax Romana is not a game you master in a single playthrough. I want to keep trying new things, wanting to practice new layouts (though I keep landing on a grid design), or blend different kinds of people together. I even love the variation in islands.
Even with a set campaign marked at 6-18 hours of gameplay, I am well over 16 hours in one campaign with plenty more to experience. Even if it sounds like I am frustrated and struggling in Anno 117, make no mistake, I don’t want to put it down. While writing, I jumped back in to look something up and caught myself figuring something out and wanting to play a little more. The game has really hooked me.
Part of that is because of the intricacy of it all, but a lot of it is also how truly stunning Anno 117: Pax Romana is. Whether I was cruising around on a ship, watching the changes in weather or the day-night cycle, or zooming in to spy on my residents, I am always in awe of what is going on below. One evening, I saw someone having a drink in their backyard, disease and flies swirling around another home (it wasn’t a good day), trees and grass blowing in the wind, and eventually, the Medici dealing with that whole disease issue.
“Anno 117: Pax Romana might just be the king of the city-building genre.”
I played the game on both my ROG Xbox Ally X and my PC, outfitted with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080. Controller support is there, but for a strategy or city-building game, it will never be as good as a mouse and keyboard. That being said, the touch screen on the Ally really enhanced that controller experience. There is definitely a difference in detail on each device, but I was able to play without any lag or performance complications on both. I did, however, have problems getting my cloud saves to work across both devices.
Eventually, I could make one campaign file work, but not my sandbox. It wasn’t until I started looking at the cross-save feature that I could play it on both devices. The issue with that is you can only have one cross-save file at a time. The ROG Xbox Ally X is a Windows-based system, so a cloud save should have worked, but at least I figured something out eventually.
My final dive into the game before review was testing out co-op, and though I did not jump into another 20-hour session, I am very interested to play more with friends. In sandbox mode, you have three other leaders, and you can swap these out for real players if you want to play against up to three friends. You choose Latium or Albion here, too, and then you’re ready to go. I was able to rush a nice little alliance with my partner, but you can’t do that so quickly with NPCs. Alternatively, you don’t have to play nice with your friends if you don’t want to.
You can also work together on a save file, both building and hosting on the same team/island. This option also allows you to turn on “Live Game”, which means they can build on your game file from the cloud when you aren’t playing. I’m not sure I have enough patience or trust for that, though.
Overall, Anno 177: Pax Romana is the ultimate city builder, rich in story, replayability, and an absolutely beautiful world to explore. I wish the title did a bit more to help players who are less experienced with Anno, but even still, I’m eager to continue playing and see what else awaits me.
