Hey Anno Community!

Today we want to give you an overview of our efforts in terms of mod support on release, and a brief look into the future and what we’re planning for postlaunch.

Mod support at release

As previously announced, the mod loader is integrated into the PC version of the game right from the start. This means, mods in the mod folder are automatically detected and loaded when you start the game.

There are even a few example mods already pre-installed. You can find them and a small how-to textfile in your game installation folder under mods/

However, we’re not yet supporting mods with a dedicated in-game UI or in-game browser. That is planned for a later update (see further below in this article).

For now, you can install and activate mods the old way by extracting. zip files into the mods/ folder as outlined above.

The mod loader comes with nice improvements and a few changes over the previous version in Anno 1800. Namely:

• ModOp improvements
• additions for Lua scripts
• built-in support for activation profiles and options (similar to iMYA tweaks in case you know them).

More details about the changes are documented in the mod loader GitHub repository which we highly encourage you to check out: https://jakobharder.github.io/anno-mod-loader/

Partnership with mod.io

We’re excited to confirm we’re partnering with mod.io on our mod support plans. mod.io is an industry-leading middleware solution for mods and user-generated content (UGC) support, used in hundreds of games.

After our collaboration on Anno 1800, mod.io will again become the home for mods for Anno 117: Pax Romana – and your way to easily both share your creations and download mods others created. You can find the dedicated Anno 117: Pax Romana page on mod.io here: https://mod.io/g/anno-117-pax-romana

This is just the beginning of this collaboration and we’re looking forward to sharing more in the coming months.

State of Tooling

Further, for the mod creators out there: the engine of Anno 117: Pax Romana is a continuation from Anno 1800, thus many community tools continue to work as is or need only some smaller adjustments.

RDA tools to unpack data work unchanged, e.g.

• https://github.com/anno-mods/RDAExplorer
• https://github.com/anno-mods/RdaConsole

The Visual Studio Code plugin has been updated to support Anno 117: Pax Romana. A new addition are templates for empty mods with the standard file structure:

• https://anno-mods.github.io/vscode-anno/

The Blender plugin still needs some work, but should be able to open most CFGs at this point already thanks to community efforts:

• https://github.com/anno-mods/Blender-Anno-117

And finally, like in the past, we recommend visiting the modding Discord server for more resources and discussions with fellow modders:

• https://discord.gg/qfUgFUTSqj

A big shout out to all who have contributed to tools and documentation in the past: taubenangriff, xormenter, lukts30, Serpens66, Hier0nimus to name a few.

Road Ahead

There are two missing pieces when compared to Anno 1800: in-game UI with info tips and popups for activation, and a mod browser with download platform.

Both are topics we’re looking into bringing to the game in postlaunch – we’ll keep you updated.

If you’re wondering about mod support on console: for now, we’re focused on PC mod support.

We do expect new needs, requests and ideas raising in the modding community following the release. There is still some potential especially around the new Lua scripting options. Therefore, we plan to gradually improve the support here and are welcoming your input on this topic.

What could be more Roman than the amphitheatre? Well, that’s what we thought, at least, and started working on the monument for Anno 117: Pax Romana. Let’s go over the history of monuments in Anno games – and then dive into the amphitheatre and its effects on your gameplay.

Monuments across Anno games

In Anno games, monuments are large projects that serve as prestigious landmarks and offer gameplay benefits. They are typically late-game buildings that require significant investment in terms of resources, workforce, logistics and, most importantly, time: it is important to keep in mind is that monuments are multi-phase construction projects. This means that monuments are built in stages, each requiring specific materials and/or conditions (e.g. being connected to your electricity grid).

Another important characteristic of monuments in Anno games is their uniqueness: they can only be built once per island, which emphasises the importance of their strategic placement.

Clearly, they are not the easiest projects to take on, especially when managing your already complex cities. However, monuments do not just simply exist in your cities, they also have rewarding effects: they boost city attractiveness, unlock special items or events, fulfil resident needs or even provide unique production capabilities.

That can be the huge cathedral in Anno 1404 that also plays a big role in the campaign, making you race against Cardinal Lucius: who can finish the cathedral first?

It can also be Leisure Center and Corporate Headquarters in Anno 2070 (with a third monument, the Science Forum, added with the Deep Ocean expansion), showing either your allegiance to one of the three groups – or your commitment to support multiple of them.

Anno 1800 then has the World’s Fair, hosting exhibitions that reward rare items, the Skyline Tower housing an enormous number of residents (added with the High Life DLC) and the Airship Hangar (added with Empire of Skies DLC) – and those were just some examples.

Anno 117: Pax Romana of course follows in these footsteps (otherwise we wouldn’t be writing this DevBlog) and has you build the great amphitheatre. Let’s take a closer look.

The Amphitheatre

When we think of Ancient Rome – or present Rome even, we might say – there is one thing that immediately pops in our minds: the Colosseum. So, let’s be honest: it wouldn’t be a game inspired by the Roman Empire if there wasn’t an Amphitheatre in it to invoke that very fantasy.

The Colosseum in Rome of course wasn’t the only amphitheatre in Roman times: many large cities had such arenas, varying in size, and their remains can still be seen today in many places (e.g. in Lyon, France, or in El Jem, Tunisia).

These amphitheatres could host crowds numbering in the tens of thousandth and were usually used for gladiatorial games.

This is also their purpose in Anno 117: Pax Romana – but first, you will have to build it!

How to build

When you have reached the fourth and highest population tier in Latium, Patricians, you can start the construction of the monument. The great amphitheatre is the biggest monument we have ever created for an Anno game, so, make sure to leave some space on your island! Each island can support one such arena.

There are four building stages to be completed by you before you can host any games in the amphitheatre. It all starts with the foundation:

Afterwards, there are stage two and three to complete, each requiring large amounts of increasingly more expensive resources – and workforce, of course. Each time you progress, the monument also changes visually: we highly recommend zooming in to discover all the details we put into this building.

And then, finally, the monument is finished: marvel at the arena with people training and preparing the next show, the rows upon rows of seats just waiting for audience, special lounges for the important people and the convenient sun covers (the velarium, as the Romans called it).

Effects

Right after construction finished, it’s time for a festival: parades will march through your city and people celebrate. Additionally, your architectural marvel will further increase your prestige, earning the respect of even the grumpiest of rival governors.

In a large area, the amphitheatre increases population (+3), happiness (+3) and prestige (+7). This will cover most large islands when placed strategically (but won’t cover the entirety of the huge island of DLC 1 – Prophecies of Ash – just in case you wondered).

It doesn’t stop there, of course: it’s only the beginning! You can now host different events in this arena to entertain your population. Different types of gladiator battles or even a naumachia – ship battles right in the arena. Let’s take a closer look at these events.

Events

There are three, to be precise, from small to large: the local gladiator games, grand gladiator games and the great naumachia.

Accordingly, the required resources to start such an event increase: requiring later not just weapon and equipment for the gladiators and some food for the nobles in the audience but also luxury goods and – for the naumachia – access to a nearby aqueduct cistern. Larger events also cost more money and require more Patrician workforce.

After a preparation phase where these goods have to be transported to the amphitheatre, the games start. There’s something to gain from these investments, of course!

Hosting events will make your population happy and boost the productivity of different parts of your economy, buffs various attributes, provides bonuses to military units and at its highest stage even prevents uprisings and increases the frequency of festivals. Repeating the same event will unlock the respective higher rewards of its category the next time around.

These rewards slowly time out and can be reactivated by hosting another such event.

With an event ongoing, you can watch the ranks getting filled with people from your city: a huge crowd is watching the events in the arena. Simulating crowds of this size was no easy undertaking for us – that’s maybe a topic for its own DevBlog.

There will also be the occasional side quest or story event happening during these events that require your attention.

“Why is there no monument in Albion?” we have seen asked here and there in the past. Our colleague Gabriel gave a more extensive answer in the Reddit AMA yesterday, but we want to pick up the topic here briefly as well: ultimately, as with many aspects of game development it comes down to development efforts. And monuments are significant efforts across multiple departments, as they are not “just” a public service building but have significant gameplay attached to it. That said, Albion does have two huge public buildings for the Celtic path (even if they’re not multi-stage monuments) which are strong visual anchors on your islands up in Albion.

And for the future… working on some more monuments for a DLC sounds like fun!

With that, we’ve reached the end of today’s blog post. How long will it take you to construct your own amphitheatre? We’re looking forward to watching you race to its completion – as we have done already for the World’s Fair in Anno 1800.

And for everyone who likes to take it slow: find a great place for this monument on your island, maybe build a park nearby? Rebuild the historical area around the Colosseum? We’re curious with what you come up with!

The Anno veterans among you will remember: back in 2009, Anno 1404 introduced the item mechanic for the first time to the series. Items are objects or people in the game that you slot into specific buildings or ships to modify some of their values, for example:

• Increase the productivity of all sheep farms within a certain radius
• Increase the happiness of all residence buildings near a market building
• Increase the sailing speed of a ship
• And many similar effects

The idea behind the introduction of this mechanic back then was, to deepen the puzzle aspects of an Anno game by letting you boost certain productions further, specialize your fleet for e.g. higher speed, or simply get the most out of a densely packed city. They are a tool that provides more choice for you, the player, on how to tackle the challenges in the game.

How items were handled differed a bit from game to game: Anno 1404 allowed slotting items in ships and your trading post, while Anno 1800 not only greatly expanded the number of items in the game but also added special buildings (Townhall, Harbor Master and Trade Union) where these items would be slotted to affect buildings in their vicinity.

Following the release and throughout post-launch we eagerly followed the discussions around the item mechanic (and the sheer volume of different items) in Anno 1800 and decided to adjust it on some levels for our next game – but don’t worry item-lovers, there’s still plenty to tweak and puzzle.

Hiring Specialists

Let’s take a look at how we’re tackling the topic in Anno 117: Pax Romana then.

Firstly, we did a small renaming: “items” are called “specialists” in Anno 117: Pax Romana. The reason is that all items are now people who you invite to work for you and who provide their services and special skills to your cities – therefore: specialists!

The specialists can mainly be obtained via quests or by visiting traders – they usually have some specialists visiting who you can hire for a certain sum. Additionally, the Discovery Tree and the Hall of Fame also offer ways to obtain specialists.

These specialists can then be slotted into either your villa and officia or your ships.

There are a total of 4 rarity categories for items. Higher rarity specialists have stronger effects but are – as their name suggests – harder to obtain. Specialists can affect residences, production buildings, public service buildings and ships.

Employing specialists

We acquired a few specialists, let’s put them to good use and take a look at where you can employ them.

Villa

As probably the first places you will slot a specialist in, your governor villa is your home as a governor and – especially in Albion – a symbol of Roman power and prestige. It has a large effect radius for items slotted here and provides other benefits, for example allowing you to recruit some personal guard units to defend your city in case of war.

It’s important to protect your own villa on each island, since capturing the villa is the way to overtake other player’s islands.

A villa comes with several slots to put specialists in. The higher your Prestige attribute, the more slots you unlock. Prestige is earned via certain needs and public buildings, as well as your city status and ornaments (incl. the beautiful marble roads).

If we look at two examples of specialists that you may want to employ in your villa, we’d have:

• The Vesseler: Reduces the needed workforce (-25%) and upkeep cost (-50%) of taverns in range
• Iain Thespis, Brightener of Days: Increases the Happiness of all residences in range by 1.8

Officia

With the villa having a large but limited radius, the way to affect other parts of your islands with the buffs from specialists is by building Officia.

An Officium is a smaller administrative building with a smaller radius and just two item slots (later three, if you progressed very far in the Discovery Tree). The radius of a villa and officium, or multiple officia, cannot overlap.

How many officia you can build per island depends on how many “permits” you have acquired. Additional permits are unlocked via your island prestige, as well as the Discovery Tree.

Ships

Some specialists are experts at guiding ships. These captains can only be slotted in naval vessel, with each ship having exactly one slot for such a specialist. Things are rather straightforward here, so, let’s also check out two such captains:

• Thunderous Bolter: Increases the accuracy of scorpiones (+15%) and their attack speed (+20%)
• Unburdener: Decreases trade prices (-5%) and reduces cargo weight slowdown (-25%)

How and to which degree you are going to make use of specialists is up to you. For us it was important to provide another mechanic for you to specialize your cities and fleet but also further boost production buildings or tax income and this way enabling you to squeeze the most out of the limited space you have on each island.