Advanced tips for new governors

You’ve built a stable first settlement, money is looking good and your citizens are happy – what other challenges await you? In this blog we’ll cover a few topics for after you reached Tier 2 and beyond in Anno 117: Pax Romana.

If you’re just starting out, check out our blog with some tips to get started!

Fertilities/settling island

While not a concern for the first population tier, on tier two (Plebeians/Mercators/Smiths) you might notice that not all goods can be produced on your starting islands anymore: lavender, olives, barley or herbs may not grow on your island and also some types of fish can’t be caught locally.

While you don’t have to fulfil all Needs of your citizens, as mentioned earlier, if you want to, you may have to settle a new island to grow different crops.

You can see which fertilities every island has by centering your camera above it and looking in the bottom left corner above the minimap:

If you’ve found an island that has what you need, send a ship there to build a trading post at the coast. Settling a new island requires a large sum of money – and the bigger the island, the more expensive it is. Don’t forget to also bring some construction materials with your ship in order to set up whatever buildings you need.

Attributes

We’ve touched on the topic of Attributes on some of the previous topics already, but want to dive a bit deeper:

There are 8 attributes in Anno 117: Pax Romana: Income, Population, Knowledge, Belief, Prestige, Health, Happiness, Fire Safety.

These attributes are increased and decreased via the Needs you provide to your citizens, as well as the area effects of various buildings. In addition, specific event (e.g. a festival or the outcome of a quest) can also impact them, as will your city status (a larger city will get a debuff on health, happiness and fire safety).

Our tips:

• Hover over the different attributes in the bar on the top to see which factors are currently impacting each attribute.
  • This will help you to figure out why your fire safety is so low (e.g. cause you built multiple bakeries in your city) or which factors are contributing to your income.
• Always pay special attention to the area effects of (production) buildings when placing them – no one wants to live next to a pig farm or charcoal burner but having a lavender field nearby is highly appreciated.
• Negative attributes are not the end of the world: you will naturally run into times where you have e.g. negative fire safety and will find ways to counter them later (e.g. with aqueducts)
• Health, Happiness and Fire Safety have specific “resolver buildings” that not only raise these attributes but also fight fires, quell riots or cure plagues. Place them strategically in your cities to automatically address any incidents appearing in your city.

Discovery Tree

One feature you unlock by advancing to the second population tier is research. If you generate Knowledge (another attribute) you can open the Discovery Tree and start investing those Knowledge Points into different technologies.

The Discovery Tree is split into three categories (economic, civil and military research) with various technologies and discoveries like new buildings, military units or improvements to existing systems.

You can, for example, unlock new deities to worship (see “Religion” tip below) like Minerva (Latium) or Cernunnos, Mercury-Lugus and Epona (Albion). Or you can research Warehouse Organisation or Sewing Circles in the economic tree, or Night Watch or Portitores in the civil tree to make your task of governing a bit easier.

A few pointers:

• Hover over discoveries to learn more about them and figure out how they can help you
• Parts of the tree only unlock after meeting specific requirements. Hover over these nodes to learn more
• Find the things most useful to your current situation:
  • Upgraded warehouses (economic tree) can support more production buildings, preventing delivery delays
  • If you want to focus on research, unlock Minerva and worship her in your Sanctuary, and unlock “Sewing Circles” to gain extra knowledge from Spinners
  • If you’re struggling with incidents (Fire Safety, Happiness, …) there are multiple discoveries in the civil tree that unlock additional buildings and boost the existing resolver units like vigiles and custodes
  • Even if you’re not focusing on military, the “Tacking” discovery in the military tree speeds up all your ships, even if they’re sailing against the wind

Religion

Religion played a big role in ancient Rome, and it also does in Anno 117: Pax Romana.

Upon reaching Tier 2, you’ll be able to build the Sanctuary (Latium) or Fanum (Albion) and worship a patron god on each island. Some deities can be worshipped right away, some others have first to be unlocked via discoveries (see above). How you use the feature depends on your current plans and needs.

• Each deity provides a number of local buffs for the island they are being worshipped. At the beginning, Ceres (agriculture) and Neptune (maritime production) are likely the most useful for you.
• Later, Minerva is powerful if you want to focus on research and discovering new technologies
• Mars is useful if you decide to go on a warpath, but shouldn’t be worshipped in early game since his buffs provide no benefits as long as you aren’t recruiting units and planning to wage war
• You can switch to a different patron god any time but have to keep in mind that you’ll also lose any buffs granted by respective deity.
• Every island can worship a different deity, allowing you to specialise and make the most of the buffs

Statistics Menu

Checking your storage in the warehouse and looking at the production timers of each chain is fine at the beginning, but the more your city grows and the more islands you expand to, the more moving parts there are you want to keep track of.

Therefore, utilize the Statistics Screen!

Click on your character’s portrait in the top center of the screen to open it and get an overview of all your islands and production chains.

• Select an island on the left side, or multiple if you e.g. produce olives on one island but turn it into olive oil on another
• The green bar represents production, the white bar consumption: generally, you want them to be of equal size.
  • a larger green bar means you’re overproducing goods
  • a larger white bar means you’re not producing enough and your stock will start decreasing, resulting in potentially your citizens’ needs not being met anymore
• You can also find information on the buildings on your respective islands, how much money they cost and what their impact on your city attributes is

There is, of course, more to discover and to learn in Anno 117: Pax Romana and we’re only scratching the surface here. Don’t hesitate to simply experiment with the game and its features – or reach out to other players for advice.

We’re looking forward to reading about your experiences!