DevBlog: Albion – Celtic deities, marshland and ponies

Hey Annoholics!

We’re back with part two of our DevBlogs on the province of Albion, covering everything we revealed last week at gamescom 2025 in Cologne.

In our first blog we introduced Albion itself, as well as the people that live there, the ways you can upgrade them – and the characters you can meet along the way. Today, we’re looking at Albion-specific aspects of features like Religion, the Discovery Tree and Military, as well as how decisions here can also impact both the province of Latium as well as your relationship with other characters.

After all, there’s more to culture and society than different types of food and public service buildings. A big part of ancient culture was Religion, and we wanted to represent that in our game as well.

Religion

Not too long ago we introduced you to the topic of worship and religion in Anno 117: Pax Romana: after building a sanctuary or temple you can select a deity per island to worship, providing you a variety of buffs. If a deity is worshipped across multiple islands, there’s also a global effect that can be unlocked and provides benefit to all islands you govern. The full details on the feature are described in this DevBlog right here.

The locals in Albion have their own deities as part of their polytheistic pantheon, just like the Romans. In your role as governor, you decide which deities are to be worshipped on each island – and if Celtic deities are among them.

Epona is the goddess of horses, and animals in general. Her worshippers increase the production of animal related production chains – as well as the speed of logistics carts. Additionally, it will allow you to build silos to store agricultural goods.

Mercury-Lugos is a romanized Celtic god, associated with trade and commerce. His buffs will boost your trade income as well as the loading/unloading speed of ships and carts.

Finally, there is Cernunnos, a mystical nature deity. His worshippers boost the production of goods from marshes and forests – and his ancient druidic wisdom will make your citizens healthier and smarter.

No matter which you choose, each will enhance your gameplay to suit your respective playstyle. All three deities need to be unlocked via the Discovery Tree first.

Worshipping deities will also result in the occasional festivals that you can decide to hold: With some support in the form of money or resources, your population will hold a parade in honor of the local patron deity, providing various buffs and preventing the outbreak of fires, plague and riots for its duration.

Discovery Tree

We mentioned unlocking deities, so, let us also briefly talk about the Discovery Tree. It’s here where you spend your Knowledge points to discover a great number of technologies across three branches: Economic, Civic and Military. These can be unlocks (like deities, units or buildings) or improvements (higher morale for units, production increases). Details on how to gain knowledge and how the Discovery Tree functions can be found in our dedicated DevBlog here.

Some technologies can only be discovered in a specific province and when fulfilling certain conditions. Only when in Albion, you can, for example, discover Celtic deities or research a technology that allows you to efficiently plant trees in otherwise unforested areas.

Other technologies are even exclusively usable in a specific province, and we want to highlight one specific technology: Marsh Drainage. You remember how we talked about the marshes in the first blog and also about the ways the locals use it for producing various goods? Well… if you romanize the local population, many of the products they are asking for are not using the marshland anymore. You’ll need more “normal” building space.

After researching Marsh Drainage, you can place sluice gates the border between marsh and ocean, and then construct canals inside the marsh. Within a certain radius around the canals, the water is drained and buildable land created. Finally space for more houses – or another bread production chain! Removing the canals will result in the marsh claiming back its territory – be mindful when rearranging or destroying canal tiles.

After this topic, we would also like to point out another important aspect: your decision to Romanize (or not) also influences your relationship with other characters!

Voada doesn’t like it when you drain swamps or worship Roman gods in Albion. Athr, on the other hand, doesn’t care – and Tarragon (one of the Roman rivals) can’t stand it when you get too close to Celtic customs.

The decision of how you want to deal with this and what consequences you are willing to live with is up to you.

Military

One of our most recent DevBlogs and livestreams have been related to the topic of military and warfare in Anno 117: Pax Romana.

As talked about there in detail, land combat is making a comeback in Anno 117: Pax Romana, after being present in several but not all past Anno games. While combat has never been – and never will be – the main focus on an Anno game, it still is one of the features we feel make up the unique character of the series.

At the same time, engaging in war is supposed to remain a choice: if you want to get along with everyone (or even disable opponents completely) or if you want to go to war and invade other islands is up to you.

While Anno 117: Pax Romana features a total of 11 different units, only some can be recruited everywhere. Others are unique to a specific province, like Legionaries in Latium – or Axebearers and Chariots in Albion.

Let’s take a closer look at these two Albion units.

Axebearers carry, as the name suggests, large axes – but don’t wear much in terms of armour. These infantry units are excellent shock-troops that deal plenty of damage and have an armour-piercing damage, to the great dismay of any legionaries. To show you them in action, we staged this little “ambush” against legionaries. You can also see the morale system in action here: after taking multiple casualties, the first group is even outflanked and accordingly breaks and runs.

Chariots fill a very interesting niche since they are combining the speed and mobility of a cavalry unit with the damage-from-a-distance of a ranged unit. They are excellent hit-and-run candidates that absolutely hate getting into close combat. In the video below, you can see them avoiding a group of Spearmen (which usually would be perfect against cavalry) while continuing to pepper them with spears from a distance.

As mentioned previously, all military units do not only cost money and resources to recruit, but also money and workforce in maintenance costs.

Of course you can also transport units between islands and between regions with your fleet – and widen your tactical arsenal in Latium with some chariots, for example!

Outro

This concludes our two DevBlogs on the province of Albion! Do you have any questions left? Leave them in the comment section below or save them until mid-September, when we’ll be holding a livestream covering Albion as well as some other aspects we recently talked about. And not much later, we’ll dive into the topic of Diplomacy – and also introduce you some of the characters you’ll be able to meet in Anno 117: Pax Romana.

Finally, let us once again remind you that you can check out Anno 117: Pax Romana in about one week: the time-limited demo is releasing on PC (Ubisoft Connect and Steam) on September 2^nd and will remain available for two weeks.

Don’t miss this chance to try out our game – and let us know what you think!