DevBlog: The Hippodrooome! A monument for chariot races

Governor, have you heard what your population is getting so excited about recently?

Horse races!

Too poor to even own a single horse, the plebs are eager to watch others race in horse chariots for their entertainment.

Sometimes, listening to their pleas can be beneficial. Imagine, the grandeur of building a Hippodrome in your city! A monument to your grandeur, an architectural marvel, a beacon of civilization and culture!

Your prestige and splendour will grow to unprecedented levels, while racers and visitors from all over the Empire will arrive.

Governor, let us build a Hippodrome.

Building the Hippodrome

It all starts with a foundation.

As is common for monuments, the Hippodrome is also built in stages and requires A LOT of resources: especially granite, marble and mosaics.

As many already noticed in the previous two trailers: it also has quite a footprint, twice that of the Amphitheatre! You will need to make a liiiittle bit of space in your cities to fit in this monument – but hey, who wouldn’t want to sacrifice their residence so that their governor can build a giant Hippodrome, right?

After that, as usual, you will need to deliver resources and set aside some of your workforce for each construction stage. Then you can watch the building slowly come together: foundation, outer walls and the stands are slowly rising into the sky alongside scaffolding and cranes for your busy workers. Finally, when all the decoration and the VIP lodges are done, you can lean back:

The efforts are worth it, as you’re rewarded with a huge racing track to marvel at.

Effects

The Hippodrome is added to the “Marvels” needs category for Patricians and can be used to fulfil said need on the entire island.

It also has an area effect which covers the entire island and increases the attributes of all affected buildings. The provided attributes go up when you increase the Splendour level of the building – this is also displayed now in the construction menu.

In addition, some of the Splendour levels also provide additional bonuses, e.g. +1 offense and +2 defense for all newly recruited cavalry units on the island, or horses as an additional need for Equites and Patricians.

The races

Your Hippodrome is ready, let’s start a race!

Similar to the “Prophecies of Ash” expansion earlier this year, a series of quests will make you familiar with the Hippodrome and its features.

In this little story, the stakes are high! Follow and support the dreams of a young man to become a racing champion and watch him grow from amateur to a legend of the Hippodrome.

You can also just skip the quest and jump right into things yourself.

Setup

There are three different race types: Amateur, Classic Quadriga and Imperial races. Larger races allow for more racers and provide more Splendour, but are also more expensive and offer tougher competition.

If you’ve followed our trailers we released over the last weeks, you will have already learned: it’s you who selects the racer, and any specialist you own can be put on a chariot.

Yes, you heard correctly: any of your owned specialist can try their luck at being a racer and comes with their own set of racing attributes. These are Speed, Stamina, Sprint and Reliability. More on that in a moment.

After you picked whoever you feel is most qualified for the race at hand, you should take a look at the goods you need to provide to prepare for the event. But you know this already from the Amphitheatre monument. What’s new is that you can (optionally) provide one extra good to reap higher Splendour rewards after the race – assuming your racer performs well enough.

After this, you’re all set to start the preparations phase for the main event – but wait, one last thing we have to mention: following your feedback, you can now toggle events to auto-repeat, so you don’t have to remember to start a new event after the last one ended. This addition is also available for the Amphitheatre.

Racing

When all preparations are done (or the timer ticked down to zero), the race starts!

You can follow the chariots race around the track and cheer on your racer (it doesn’t help, but it’s fun). In certain intervals, you can also order your racer to do a sprint, gaining a temporary speed boost which might just make the difference between first place and being left behind in the dust.

By default, you will need to hover over the racers to have them highlighted for you. We did, however, also add some accessibility settings which colour either just yours, or whatever racer you selected in a bright colour.

Click on the images above to open a larger version

Rewards

You won a race, you lost a race… what are you getting out of organising these expensive events?

Splendour levels

We touched on the Splendour levels already when we talked about event types, let’s have a closer look at the topic.

For each race you get awarded with Splendour. The exact number depends on the race type, the extra goods you managed to provide and the performance of your chosen specialist in the race. You get the full amount when your chosen racer finishes first, and less when they perform… less optimal.

Gather enough Splendour to reach a higher level of Splendour and be rewarded with an increase of the attributes the Hippodrome provides, as well as additional bonuses, e.g.  horses as an additional need for Equites and Patricians or horse breeders producing chariots as extra-product and increasing the productivity nearby.

The two larger types of chariot races are also unlocked after reaching a certain amount of Splendour.

Please note here that we reworked the Splendour levels of the Amphitheatre monument with this update as well, more information here.

Improving racers

Finishing races also improves your specialists’ racing attributes. Let’s expand on it a little bit here.

Each specialist now has four racing attributes: Speed, Stamina, Sprint and Reliability. At the same time, these are merely their starting values and every specialist can improve upon them by participating in races. Keep in mind that there are individual limits, no racers can max out all four attributes, and each has different strengths and weaknesses.

Before a race, you can check your opponents and compare their attributes with your roster of racers to pick the one you think fits best. We invite you to experiment with different specialists, and maybe write a success story for a racer considered to be an underdog!

New Research and Items

Finally, this DLC also adds a handful new technologies revolving around the Hippodrome and its functionality, which mainly help with training racers. Additionally, a bunch of new items also make their way into the game.

These can be obtained via different ways: fulfilling quests, trading with Valeria or researching the repeatable new technology in the research tree.

Since it’s relevant here, we also want to point your attention towards the “Honoured Guests” feature we’re adding with Update 2.0 alongside the DLC.

Based on your Prestige as well as your Splendour levels, you increase the chance to get rarer specialists, including the new Heroic-type ones. Learn more about this feature here.

We’re coming to the end of this DevBlog on the upcoming “The Hippodrome” expansion and hope you now have a good idea of what this upcoming expansion for Anno 117: Pax Romana will bring to the game.

On August 18^th we’ll publish the patch notes for the accompanying Update 2.0 with all the changes and fixes in addition to the ones we already shared in our highlight article.

The “The Hippodrome” expansion releases on August 20^th on all platforms for the price of 8€ or your regional equivalent.

Don’t miss our livestream on August 20^th at 5PM CEST on Twitch – this is a bit later than we’d usually do a DevStream for a DLC but this time we not only walk you through the new content, we’re also premiering the trailer with the racers you voted on AND the winners of the sponsors contest! See you there!

In the meantime, if you have any questions on “The Hippodrome”, leave us a comment or ask us over on Reddit or Discord.