Gamescom recap: Dawn of the Delta and Echoes of Kassandra

Hey Anno Community,

We’re back from gamescom and ready to give you an overview of what was presented and announced.

Over the course of last week, we met quite a few Anno fans in Cologne, had some nice chats, answered a lot of questions and talked about “The Hippodrome”, the big “Dawn of the Delta” expansion as well as the upcoming cosmetic pack “Echoes of Kassandra”.

Let’s give you an overview of what we shared:

Dawn of the Delta

The third gameplay expansion this year for Anno 117: Pax Romana leads you into the south-eastern corner of the Empire – to Aegyptus. The land there looks very different to what you’re used to from Latium and Albion, with deserts and floodplains next to a mighty river.

Each buildable area in this river delta is split in three zones. The Arid Zone, where nothing grows (for now!) but where there’s plenty of space to build cities. The Farmlands, a fertile belt close to the river, useful for agriculture and foresting. And the Floodplains, an area right next to the river itself which gets regularly flooded and impacts the production of buildings placed in it.

When starting to build a city here, you’ll first meet the local population: the first population tier are the Threshers, carrying Aegyptus’ farming traditions.

Fulfilling their still rather modest needs, you’re again encountering a decision: will you follow the Roman path and merge Greek and Roman culture? Or promote local traditions and follow the Aegyptian way of life?

This means either upgrading to the Scribes (Graeco-Roman) or to the Potters (Aegyptian).

Each come with a number of new needs, both in terms of goods (e.g. stuffed geese for the Potters or papyrus and writing materials for the Scribe) as well as public service buildings. As in Albion, choosing whether to Romanize the population or preserve their traditions will affect both your gameplay as well as the visual appearance of your cities.

No matter which path you choose, one topic will play a big role for you soon: irrigation!

To make most out of the river and the scarce Farmland, you can either create basins and connect them with canals to create fertile ground…

… or, when Romanized, use a noria to transport the water via aqueducts inland and water the area around a cistern.

While we today do not want to reveal everything just yet, let’s look at two more topics, starting with Religion.

Dawn of the Delta will introduce three new deities – like Sobek, god of the river delta. Worshippers of Sobek will devote greater attention to managing and channelling the region’s waters, boosting your irrigation systems and farms.

Lastly, you can also research two new military units unique to this province:

The elite Kushite archer (more expensive but offers high range and accuracy) and the Dromedarii cavalry (reduces the morale of enemy cavalry and infantry units).

To ease transport on the river, two new local ship types also await your construction which are significantly faster on the rivers than their Roman counterparts.

Aegyptus can serve as a starting province when setting up a new game, or can be explored in any existing savegame with the DLC enabled. Accordingly, inter-provincial connections can be a great boon for your Empire: turn Aegyptus into a breadbasket while, for example, importing luxury goods from Latium back into the province.

We’ll talk more about Dawn of the Delta in October, when you can expect full DevBlogs as well as livestreams directly from the team with live gameplay and insights into the biggest expansion for Anno this year.

Dawn of the Delta will release alongside update 3.0 in November – we’ll also share more details about the contents of this update closer to its release.

Echoes of Kassandra

Coming much sooner, on September 17^th, is update 2.1 and the “Echoes of Kassandra” cosmetic pack.

The name will be familiar to some of you, we’re sure: it’s themed around the world of the famous Spartan hero Kassandra from Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.

While we’ll pick up this topic again next week in a dedicated DevBlog, let’s give you a brief overview today.

The cosmetic pack introduces a number of ornaments and skins inspired by Odyssey, including the enormous Zeus statue, which can be placed in the harbour, as well as a huge rock carving of Sisyphus and some more “classical” statues for your city.

The pack also includes skins for the first residence tier (all provinces) and emergency services inspired by the island of Mykonos, a flagship skin inspired by Kassandra’s ship “Adrestia” and – of course – Kassandra herself as a character portrait.

If you’ve attended one of our two (one English, one German) panels with our Art Director Reiko last week, you’ll also remember Reiko sculpting a skull-medusa as well as a grumpy cyclops-head (with horns) live during the show together with you in the audience. While we haven’t quite decided yet on the “how”, we really want to bring these (after polishing, of course) into the game in some way. Stay tuned for updates on this front.

For anyone who didn’t attend, below are screenshots of the state of both sculpts at the end of the panels.

Roadmap

You’re looking for a place to always stay up-to-date on our release roadmap at a glance? Well, then have a look at our new Roadmap Page.

On this page here on the Anno Union, you’ll find an overview of the upcoming release dates, as well as the content highlights of the updates. Keep in mind the content of updates can still change, additional updates/patches can be added, etc.

We’ll let you know about larger updates of the roadmap via a Union Update blog.