Hey Anno Community!

With the big gameplay reveal for Anno 117: Pax Romana behind us, we’ve put together a high-level overview of all recent news, as well as some general information on the game.

Find below information on some of the most frequently asked questions as well as links to further resources.

And don’t worry if we haven’t answered your questions just yet – far more news coming soon in the next weeks and months until November 😉

General

Q: What’s the release date for Anno 117: Pax Romana?

Anno 117: Pax Romana will release on 13th November 2025.

For all the Annoholics asking why the game is not launching on 7th November so we would get 11/7/2025 (following American dating format) as release date – the answer simply is that it’s never a good idea to release a game on a Friday. 😉

 

Q: What will Anno 117: Pax Romana cost? What kind of editions are available? When can I pre-order?

You can preorder Anno 117: Pax Romana now!

There are three different editions:

• Standard Edition at 60€
• Gold Edition (base game + Year 1 Pass) at 90€
• Collector’s Edition at 160€ (only available physically at retailers)

You can find out more about these editions here.

 

Q: Where can I wishlist or preorder the game?

You can wishlist or preorder Anno 117: Pax Romana on your platform of choice:

• Ubisoft Store: https://ubi.li/3FMo7
• Steam: https://ubi.li/DkL8F
• Xbox: https://ubi.li/pkyht
• PlayStation: https://ubi.li/B6Kze
• EPIC: https://ubi.li/3Xcf0

 

Q: Will all the DLC you announced as part of the Year 1 Pass also be released on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S?

Yes, all announced gameplay DLC will also be released on consoles.

 

Q: Where can I find the trailers you’ve published so far?

• Announcement trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJNzvo3UJb8
• Modular ships: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gbGY0rJ80A
• Gameplay Showcase Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBXNl88yeW4
• Gameplay Overview Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8G9VCHS1xQ
• Cinematic Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6a37J87bew
• Military overview trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGJKEWw3wr4
• Governor Edition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX1EhztmAMg

 

Q: Will you be at gamescom 2025 in Cologne?

Yes, Anno 117: Pax Romana will be at gamescom from August 20th to 24th – we’d love to meet you there!

Q: Will there be more playtests before release? I signed up for beta tests but didn’t get an invite yet.

Yes, the Technical Test in May was not the last playtest and there will be more opportunities to play the game before its release in November.

 

Q: Where can I discuss further with fellow Anno fans?

Two great places to start are the Anno subreddit and the Annoverse Discord server.

Features 

Q: Will Anno 117: Pax Romana have a campaign? What’s the story about? 

Anno 117: Pax Romana will feature a campaign, putting you in the role of a young governor. We will reveal more about the story later this year. 

 

Q: Will Anno 117: Pax Romana have multiplayer? 

Anno 117: Pax Romana will allow you to play with or against other human players in PvP and co-op multiplayer. 

 

Q: Are you bringing back land combat? How does the military aspect of the game look like? 

Anno 117: Pax Romana will allow players to fight rivals with both warships and land units if they so desire. Ships can be built using different modules, while on land a variety of unit types are at the player’s disposal – together with fortifications for defense. 

We’ll soon reveal more on the military and will then update this blog. 

Q: What is the “Religion” Feature? 

Choose which deities to worship on your islands in sanctuaries and temples, increase the belief of your citizens and unlock powerful local and global buffs for your empire. 

More details in this dedicated DevBlog.

 

Q: What is the Discovery Tree? 

Via the Discovery Tree, players can research new technologies and improvements, as well buildings and military units. They allow the further optimisation of economic, civil and military matters, increasing production, improving troop morale or unlocking new deities to worship. 

More details in this dedicated DevBlog.

 

Q: What did you change regarding the Needs system? 

Needs are now sorted into categories (e.g. food, clothing, …), and each category will only have to be fulfilled to a certain level in order to upgrade residences. Fulfilling as many needs as possible still provides you with bonuses in the shape of extra income, happiness, population and more. 

More details in this dedicated DevBlog. 

 

Q: What are attributes? 

Attributes describe the overall workings of your islands and your empire overall: fire safety, happiness, income and the other five attributes are broken down into detailed overviews to allow you to optimise or adjust where necessary. Low fire safety? Seems like those bakeries are the culprit – nothing an aqueduct can’t fix! 

More details in this dedicated DevBlog.

 

Q: When will you tell and show us more about the other province, Albion? 

We’ll talk more about Albion specifically later this year at gamescom. 

Until then, make sure you’ve checked out our blog post on Romanization. 

 

Q: Will Anno 117: Pax Romana have an active pause feature? 

Yes, it’s possible to pause the game and issue certain commands – even though certain calculations will require the game to be unpaused. 

 

Q: Does Anno 117: Pax Romana support cross-play and cross-save features between PC and consoles?

Yes, both features are supported, allowing you to play with friends on other platforms, or even share saves between platforms.

 

Q: Can I play with mouse & keyboard on Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X|S? Can I use a controller on the PC?

Yes to both questions 🙂

 

Q: Are you planning more DevBlogs and livestream to talk about diplomacy and NPCs, trade, the lategame in Latium, system specs, multiplayer, sound, beauty building, … ? 

There are so many more aspects of Anno 117: Pax Romana we want to still talk about and show you – don’t worry, we’ll have plenty of content planned for the coming months. 

Today, we just covered a fraction of the questions you likely have, so: don’t hesitate to leave a comment to tell us what you’d like us to talk about or go into more detail on!

Hey Anno Community,

As we get closer and closer to our gameplay reveal, we wanted to recap some news for the upcoming weeks. We know you’ve been waiting for this for a long time: on Monday 19th May we will reveal the gameplay for Anno 117: Pax Romana! So, keep an eye on our socials around 6 PM CEST/4PM UTC/12PM EDT to not miss our trailer. Plus, you might spot some of your favourite content creators sharing their first impressions and hands-on on the game starting Monday evening as well.

Developer livestream

Cannot get enough of the Anno 117: Pax Romana gameplay reveal? Well, we got you covered – tune in on May 21st, 5 PM CEST/11 AM EDT at twitch.tv/annogame for a livestream dedicated to Anno 117: Pax Romana! During the live stream we will show you the game in action, whilst giving you the opportunity to ask your burning questions in chat. Community Developer Oliver and Community Manager Celeste will be joined by Game Director Jan and Art Director Reiko to talk about the game and discuss new features: some you may already know about, others… not so much.

We hope to see you there!

Steelbook voting – and the winner is…

It’s official, with 78% of the votes, the colourful mosaic has emerged as the clear winner and will be the steelbook design for the Governor’s Edition!

With this, we conclude the voting campaign for the Governor’s Edition. If you’re interested in the Anno 117: Pax Romana Collector’s Edition, don’t forget to register your interest here to not miss any future news on the topic.

We’ll have more details on the Governor Edition soon.

Future playtests

Whilst our current Technical Test is coming to an end, we wanted to remind our beloved community that more tests are planned for the future – so if you haven’t been invited to this one, don’t worry! There will be more opportunities in the future. Just make sure you have registered your interest here!

Anno 1800 reached 5 million Players!

Let’s close this Union Update with some more FANTASTIC news: we’re super excited to share that Anno 1800 has passed the 5 million players milestone! It’s amazing to see the outpouring of love for this title, 6 years after its release, on the dawn of Anno 117: Pax Romana.

Anno Community – 5 million times thank you to each and every one of you, for the constant support through the years.

Hey Anno Community,

Today is a great day for Anno 1800, as it marks the release of the “New Horizons” mod! After 5 years of hard work and effort, we wanted to celebrate the release of this highly anticipated mod together with its creators and the Anno Community as a whole. The team behind this massive project includes Taubenangriff, jje1000 and Hier0nimus – well-known names in the Anno modding community.

Who can explain the content of the mod better than the people behind this big project? So, we asked them:

What can Anno 1800 fans expect in the New Horizons mod?

In Vanilla Anno 1800, there are four regions, the Old World, New World, Arctic and Enbesa, each with their own population and production. In New Horizons, we are adding a fifth region, Horai, which is inspired by East Asia, mostly Japan and China. Horai itself has two population tiers, as does each Colony region, and its residents want products like porcelain, tea, sake and koto instruments. On top of that, the session comes with its own challenges and mechanics: First of all, your farm production in Horai is going to be regularly interrupted by monsoons, something you might have already experienced in the Seasons of Silver scenario. If you need additional workforce and money, you can provide your Horaiese population with street food, and if you look to complete fancy architecture projects, you can rebuild the Wonders of Horai on your islands.

Not only does New Horizons contain an Asian-inspired session, it also adds a sixth population tier in the Old World at the end of the progression where Investors can now upgrade to Magnates, who turn the endgame economy on its head by providing little income for high efficiency, and it should come as little of a surprise that Magnates primarily want goods from the Horai session.

As with previous Modding Spotlights, we’ve prepared for you an extensive Q&A with the team behind the mod – both about their modding experience as well as about the mod itself. Without further ado, let’s dive into it!

Q&A, Part 1: Modding experience

What would you advise someone who wanted to get into modding Anno?

Discovering your creative side takes a lot of effort and time, and you will never find out about it if you do not start off just creating things. Creative skills can be learned, and ultimately you do not have to be the best in your discipline to create cool stuff and have fun with it. It takes a bit of stubbornness and persistence to transform your vision into reality.

But most importantly, do it for the fun, not for the result. And you will always have learned something valuable in the process.

 

Did you have any prior modding knowledge or specific skills (programming, 3D Art, UI Design, …) when starting to mod Anno?

We had and have a lot of talent on the team that was involved, and what we can do covers pretty much the entire palette that you might need when creating and modding games. That reached from being very capable at reverse engineering and programming to bringing 3D art skills or general knowledge of how to code mods for Anno 1800. But most importantly, no single person on the team could do everything, so it was very important to assign tasks based on who could do what. This collaboration was very important during development, because this way every task could be handled by someone who knew what they were doing.

 

The skillsets on the team could be very specific, we even had someone on the team who specialised in Sound Engine modding, which became very handy when porting and implementing resident voice lines from other Annos into 1800, because none of the others on the team could have done that. Some of us also used New Horizons to expand and practice their skillset, like learning and improving 3D art skills with and for the project, which was a great learning opportunity.

How did you get into modding? What prompted you to create Anno 1800 mods specifically?

Taubenangriff: I used to do record building on Anno 2070 a lot before 1800 came out. That was roughly the time where I learned general programming. Then 1800 came out and it all started at a white empty Plaza tile that was missing from the release, but which I wanted to build. So, I tried my luck on it, it worked, and through that I got to know a lot of awesome people that also tried their luck with modding Anno 1800. Mind you, that was even before there was a modloader for the game.

Well, in the midst of that pioneer era of modding, we started getting better and better and eventually went crazy with our ideas – that is when New Horizons was born out of pure hybris and megalomania. Well, and now 5 years later I’m here and it’s done.

 

Not too long ago we did an interview with Hier0nimus. You can check it out here.

Q&A Part 2: Behind-the-scenes of the “New Horizons” mod

For the second part of this spotlight, we were of course very curious how the team handled the development of the “New Horizons” mod.

 

Did you know what you were committing yourself to when starting the project?

No, absolutely not. This project is the result of the pure stubbornness to complete a vision that we came up with years ago. We knew that this project was not going to be easy, it was going to be a lot of work, but the scope kept on growing and growing – which primarily came down to increasing standards. When you compare the visual quality of the early Anno 1800 mods with mods that are more recent, there is a huge apparent upgrade, and that upgrade coincides with our skillset and toolstack growing.

So, not only did we create all of New Horizons, but we also updated old assets multiple times, because we just knew that we could do better than what we created earlier.

 

You’ve mentioned multiple times in reddit posts or videos the different contributors to the mod. How big of a team worked on this mammoth project? How did you collaborate?

We always had a core team, which for the first two years or so pretty much consisted of Taubenangriff doing art content by himself, but the core team expanded to 2-3 people, namely bringing in jje1000 to create and overhaul a lot of art assets and Hier0nimus for coding and item work. Moreover, a lot of people joined to contribute in the form of individual projects over time, where they would create a single part of the mod, i.e. a set of ornaments, a single wonder or the magnate houses. So, in total around 15 people worked on the project but they never did so at the same time.

 

To organize our effort, we set up half-yearly milestones where we would define tasks in advance and distribute the work among the team, and regularly shared our progress internally, as well as using version control to backup, manage and bring together our work.

But we also regularly stepped in to help each other complete our tasks, so that everyone could bring in their skillset where it was suited for best. This was perhaps the most important part in getting the mod to a reasonable quality level, being pragmatic about who should commit on doing what on often very limited time and resources.

Well, we know Anno 1800 doesn’t always make modding very… straightforward. What were your main challenges? How did you tackle them?

The main challenge during the development was that we could often not edit certain parts of the engine – like islands. Often, we then wrote our own tools to give us those possibilities for New Horizons, which were often then made public and have since become widely used in the modding community.

 

What is something players will have to get used to that they don’t know from the unmodded Anno 1800?

The regular seasons in Horai will certainly be a challenge for players, as storage space suddenly is a central resource. You will need to stockpile 30 minutes’ worth of farm production to get through a monsoon unimpeded, and that means you will need to invest extra space into building storages – but there is only so much building space to work with, and every tile that goes towards storage cannot be used for production buildings.

 

If you install the optional Item Rebalancing that comes alongside New Horizons, your items also suddenly will do different things – as an example, you cannot circumvent Steam Carriage production with Susannah Brightwoman anymore. But I want to stress the optionality of this, this is meant to be part of the mod, but ultimately up to your choice whether you care about better balancing or not.

If other players want to know more or have questions, where would you want them to go?

I reckon this is pretty much a standard answer by now, but you can always find us on the Anno 1800 modcorner discord. Don’t be shy, join and ask your questions there .

And you can visit the New Horizons modpage on mod.io: https://mod.io/g/anno-1800/m/new-horizons

 

 

A big thank you to the “New Horizons” team for taking the time for this modding spotlight and congratulations once more on the release of the mod!

We love seeing the Anno 1800 community still going strong and are sure this long-awaited mod will make many in the community very happy.

That brings us to the end of today’s blog. Make sure to check out “New Horizons” on mod.io and as usual: leave a nice comment over there for the mod creators if you enjoy their work.

Hey Anno Community,

As you might have seen from our social post last Friday, we announced a couple of things happening in the upcoming weeks.

Back in February, during our IGN Fan Fest segment, we mentioned we would show more of the game in April… well, we got the months mixed up. The full gameplay reveal will happen during the week of 19th May.

In the meantime, what about a developer livestream next week? During this livestream, we will be talking about changes to the Needs and Attributes system with Creative Director Manuel and Game Director Jan. So, if you’re curious to more about these topics, don’t miss out our livestream on Twitch, 15th April at 5:00 PM CEST / 9:00 AM PT.

We’ll see you there!

Hey Anno Community,

We have a packed Union Update with news for you today, so, grab some coffee or some posca and read on.

First: As some of you noticed, we currently have some issues here on the website with the login and comment feature specifically. We’re working on a resolution and hope to soon discuss Anno with you in the comment section again.

Beta sign-up and playtests

A few weeks ago we announced that we’ll be having beta tests later this year and opened registrations. You can still sign up for those playtests by following this link .

Since we have received some questions since: No, don’t worry, invites haven’t been sent yet. These beta playtests still lie a bit further in the future – you can be sure that we’ll let you know both here and across all our other channels as soon as invites have been sent (just so you know when to check your inbox).

 

Talking about playtests: As mentioned previously, we have already done multiple smaller scale focus tests and diary studies for Anno 117: Pax Romana in the past. These are organized in collaboration with the Ubisoft User Research Labs who are organising similar smaller-scale playtests for all Ubisoft games. We tend to look for a variety of player profiles for those tests and are organizing tests with different focuses. If this sounds like something you might be interested in, you can register here.
Important: This registration does not guarantee you access to any such future playtests but merely adds you to a “pool” of people that the User Research Lab may select candidates from for future playtests.

IGN Fan Fest

For those of you who missed, Anno 117: Pax Romana was at IGN Fan Fest last week! Manuel Reinher, our Creative Director, presented a new feature that’ll be part of Anno 117: Pax Romana – modular ships. We’ve already seen much conversation about this on Reddit and Discord, so feel free to share your speculations and thoughts about it there as well!

Devblogs

After our very obvious hint about diagonal roads back in January, last week we published the first DevBlog dedicated to the road system in Anno 117: Pax Romana, in which we give an overview of what changed from Anno 1800 and what that means for your gameplay experience.

If you like the DevBlog, then we’ve got great news for you! In the next few weeks and months, more DevBlogs will be published here on the Anno Union: the second blog on the road system topic, where we’ll dive deeper into the technical details and the challenges of the new road system; a devblog fully dedicated to the new modular ships feature, to follow up on the IGN Fan Fest showcase; another devblog dedicated to game design, and much more! So, watch this space if you don’t want to miss out on super detailed blogs on what’s going on behind the scenes here at Ubisoft Mainz.

What about modding?

From Anno 1800, we already know very well: some of you love to create and use mods. In fact, the Anno 1800 modding community saw a fantastic increase over the years, creating some absolutely fantastic, creative mods as well as a bunch of useful quality-of-life pieces. We’re very much aware of their contribution to the Anno 1800 community as a whole, and it was therefore something that we were happy to support in 2023 with official mod support and the collaboration with mod.io.

For that reason, we also want to provide mod support for Anno 117: Pax Romana as early as possible.
For release, we can confirm that a mod loader will already be integrated into the game.

Additionally, our colleague Jakob is happy to help you with information to adjust community tools to changed data formats.

 

There are more ideas and things we want to do but that’s not something we are ready to discuss yet. For now, it was important to us to assure our (modding-)community that modding support is very much on our radar for Anno 117: Pax Romana.

Island Contest

Annoholics, we have a winner! As you may have already guessed from our social post: Congratulations to Logan!  Your design will now become an actual island in Anno 117: Pax Romana and we’re looking forward to sharing updates on its progress with you in the coming months.

As usual, we would of course also like to thank you all for participating in this contest – which quickly became the most popular one of the three, with more than 140 valid entries! The team, especially Level Art, was super impressed by your creativity during the selection process: selecting only 5 entries was a hard task. We’ve put together a collage with all your entries (if yours is missing, apologies: they were A LOT and some of them might have been accidentally missed from this image).

Governor Edition Voting

As you might have guessed from our latest social posts and news, there will be a Collector’s Edition for Anno 117: Pax Romana – the “Governor Edition”. A couple of weeks ago we’ve asked you to vote for your favourite design for the case and the artbook cover of the Governor Edition. The voting was a very close one – today, we share the results here on the Anno Union with you all:

Hey Anno Community,

let us quickly update you on two recent pieces of news!

Register now for beta tests

You can now officially sign up for upcoming beta tests later this year via this website!

We’ll have more information on the exact dates of these tests in the coming months. From all registered players we will randomly draw a certain number of people based on the goals of the tests.

These tests serve to both collect your feedback on the game and its features as well as test performance and stability on all platforms and different kinds of hardware configuration.

The Anno 117: Pax Romana Collectors Edition

Just last week we confirmed with a teaser a question that many of you have already been asking: yes, Anno 117: Pax Romana will receive a Collectors Edition: the “Governor Edition”!

You can register now via this link to not miss any future news on the Governor Edition. We’ll reveal more on the content of the edition later this year…

 

… but wait, we actually have a little sneak-peak already! In fact, we even need your input!

Right now, until February 21st, you can vote on your favourite design for the Governor Edition’s box, as well as the artbook that’s going to be included in the edition. Follow this link to the poll!

We’re very curious which designs you prefer!

Hey Anno Community,

While we’re in denial that January is already coming to an end – we’re still finishing up all the chocolate stockpiled during the holidays – we thought to have a small recap of the latest news in this Union Update.

Island design contest

Our third and last contest is up and running, Annoholics! Have you always dreamed to have your very own island design for an Anno game? Well, this is the perfect opportunity for you. In this contest, we challenge you to design an island for the Latium region, in Anno 117: Pax Romana. If you would like to submit your entry for a chance to see your island in the game, check the full rules here.

Since we received some questions on the topic of “group submissions” we updated the rules accordingly: two or more people can work together on a single island design.

An update on the Community Statue

Speaking of contests, we thought it was the perfect time for us to share an update on the Community statue! Last August we announced the winner of our first Community Contest – Design a Statue: the mighty Annocius, the god of the 9, created by HiddenMoon79.

A little disclaimer: this is a work-in-progress “highpoly sculpt” of the statue, it will still get texture and colours.

(Which also answers this recent question from Reddit)

Roads? Where we’re going, we… definitely need roads.

Last week, on a very fitting date – January 17th – we shared a little teaser on our social accounts.

And of course, you all at once spotted that something is different compared to previous Anno games. Diagonal roads! We have seen multiple questions on how the road system will work in Anno 117: Pax Romana but fear not: we have got a dedicated DevBlog coming in the next weeks. In the meantime, without too many spoilers on the topic, we would like to address some of the concerns we read in the comments.  

Q: Is this actual game footage or just part of a scene? 

A: Yes, this is a screenshot taken in-game by Oliver, our Community Developer, who diligently placed those roads for this teaser. We think he did a pretty good job, didn’t he?  

Q: What happened to the Anno grid? Did you get rid of it? 

A: No, we didn’t! For all the efficiency builders our there – do not worry, the grid will still be there in Anno 117: Pax Romana. Our dedicated DevBlog mentioned earlier will explain in detail how the road system works, and which improvements we did to the grid compared to Anno 1800 and previous Anno games. 

A wild Town Crier appears!

Yes, Annoholics! You have seen that right – a wild Town Crier has appeared in Anno 117: Pax Romana! You have already noticed how it recreates the scene from our reveal video, but will you see the Town Crier appear somewhere else? Who knows…

 

 

 

 

 

We hope you enjoyed our quick recap of the latest news, and the little teaser we sprinkled here and there in the past weeks. We’ve got more news coming, together with insightful DevBlogs on the new Anno… so, watch this space!