Last time we talked about the different population tiers, about irrigation and floodings. If you missed our previous blog, you can check it out here.

We ended with the topic of research, and related to that is the topic of Religion: while one Aegyptian deity (Sobek) is available right away, the cults of the other two first have to be discovered via the research tree.

Let’s do that now and talk about all three new deities in more detail.

Religion

The population of Aegyptus worships deities rooted in their land and traditions.

The first of which is Sobek.

Grinning Sobek, king of the riverbank, lurks unseen. All that comes he consumes and yet has a stomach that can never be filled. As demand scales, so does his unremitting appetite for more.

Accordingly, worshipping Sobek motivates your food-producing workers, boosting the production of cheese sausages, stuffed geese, sanga cattle and more. His second local effect boosts your water supply for irrigation and provides bonus population.

His global devotion bonus unlocks dovecotes, which can be attached to plantations and boost their productivity.

Isis-Bastet

Isis-Bastet embodies the velutinous consolations we find in our cat companions. Pawing at things feline and feminine, she catalyzes the good times, induces fecundity, and is the mother of all rat terminators.

Before you can worship her, you will first need to discover her cult in the research tree.

Devotion to her boosts the production of e.g. lavender, perfume and dates but also reduces the goods consumption of your residents. Global devotion extrends the duration of all festivals and unlocks large cat shrines which not only have a wider area of effect but also boost population, income and prestige.

Or as Ben-Baalion would say: Miw, ere.

Thoth-Trismegistos

Also a form of Hellenic Hermes, Thrice-great Thoth is infinitely wise. Seldom does he expose mortals to cosmic revelation, except those expressing a moony commitment to the Khaemically arcane.

Assuming Thoth does indeed some of his wisdom with you, you can expect production boosts to for refined productions like glass, wine, writing tablets and scribing sets. Additionally, an island’s income and prestige are based on your knowledge.

If his worships spreads globally, your highly educated librarians will boost the production of all buildings in range of a library.

When worshipping an Aegyptian deity, your sanctuary or temple will adapt an Aegyptian look, for example turning it into a cat (or crocodile) sanctuary. Pet at your own risk.

Story & characters

A new region means new people to meet! This goes beyond your population, however, as we’re also introducing three new characters with the DLC: a trader, a raider and a new rival. Let’s go meet them!

Characters

The likely first character you’ll meet in Aegyptus is Epistrategos Heron. Heron is the official representative of the Emperor here, overseeing the province from the large port of Naukratis in a bay in the west of the delta. He certainly makes sure he’s enjoying the good life while going about his duties – but has no military to speak of to actually enforce the Emperor’s will. He’s more of a middleman, relaying information and serving as a trader.

Furthermore, you’ll also meet a familiar face, Valeria, who found a small harbour near the river to use for her expanding trade empire.

On the other end, geographically as well as culturally, is the Kandis of Kashta. Her base is far to the south of the river delta, using the Valley of the Pharaohs as hideout for her forces. Strongly rooted in Aegyptian traditions, anyone wishing to shatter her ambitions will not only have to destroy her harbour but also send troops up into the winding maze of the valleys.

She acts as the local raider, attacking your ships and settlements if you don’t pay her ransom.

Finally, a new rival governor steps on the stage: Decimus Naukratius Nerva. The “tyrant of Aegyptus” and father to our campaign characters: Marcus and Marcia. While greatly focused on Aegyptus, he favours the Roman way of life, judging those who decide to follow the Aegyptian path. His military power and ambition are unmatched – if you like a challenge, add Decimus as a rival governor to your game!

Story

Naturally, we don’t want to spoil the story of this expansion to you right here. Instead, we want to give you a bit of a taste for what you can expect.

While the new characters bring some quests with them and there are also some smaller local quest chains, the main story of “Dawn of the Delta” is a murder mystery!

The body of a very well-loved local celebrity who advocated for Kumatic and Hellenistic cohabitation in the city of Naukratis is fished out of the Nile river. What happened to Nymphaeus? Who might be interested in covering it all up?

Step up your detective game, governor, or decide to skip the story and focus on your islands first and foremost.

Pyramid

The pyramids have already been featured before, specifically in a dedicated trailer released earlier this month. Let’s have a closer look at this ancient wonder.

As many of you will know, the pyramids were already VERY old when the (real life) Romans added Egypt to their empire. The situation is very similar in the world of Anno 117: Pax Romana, and the once-mighty monuments have fallen into disrepair over the centuries.

With Aegyptus now firmly under Roman control, a show of might is needed: you’re tasked with not only restoring Aegyptus’ power and assure it can serve the empire as breadbasket, but also with restoring the pyramids! Show the locals the power of Rome while also appealing to the local traditionalists.

Such a restoration project is of course neither cheap nor quick: the pyramids are a “province project”, meaning they don’t exist on a specific player island but are part of the province itself, and close to the port of Naukratis. Restoring them therefore provides a bonus for the entire province.

Rebuilding this wonder takes several phases: in each, a large quantity of resources have to be provided to the pyramid dock near Naukratis. Hundreds of tons of tiles, granite and marble, but also tunics and food for the workers, as well as dromedary to speed up the transport of all these goods. After finishing a phase, a buff is applied on all your islands, decreasing the imperial land tax and increasing your prestige.

There’s a bit more to it, however: if you’re playing with rivals, the restoration project becomes a bit of a race. All governors are contributing to the required resources and whoever provides their share first, will receive a stronger buff than their rivals.

When the last delivery has been made and the pyramidion been placed on top of the pyramid… well, first you have to lean back and admire your work. Then you can enjoy a province-wide bonus of Prestige as well as a temporary buff to your chance of receiving heroic specialists – three new ones are added with this expansion.

The newly restored pyramids will become quite the attraction: you’ll be able to regularly hold ceremonies there to further extend the duration of the buff.

In addition to these buffs, the restored pyramids also serve as a need for the third population tiers (Chanters and Gymnasiarchs), providing happiness and prestige.

Prepare for your travel

There’s more to discover in Aegyptus and the expansion, for example, that various goods from Aegyptus are now alternative needs for your population in Albion and Latium, or which technologies from the expansion’s research tree also impact the other provinces (e.g. ways to lower maintenance for monuments and speed up their construction).

So, here we are, one week from the release of Dawn of the Delta! We hope you feel well-equipped for your coming journey to Aegyptus. For some full gameplay impressions, why not check out our livestream from last week. Alternatively, you can also watch some content creators on their channels next week before deciding on your approach to these new challenges.

Alongside this expansion, game update 3.0 includes several new features, improvements and changes. Have a look at our dedicated blog post from earlier this week to learn more.

Next week we’ll release the full patch notes including all changes and bug fixes for this version.

Dawn of the Delta releases next week, November 5^th, at 10 AM UTC on all platforms.

Last week, we’ve given you a first look at Aegyptus, the new province releasing as part of the “Dawn of the Delta” expansion on November 5^th this year. We recommend checking our the full DevBlog here to learn more about the different zones in Aegyptus and to gain insights into the work of the Level Art and 3D Programming team.

Today, we’re walking you through the different population tiers, the topic of Romanization, various production chains and the flooding mechanic.

We’ll also take a look at the new technologies you can research, including new land units and ships.

The population of Aegyptus

With our small settlement from last time and the basic needs of the first population Tier, the Threshers, fulfilled, further progression is gated by a decision: do you upgrade along the traditional, Aegyptian path, or choose to Romanize them?

The local ways

The Aegyptian path means upgrading your Threshers to Potters, artisans deeply rooted in traditional working methods with little desire to innovate or change.

They will come with an increased number of needs like stuffed goose and beer as food needs and the newly unlocked household needs category, asking for talismans for protection (bonuses to income and belief) and oil lamps for their workshops (improves belief and knowledge but hurts your fire safety).

Make them happy, and one more upgrade becomes available to you: the third population tier are called the Chanters. These Priestesses are embodying Aegyptian culture and expand their set of needs with e.g. Blue Lotus Tea, Perfumed Oils and instruments (Sistrums) which make them very happy despite paying good money for it, and it even adds to your prestige.

Alongside these needed goods, you’ll require space for new public works:

Build the Apothecary with its own large herbal garden to improve both health and knowledge of your population.

Take care of your population’s spiritual needs with a sanctuary or temple and worship local deities – resulting in unique Aegpytian designs for both buildings – or build a Rock Tomb (requiring a mountain slot) for the upper class.

And finally, find a good spot for the Observatory to gaze into the stars  – be it to communicate with the gods or to divine measurements for your largest building projects (adding +5 belief and +3 knowledge).

The Roman way

The Roman way is almost more of a hybrid culture: strong Greek influences in Aegyptus rather make it a Graeco-Roman path when you’re upgrading your Threshers to Scribes.

The Scribes are scholars and administrators and are, to some degree, looking down on the Aegyptians, being rather protective of Greek culture instead. They’ll ask for bread and cheese, want soap and olive oil – and scribing sets to be able to get their work done in the most efficient way possible (+4 knowledge but –1 fire safety). We’re sure, they’d love Excel.

The third Romanized population tier in Aegyptus are the Gymnasiarchs: the educated elite focused on mercantile ventures and enjoying the good life with the profits they earned.

Expect decadent requests for rare meat platters, bird tongues in aspic, jewelry and bath milk, greatly boosting your prestige and providing plenty of extra income.

Your Graeco-Roman population will ask for many typically Roman public works, like a theatre, bath house (requiring an aqueduct) and a library (be careful with those oil lamps!). The aqueduct can also help with irrigation – more on that in a moment.

Building the breadbasket – production chains and granaries

Knowing you all, you’ll want some more details on which goods you’ll be able to produce and how the production chains look like. Let’s look at three examples:

Talismans (Potters)

From copper and sand you produce a vibrant blue dye with which the talismans created from local clay can be dyed.

Scribing Sets (Scribes)

No scribe without their scribing set made from papyrus (requires reeds) and pigments produced from minerals, which can also be found in Aegyptus.

Sistrums (Chanters)

Here we need both local copper and tin to produce bronze, but also beads (found in the Floodplains) to ultimately produce these percussion instruments.

One design goal for Aegyptus was to have this province offer alternative ways to produce goods and increase your options, especially if you’re playing with all three provinces: produce bread in Latium, Albion or Aegyptus? Where is the best place to brew beer? Should you import soap to Aegyptus or is it easier to just produce it locally?

When combined with the Flooding mechanic and the possibility to store large quantities of agricultural produce via granaries, this allows for new strategies and we’re looking forward to hearing your feedback.

An Aeygptus-specific feature for your agricultural dreams is the Granary building we just mentioned. It serves two purposes:

• Within its range, it increases productivity (+15%) and gives a population bonus (+1) for all farms.
• It provides additional 100t storage space each, specifically for agricultural product, either for export or to get you through the flooding season.

Both aspects can be further improved by upgrading the Granary, which requires you to do some additional research first.

There is a little downside connected to it all as well, however: the overflow mechanic and – potentially – rats!

Storing more than the regular storage limit allows slowly leads to your granaries overflowing which risks attracting rats. The higher the overflow and the lower the level of your granaries, the higher the risk. Active rat infestations reduce the health on your island and can trigger further Governor Decisions.

Upgrading your granaries and employing dedicated specialists (like Catfriend Cattulus) can help mitigating this risk. Can you spot the cats?

Flooding & Irrigation

Let’s go back to a topic we have alluded to a few times already: Floodings!

The mighty river has a mind of its own and in certain intervals will carry more water, flooding the aptly named Floodplains zone of each island. Each “season”, the flooding season and the following harvest season, have each an impact on your economy:

• Flooding Season: it’s much harder to get anything done when everything’s flooded! Accordingly, productivity of all buildings in the Floodplains zone is reduced by 75%. Additionally, health is reduced by -2 and firesafety increased by +2 across the entire province on all buildings.
• Harvest Season: increases the production of all production buildings in the Floodplains zone by 1t per cycle.

There are also some more… controlled methods of irrigation, however.

The Aegyptians long have mastered irrigation techniques to get the most out of the regions lifeline which is the river. Build Basins at the coast and then construct canals further inland. In a radius of 8 fields on each side of the canal the land is watered and turned into Farmland, ready for your agricultural plans. This way you can transform parts of your Arid Zone, at the cost of building space for your city, of course. It may be worth building dedicated Farmland islands.

Connecting a Water Channel Sump to any part of the canal and providing a road connection provides +1 Health and +3 Fire Safety within its range.

Romanizing your population and reaching Tier 3 (Gymnasiarchs) unlocks another potential irrigation method: aqueducts. A giant Noria sweeps up water from the river and transports it inland via aqueducts to wherever you need it. Cisterns then not only act as water sources for your bath houses, but also water a circular area around them, creating additional Farmland.

Research

It wouldn’t be a new province without a dedicated research tree. There’s a variety of wisdoms you can discover to make your life as a governor in Aegyptus easier and unlock new potential strategies.

• Unlock the option to grow a wider variety of goods in the Floodplains and profit from the production boost
• Further improve the irrigation systems and make production buildings use less water while building longer canals
• Unlock the producton of e.g. soap in Aegyptus
• And several more improvements

Also discoverable are new, local deities. Worshipping them can bring great advantages for your economy, agriculture and research. We’ll leave the topic for Religion for next week’s blog, however, and instead talk about new units you can recruit in Aegyptus.

New units

Aegyptus can also supply your army with new unit types, expanding your roster and potentially giving you an edge over your rivals and any raiders. Dawn of the Delta adds one of each to the game – but more on that in the next blog.

The two new military land units first have to be researched via the Discovery Tree:

• Dromedarii: this cavalry unit is especially strong against other units on horseback and is slightly cheaper, but can’t keep up with much nimbler horses in a chase.
• Kumatic Archers: this elite formation deals more damage, is more accurate and shoots further than your regular ranged units. This quality comes with a price tag, however, namely higher recruitment and maintenance costs.

One new technology furthermore allows you to recruit legionaries outside of Latium – is this the way to make Aegyptus yours?

The new ships we did mention before, but let’s have another look: two new (non-modifiable) ship types can be built in Aegyptus via a dedicated shipyard. The smaller of the two vessels, the Skiff (Epholkion), is buildable right away. It’s unarmed with three cargo slots.

Via research you can then unlock the bigger Galley (Aba) with five cargo slots. It has a military variant with several archers on board but… if you’re expecting larger fleet action, your Roman ships with stronger hulls and more potent weapons are likely the better choice.

Why pick the Aegyptian ships at all then? The heavy Roman ships are great for the open sea, but struggle on the shallower waters of the river delta. The light Aegyptian ships, on the other hand, are perfectly suited for this environment and travel quite a bit faster.

Of course we’ll let you try that for yourself, but we recommend largely relying on local ships for transports on the river and then transferring goods onto the heavier Roman ships for transports between regions. A sort of “cargo hub” near the ocean could come in handy here.

Outro

Population, production, research, … we covered all this today but what about the spiritual needs of your people?

Accordingly, in our next blog we’re walking you through the three new deities “Dawn of the Delta” is adding to the game and also give you a small glimpse at the story of this expansion – the rest we’ll let you discover yourselves. We also still have to cover the new characters you’ll meet as part of this expansion AND we haven’t yet talked about the elephant in the room, pardon, in Aegyptus: the pyramids!

Stay tuned, our next DevBlog will release on October 29^th.

Do you have any questions on the topics we talked about today? Leave them in the comments or reach out to us via Discord or Reddit!

Welcome, governors, to the first of three DevBlogs on our upcoming “Dawn of the Delta” expansion!  Discover the province of Aegyptus, build sprawling cities in its river delta and use the regular floods to your advantage.

Decide to Romanize the local population or support their ancient traditions and deities while dealing with new challenges to your governorship.

In this first article, we’ll focus on the province itself, its distinctive features, how and where to settle and how we set about creating it.

In the second and third article, we’ll introduce you to the new population tiers, production chains, technologies, characters and other features of the expansion.

Let’s get started and visit Aegyptus.

Aegyptus – a land of contrasts

Imagine you’ve only just arrived in this new province, are seeing the landscape for the first time and are eager to learn more about its population, its culture and technology.

Your first impression of Aegyptus will be that of a region blessed by the sun: wide stretches of desert and sandy dunes, small cliffs and rocky hills all shine in the bright light – and comparatively little green is to be seen on first glance.

The second thing you’ll notice is the might river: flowing from the south towards the ocean, it branches widely, creating a river delta with many elongated islands, just waiting to be settled.

Maybe you can spot the ancient pyramids in the far distance, or the port of Naukratis, closer to the ocean.

Accordingly, the province of Aegyptus offers a few differences to the other two provinces:

Not the ocean, but a river now separates buildable areas. While this means you’ll still need ships to transfer goods, the “islands” are closer to each other. The elongated shape of the different landmasses can still add to the travel time of ships, however.

We also differentiate between river and ocean (in the far north), with the river not only having a flow direction, but also slowing down the heavy Roman ships you’re used to. For travelling the rivers, you will want to use the new Aegyptian ship types – more on that in the next blog.

The province can also only be entered from one direction – north – which requires you to make strategic settling decisions based on location, building space and fertilities.

Building space is somewhere between what you have available in Latium and Albion.

Each “island” is separated into three zones: Floodplains, Farmland and the Arid Zone. More on that in a second.

Finally, you will need to keep an eye on seasonal floodings in the area near the river.

Island areas – Farmland, Floodplains and the Arid Zone

Let’s assume you sailed a little bit upriver and found a nice little place to settle. What are these three areas we just mentioned?

Right at the coast is a stretch of green with grass and trees: the Farmlands are useful for agriculture and the only place to build your harbour. The biggest area right next to the river are the Floodplains which get regularly flooded and impact the production of buildings placed in them. Finally, going further inland you’ll cross into the Arid Zone, where nothing grows (for now!) but where there’s plenty of space to build cities.

To give especially that last zone the right mood, you’ll notice the occasional small sandstorm. We had a ”snow drift” effect from before that we could re-use, and actually already used in a modified way for the ash rain in “Prophecies of Ash”.

“For Aegyptus, we gave it a visual update. Besides that, our artists created completely new particle effects. And our engine already provides a large set of ambient parameters with which artists were able to give Aegyptus its hot, desert feeling.” – Frank, Expert 3D Programmer

The limited Farmland will be the zone for the agriculture at the beginning, growing dates, oats, and later also grains like for example wheat or barley. Ultimately, you’ll reach the limits of what this zone can supply and will likely have to create more fertile land – at the cost of the Arid Zone. This is where irrigation mechanics come into play, more on that in the next DevBlog.

The Floodplains are located right next to the river and can be used for a variety of purposes, like harvesting valuable mud and reed to turn into sun-dried bricks or growing wheat and barley for bread and beer. The fertile mud increases the production of buildings in the Floodplains but be aware of the flood season!

Finally, the Arid Zone does not support agriculture (not without irrigation, at least) but that makes it the perfect place to build your cities. On these vast, and mostly flat, stretches of land you will want to build residences, public service buildings and – of course – your Governor Villa. To save valuable fertile space, it’s also a good idea to place your production buildings here – plus, you may profit from useful area effects, as you’re already used to from the other provinces.

Connected to the Arid Zone are cliffs and smaller mountains, ultimately limiting your building space. On the plus side, these cliffs usually have mountain slots to mine valuable ore or rock.

River islands can have Floodplains and Farmland on both sides if located in the river, with the Arid Zone in the centre of the island; however, some larger ones are also split by a mountain. There are also buildable areas on the sides of the river (“valleys”), those only have one coastal strip but have a larger Arid Zone compared to river islands.

The river, of course, is omnipresent (like the ocean in Albion and Latium) and your way of transporting goods from A to B. It flows from south to north – which impacts the speed of your ships – and ultimately flows into the wider ocean. It could be worth having a trade hub here so that your ships don’t need to travel all the way upriver to load or unload the goods that are being shipped between provinces.

Behind the Scenes with Level Art & 3D Programming

Creating an entirely new province always brings in plenty of work for the 3D Programming and Level Art teams; to give you a bit of a look behind the scenes, we talked to our Expert 3D Programmer Frank and Senior Level Artist Simon.

For the 3D Programming team (often also called RnD team by us), a new province means a need for new render features, like material shaders for the very different landscape features including bright rocks, lots of sand and – of course – the river.

“We helped our level artists by giving our material shaders a visual update: We improved sand lighting and added a subtle sand glimmer effect. A much larger challenge was the province landscape itself: Aegyptus features a big, continuous surface. Our game engine, tools and render engine are optimized for individual islands located in ocean. But Aegyptus presents players a single terrain surface with river meshes placed in between. In a large team cooperation, we had to develop a completely new workflow pipeline for our level artists while ensuring that typical engine stuff like data streaming still works correctly.” – Frank

The Level Art team approached creating the new province by essentially dividing the region amongst themselves, each part being (mostly) worked on by one Level Artist each. This was possible this time around since the overall province layout is not as random as Latium or Albion which are both made up of “normal” islands in a wide ocean.

“For Dawn of the Delta we did not want the province to look and feel like just another archipelago but rather have the feeling that you are in fact now sailing on a river delta. We quickly realized that random island distribution would not work here and opted instead for a more static connected terrain that better supports the feeling that a river carved its way through the province towards the sea.” – Simon

The above-mentioned river was another topic for the team in itself: We did indeed use the existing river tech here, only the very northern part of the province is technically an ocean. The small rivers you know from Latium are neither wide nor deep enough for ship travel, of course, so, additional work was needed:

“We already had some basic support for modifying the water height but additional work was needed for proper ship placement. Shaders also needed an improvement, as the river can easily cover the whole screen now. To an extent, we were able to re-use existing shading features from the ocean tech, but had to carefully adapt them. In Aegyptus, the river waves are much more diverse. Wind gusts on the water surface provide a less uniform look when watching along the river. And we added a whole bunch of new shading parameters to support different river appearances for the dry and flood seasons.” – Frank

As usual, the Level Art team also put a lot of time into the various smaller settlements and outposts you can find on the map, as well as the smaller details and slightly hidden part – or, as Simon puts it:

“For the explorers brave enough to venture out into the sands, there might be some things to discover.”

Your first settlement in the river delta

We talked so much about the land and the river, don’t we want to settle somewhere before we end the blog?

Knowing more about the different zones now, we picked this island here, in the north of the delta. The first population tier are the Threshers, local Aegyptians whose main focus is agriculture.

To satisfy their need for public services, we built a Firepit (which gives +1 Population and +1 Belief), and then built a Date Farm in the fertile Farmland to provide some food. The Date Farm requires trees in its vicinity to function.

When starting to build in Aegyptus, you’ll also immediately notice that you won’t require wood: instead, you’ll have to produce the aforementioned Mud Bricks from reed and mud. Both are produced in the Floodplains; this is also where your people can collect beads to create Wesekh Collars, fulfilling the need for fashion.

That’s only the first step, of course, and you’ll not only want to increase the number of Threshers soon but also upgrade them further – and decide if you want to Romanize them or not. However, that’s a topic for the next blog post.

It’s important to note that 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.

Next blogs and the pyramids

So much for the first of our three DevBlogs: the next one will release on October 22^nd and go into more detail on the population tiers, the topic of Romanization, production chains, technologies and the flooding and irrigation mechanics.

The “Dawn of the Delta” expansion releases on November 5^th on all platforms.

If you want to watch a teaser for a topic we’ll cover in our third blog… then have a look at the trailer below which premiered at the IGN Fall Fan Fest this week: it will give you a first look at the pyramids and which role they play in “Dawn of the Delta”, as well as simply more video scenes from Aegyptus.

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.

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 (60×28 tiles if you want to know the exact number)! 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 through the screen (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.

Hey Anno Community,

It’s August, and that means the release of the “The Hippodrome” DLC as well as update 2.0 are near. Today, we’re looking at the latter: what kind of larger improvements and changes does the update add for everyone?

We look at new features, tell you more about how they work and also highlight changes to existing systems that may impact the way you play. Read on for news on the photo mode, note function, new items and some balancing changes.

Keep in mind this is only covers some of the changes of Update 2.0. The full patch notes will be published on August 18^th.

Photo mode

Take even more beautiful screenshots of your islands and cities, of ships on the open sea and armies clashing on open fields!

• A free camera allows for far more angles to take screenshots from, and also allows you to zoom in and zoom out further
• The time of day can be freely set to pick the perfect ambient for your photo
• Several lens effects, from depth of field and focal length to a tilt shift effect

We can’t wait to see what you do with these new options!

Worth noting also is that we right now consider this just as a first version: we have a few more things we want to implement later and are also very happy to hear your feedback on what you’re missing in terms of options.

Note function

A big quality-of-life wish you have been sending our way for a while already was a way to take notes in-game. With this update, you can write notes to remind yourself to e.g. expand your city when you start the game the next day, or to check on a ship in 20min, etc.

The notes can be simply added anywhere in the game world, or attached to specific buildings or units.

For example, you want to buy agriculture specialists at Valeria’s harbour, send the ship there and attach a note to it reminding you of your plans, before you continue with your city expansion, that new island in Albion, etc. When you later see your ship at Valeria’s, the note will remind you WHY you sent it there.

You can also set timers for each note, resulting in you getting a notification as a reminder.

We hope this will make your job as a busy governor easier.

Honoured Guests & Heroic Specialists

Your Prestige grows, your monuments’ Splendour increases – you’ve become a famous governor! Honoured Guests are willing to visit you and support your efforts, will you welcome them in your city?

There are two feedback topics we’re aiming to tackle with this feature: making the Prestige attribute more valuable and adding new layers to the item/specialist system overall.

In your prestige screen you can now find a new page for these Honoured Guests.

Depending on your overall prestige, you increase the chance of specialists joining you in certain intervals. The higher your prestige, the higher the chance to receive a rare specialist.

That’s not all, however: we also introduce a new rarity-level called “heroic”. These specialists are very rare, and they are unique: each of them can only exist once per savegame.

Let’s have a look at one of them: Paldius, Ovine Authority Unquestioned

As you can see, their effects are not only quite strong, they also have both a ranged-effect like all specialists, and an island-wide effect.

Before you can employ them, however, you will need to have enough Prestige: as you could see in the screenshot above, each Heroic Specialist comes with a prestige cost, from just a few thousand to multiple ten-thousands. This “cost” is not removed from your Prestige but your prestige rather acts as a threshold.

With 10,000 Prestige you could employ two specialists “costing” 5,000  Prestige or one that “costs” e.g. 9,000. But you can’t, for example, employ a specialist costing 5,000 and another costing 6,000 as that would exceed your current maximum. Increase your Prestige to employ more or more expensive Heroic Specialists.

There’s one last key difference to the other specialists you can get via the “Honoured Guests” system, however: their drop chance is decided by the Splendour you amassed across your monuments, both from the Amphitheatre as well as the Hippodrome. Each level of Splendour in your monuments adds a 2% chance to receive a Heroic Specialist.

The “Honoured Guests” visiting chance is calculated on a by-island-basis.

Amphitheatre Buff Rework

We just mentioned monuments, so, let’s continue on this topic:

With this update, we’re reworking the buffs of the Amphitheatre. The intention here is to increase the clarity of the provided buffs for players, as well as the usefulness of the buffs.

Now, the Amphitheatre has a 9-stage buff system, and holding events increases the splendour required to reach higher buffs.

Additionally, as some have already noticed after the previous update, its effect are now affecting the entire island and are not range-bound anymore.

A further quality-of-life improvements is that you can now set events to be automatically repeated, reducing micro-management if you so desire.

Both of these points are also true for the Hippodrome monument which is part for DLC 2.

Time-limited challenges

With some delay, challenges in Ubisoft Connect will arrive for all platforms (PC and consoles) with the update as well.

A rotating set of challenges with a limited time to complete will award you with “Ubisoft XP” (to level up your Ubisoft Connect profile, with level-ups awarding “Units” which you can use for e.g. store discounts or to unlock rewards for games in Ubisoft Connect) as well as Fame points (to use in the in-game Hall of Fame).

Rotating here means that the challenges will repeat in certain intervals and can be completed again, providing the same rewards another time (progress doesn’t carry over).

Please note that together with the update we’ll also expand the Hall of Fame by adding a page with previous Twitch Drops, which you can now unlock this way as well.

Resident Quests

The update also adds a new type of resident quests.

They can be repeated and will therefore pop up occasionally, providing another way to engage with the world and get some rewards throughout your game.

We’re also doing some balancing adjustments:

Bread consumption

From our perspective, current bread consumption is too low. As a result, bread production chains have limited strategic importance, which undermines vision of Rome relying on bread and imports.

We therefore increase bread consumption by roughly 50%.

To compensate, bread provides +1 population (i.e. +3 instead of +2).

You may have to adjust your supply chains and build additional farms and bakeries to compensate for this change.

Incident size

We’re doing further adjustments to major incidents to address feedback on high negative attribute numbers not feeling impactful enough and being easy to ignore.

Both major fires and major plagues now affect significantly more buildings, especially so in large cities, making their impact felt more and being more clearly distinguishable from minor incidents.

This brings us to the end of this first look at Update 2.0, releasing alongside “The Hippodrome” DLC on August 20^th.

As mentioned at the beginning, expect the full patch notes with all changes and bug fixes closer to release for the full picture – today, we wanted to give you an overview of the major changes and improvements you can expect, and potentially give you time to adjust and prepare for the two balancing adjustments.

Ah, and yes, with this update field workers will be added to various farms and plantations.

Salve Anno Community!

My name is Oliver Mertins, Senior Technical Artist on Anno 117: Pax Romana. I’m with Ubisoft Mainz for 5 years and have started on Anno 117: Pax Romana at the very beginning.

Often, I get asked: “What does a Technical Artist actually do?”
Simply said, they are the glue between the Art (e.g. Level Art, 3D Art, Animation) and development departments (e.g. Game Play Programming, Engine Development, Tools Development).

While Artists tend to think in shapes, colors and timing, Programmers might think in game logic, code design patterns or data types. To bridge between them a Technical Artist is needed who understands both worlds and can support in meetings, write scripts and little tools to support the Artists, do research to explore new fields of interest or investigate into asset optimization to improve the game performance. They take care of the more technical art side, like building functionality out of node networks, creating control rigs for character or props, developing procedural materials or stunning visual effects using several techniques or even writing shaders.

When you think about Anno, you immediately think about building a beautiful-looking empire. But today I will show you how to burn it down to the ground, leaving destruction and chaos. Curious? Then read on

Creating a fire

In ancient times, fire was a central element for humankind to survive and prosper. It not only spent light at night but enabled us to cook and prepare food, manufacture goods and weapons and helped to protect against wild animals. But whenever we thought we had total control over the forces of nature, we were proven wrong, as the great fire in Rome under Emperor Nero showed, for example.
All these cases found its way into Anno 117: Pax Romana – but before we start to create and control an inferno, we need to start mastering small flames and sparks first.

For achieving a vivid blazing fire effect, we will combine multiple visual components starting with emissive flames at its core, sparks for tiny details, heat distortion and a light source to send out light and shadow to its surrounding, to behave believable in the game world. Some aspects will be artistically exaggerated compared to reality to be visible from the usual player-perspective or to create more dramatic imagery.

For creating animated flames, we jump into the most advanced tool for creating visual effects: Side FX Houdini. Here we gain the ability to create digital fire-based rules on how it would work in the real world. This is called a simulation and will be done for each element: the flame, smoke and embers flying through the heated air.

Since a high-resolution simulation contains too much data to process in a real-time game environment, we need to simplify the information by baking a single animated flame into a texture – the “flipbook”. It will be read from left to right and from top to bottom in a repeating fashion from a shader later.

Now we want to have the appearance of a three-dimensional object as well, so we create multiple moving points in space called “particles” and attach the flipbook at each point to create the overall moving fire shape. Here is an overview of the fire ingredients:

Of particles, heat effects and light sources

“But wait a moment, the flipbook texture is just black and white, where are the colors?”, you might ask.
By using a gray scale texture for the flames and a fire color ramp texture, we can later tweak the colors of all fires in the game at a central place. This makes iteration and achieving a consistent quality much easier. We go even further and split the color into two ramp textures, one for the emitting color and one for the pure albedo color. But this is just for a more vivid color shifting look. These will be used as separate inputs for our shader later.

What else would you expect from a fire? Right, sparks! Let’s add some:
Back in Houdini we create particles flying around affected by wind turbulence and gravity. We make them a bit bigger than in reality to have them visible even from greater distance.

Now that we have made the more obvious and “loud” components, it’s time to address the subtle ones. We want to feel the heat the fire sends out, meaning, we want to distort the air around the fire. So, let’s add a few particles for that as well. To achieve the effect, a normal map gets assigned in the shader which deforms the pixels behind it.

Since Anno 117: Pax Romana has a day and night cycle, our fire should light our way at night as well. For dancing shadows on surrounding walls or a gloomy atmosphere, adding a light source becomes essential.

In the real world not only, objects get lit but the air around the light source as well. Tiny dust particles fly through the air reacting and transporting the light further, creating what we perceive as beams or god rays for example.

And there we have it:

Combined with fireplaces and baskets it nicely illuminates the city:

Setting a city on fire (in-game)

Now that we made fire, let’s have a look at unloved fire city incidents.
In Anno 117: Pax Romana we have three types of incidents: fires, disease, and uprisings. The fire incident is what we want to have a closer look at.

Overall fire incidents were a complex topic because they required multiple departments to achieve the overall feeling. When the incident happens, residents panic and run away, resolver units come to the rescue, extinguishing smaller fires. The air fills up with smoke, rooftop holes become visible and multiple fires spread in dangerous rings across the city leaving ruins behind. Therefore, multiple types of fires and smoke effects in several sizes were created, position markers were added to every building and all pieces got balanced and adjusted. For example: in the first iteration the smoke was way too intense from the players’ perspective, hiding the actions of residents and resolver units.

Looking at a single residence building the visual dramaturgy can be explained:

First, smoke and small fires start to evolve, getting bigger and more threatening.
After the fire has eaten through the building, holes in the rooftop get visible, showing glowing and black burned wood beams. When the building has reached its end, it collapses to dust leaving ruins behind.

How to destroy a building

This leads me to the final topic: Building Destruction.
Since Anno 117: Pax Romana contains many different building types and creating an individual destruction animation would require significant extra hard drive storage, we came up with several solutions for specific cases.

The bulk of buildings which are not that often destroyed, get a shader solution with additional smoke and dust effects leaving the detailed destruction animation for military strategic targets like walls, towers, gates and the villa which get seen relatively often.

Usually, the buildings are created in an “onion style” meaning multiple single sided shells got added to compose a building. Unfortunately, this is not ideal for the destruction process for which a “solid” geometry – closed geometry from all sides – is needed.

Therefore, the mesh gets prepared to be solid first. Afterwards it gets cut into pieces – “fractured” as we say – by using simplified fracture patterns, each standing for a different material like wood splitting into long shards, while stone bricks stay as single bricks compared to concrete material crumbling into many pieces. Marble, for example, gets chopped horizontally into multiple pieces:

Now let’s have a look at how we achieved the destruction animation for the stone tower.

By having loose fractured pieces only, our tower would instantly fall apart in an uncontrolled way – but that is not what we want. So, to gain controllability, we glue the loose pieces together and remove the glue partly over time, exactly where and when we want. This results in areas where the tower crumbles first, then second and so on which looks much more realistic.

In our game engine – the Empire Engine – we use a technique called “vertex animation” to playback the animation of the falling pieces in a shader. This is an alternative method for animated meshes compared to the “bone with a skinned mesh” approach usually used for characters and animals. A vertex animation requires two animation textures, one for translation and another one for rotation of the fractured pieces in addition to the fractured mesh. All these get exported, converted and put together by a python script to speed up and smooth out the process.

This is only a high-level overview of the main process of how we destroy specific assets. The whole network to do all these steps bit by bit looks like this under the Houdini hood:

This brings me to the end of the insights into fire and destruction. I hope you will enjoy the effects as much as we do while playing Anno 117: Pax Romana.

Have fun,

Oliver