A teardrop of bog bordered by slithers of fertile ground. The locals call it Natrixia – I call it Sausage Island, and it’s at the heart of my domain in Anno 117: Pax Romana.
You see, shovelling meat into the Romano-Celtic mercators on my main island, Cudslip, helps them become nobles, who can then build striking aqueducts and make wine to sell to the Emperor’s representative nearby. Cudslip has no herbs for those sausages, so I seize Natrixia and squeeze plantations, pigsties, and warehouses together. Disease is rife and nobody is happy, but at least my mercators are fed: I dedicate a ship to do nothing but haul pigs and herbs from Natrixia to my sausage maker on Cudslip, and then into their bellies.
Except that’s not the end. To maintain my base of sausage manufacturing, called a salsicium, I need Roman amphorae jars. Cudslip lacks the resin to make them and Sausage Island is full, but by establishing a long trade route I can buy them from a rival at an extortionate markup and cart them home. Just when I think I finally have production perfected, my salsicium catches fire and burns down an entire street, tanking my fragile economy. Time to rethink my city layout.
This is where Anno shines as a series: its building tools are less flexible than those of Cities: Skylines and its combat is simpler than Total War’s, but as your domain spreads across multiple islands and provinces you constantly encounter logistics puzzles that are fun to solve, break, then solve again.
Anno 117 keeps that core loop, last employed effectively in 2019’s Anno 1800, but makes tweaks that maximise both the number and scope of those puzzles. Each change works – if never perfectly.
You can play in the sunny Roman province of Latium or the foggy Celtic one of Albion, or both, ferrying goods between maps. Albion is more interesting because as you level up your bog-dwellers, you can decide to enforce Roman customs or keep their Celtic traditions. You can send some peasants down one path, some down the other, and each has differing needs: my Romanised mercators like sausages, but my Celtic smiths prefer beer and cheese.
It adds variety, but I wish Anno 117 did more with this blend of cultures. You might assume it creates conflict or tension but aside from their differing, caricatured accents, they feel like cosmetic skins for the same groups.
Another big change from Anno 1800 is how your citizens level up. Rather than gating progress behind a specific good, each household has bars of needs you can fill in different ways. Sausages fill two out of three pips of my mercators’ food needs but cockles, eels, and bread also work – if I wanted, I could forget about pigs and turn Sausage Island into a mining spot. This ability to specialise in certain resources and ignore others makes every playthrough feel different.
The massive tech tree and persistent progress between save files adds even more variety. You can’t research everything in one playthrough so you focus on, say, expanding your economy. The next playthrough, you try another branch. I just wish the unlocks felt more logical – seemingly unrelated upgrades are grouped together, and I’m not sure why a research node for my beaver trapper is hidden behind one for my vineyards.
The persistent “Hall of Fame” looks suspiciously like a battle pass but simply unlocks bonuses, including research nodes, that you keep between saves. After 20 hours I can now, for example, start every playthrough with a late-game unlock that lets me harvest wood from meadows rather than forests, opening up new possible city layouts.
At street level, Anno 117 changes how your buildings affect your citizens. Most non-residential buildings convey bonuses or penalties in a radius: my salsicium boosts population and income but makes local fires more likely. Pigsties damage health while Fanums – Romano-Celtic temples – improve belief and knowledge, speeding up my research and strengthening religious bonuses. Building a neighbourhood is a satisfying puzzle of overlapping venn diagrams as you try to maximise the positives and mitigate the negatives.
I wish it better conveyed, at a glance, what was happening. There’s no overlay for building effects, or even a way to highlight buildings that are granting bonuses. You have to click on them individually to see their impact, and when you’re zoomed out, picking out a porridge stand on a long residential street can be difficult. Anno 117 is too scarce with vital information overall: your advisor tells you that a need is going unfulfilled without saying which one, so you need to menu dive to find out.
Thankfully, it’s simple to correct mistakes. Anno 117 has tools for mass demolishing, relocating, copying and upgrading your buildings, and you can redesign entire neighbourhoods in seconds. Building feels intuitive and every production line is clearly explained, so you always know what you need to put down next.
And city layouts are more flexible than ever: this is the first Anno with diagonal roads. It’s long overdue, but it transforms how you build. I can snake my cities up any hill, angling my roads to give my nobles a wonderful seaside view, and create triangular fountain plazas paved by mosaics and lined with potted trees. This might be the prettiest Anno cities have ever looked, though there are, unfortunately, no buildings to jam into those 45-degree corners, leaving annoying gaps. I hope that changes in future updates.
The cliffside views, lapping seas, foggy bogs and marble pillars make Anno 117 feel peaceful, and I like that this is a game about Rome that doesn’t make you fight. During the main 10-hour campaign – basically an extended tutorial – I avoided combat altogether, talking my way around a Celtic warlord. It’s the same on the more open “endless” mode: through courtesy, gifts, and economic might you can impress your rivals and secure trade deals, and the difficulty is fully customisable to make your opponents as demanding or placid as you like.
When combat happens, whether at sea or on land, it’s easy to understand. Winning is less about precise clicks and more about how well you’ve prepared – not just in the positioning of your troops but in the stability of your supply lines. Have you set up enough sawmills to build fortifications and archer towers in the right spots? Have you built enough homes so that, when you stand up your army, you have enough people behind to fish? That makes combat feel properly part of Anno 117, rather than a minigame. And even if you don’t want to fight, building an impressive army can intimidate rivals into trade treaties.
I can’t help but compare Anno 117 to Anno 1800, which, after several years of chunky DLC, is one of the best and most complete city-builders of all time. Release-day Anno 117 was always going to feel slight by comparison. But I’ve already started four separate playthroughs focusing on different goods, and I’ve planned two more campaigns, including one where I’ll build Rome’s biggest ever naval fleet.
That’s a good sign. Anno 117 has solid bones to build on, and enough meat to go around.