Hírek
Outlasting the volcano in Anno 117: Pax Romana – Prophecies of Ash
D
Dave Tach
Give me 20 minutes, and I’ll have woodsmen chopping and sawmills cutting lumber. I’ll flatten the earth to carve roads and stretch them from coast to coast. I’ll turn barren plains into vibrant neighborhoods. I’ll have farmers reaping and seamstresses sewing, and that’ll thrill my budding population. I’ll build networks of warehouses to store goods, and I’ll erect markets and taverns just to make sure everybody’s having a good time.
I don’t mean to brag, but like I say, I’m your man.
But if you want someone to appease Vulcan, the god of fire, or use hundreds of tons of offerings to placate a rumbling volcano, well, caveat emptor as my emperor might say.
Despite my best efforts, the sky is falling, my world is burning, and everything is shrouded in a dark gray malaise.
Anno 117: Pax Romana – Prophecies of Ash is a brilliant experience, deep, interconnected, and terrifying. It’s also survivable, even if you can’t placate a god. I can’t remember ever feeling more rewarded in a game — almost triumphant as the pieces come together before the world falls apart.
Expanding the empire
I’m a relative newcomer to city-building games like Anno 117. I’m familiar with the genre, and I have experience, but I’ve spent the last few decades mostly playing other genres, only occasionally diving into this one.
When I booted up Anno 117: Pax Romana recently to check out Prophecies of Ash, my first order of business was to reacquaint myself with the intricacies of expanding the Roman Empire. I love this phase of the game, where you start with a blank slate (in the form of a single, uninhabited island) and your only goal is to pave over everything in the name of progress.
The volcano may be the star of the recently released Prophecies of Ash DLC, but its content isn’t something you can immediately jump into from a new game. You’ve got to build a civilization before the fates can destroy it.
A couple hours in, I was fully in "build civilization" mode. No longer was I wondering what the effects of, say, building a pigsty near a city were. I was designing infrastructure in pleasing blocks and patterns, role-playing as a civil engineer whose ideals were about beauty as much as they were about serving the population.
Speaking of the population, the general arc of an Anno 117: Pax Romana game is really about the people — the tiny little citizens who inhabit your islands and go about their days. You need to give them things to do, build quality-of-life structures like markets and taverns to make them happy, and make them rich. Play your game right, and you can upgrade your citizens to higher classes, which bring more complicated and intricate jobs and structures to build.
You’ll meet your neighbors, both friendly and hostile, on nearby islands. You’ll establish settlements on unclaimed lands. You’ll establish trade routes from your islands to others, and if you’re playing the game smartly, you’ll be growing rich all the while.
There is an immense amount of delight in suddenly seeing through the Matrix. The tough part for new players is that there’s so much going on all at once in multiple overlapping systems that it’s easy to get overwhelmed. But stick with it (and listen to the game’s built-in tutorial), and its random rewards rival slot machines.
It took a bit of time for me to find the rhythm, but when I did, I found to my absolute surprise that I wanted to start a new game. Why saddle myself with the mistakes of a novice who built an ugly city when I could wipe the world clean and start again? So that’s exactly what I did, and I was riding high and getting wealthy when a mysterious blindfolded lady living in the far north beckoned.
Caecilia and the volcano
I built a thriving civilization first, upgrading significant portions of my population from the simple Liberti to the more sophisticated Plebeians, and then to the cheese and wine-loving Equites.
It was around that time that Caecilia deigned to speak with me. Dressed in a dark gray robe with a blindfold over her eyes, she wanted obsidian, and I needed to find it. As with everything in Anno 117: Pax Romana – Prophecies of Ash, there are gates that hold back the content until you’re ready for it.
Obsidian is available from pits and quarries, and that wasn't a problem for me, because I’d already unlocked and built those as I upgraded my population. So I gathered up what she needed and shipped them her way.
This is about the time that she started to confide in me. She was worried that Occasus, the local volcano, would erupt, and there was only one thing for it: a sacrifice to Vulcan, the god of fire. She thought that 75 tons of food will do the trick; that’s a lot. But since I spent hours building up my food supply chain, all I needed to do was load it on a ship and deliver it.
I love moments like these so much. I hadn’t prepared specifically for this situation, but it felt like the game was giving me an attaboy for governing well. This is quintessential Anno 117. Everything I did in the last few hours, I did to solve an imminent problem. Then those things helped me elsewhere.
I made my delivery, and I became curious. I asked Caecilia for a history lesson, and I learned about the volcano’s last eruption, which Caecilia blamed on the hubris of the people living there at the time. They displeased Vulcan, and in his merciless way, took everything from them.
I now understood the offerings better and the twisted logic of the woman who communes with the god. She is “the voice of Vulcan,” and her island, Cinis, is Vulcan’s chosen home for his kin. She is a guard of sorts, protecting her people. If Vulcan rises, she will blame herself.
The big bang
Look: The DLC is called Prophecies of Ash, and there’s a giant volcano looming in the distance. Here in the real world, I don’t think that donating marble to a lava-filled mountain is an effective prevention strategy. But when in Rome, you know?
I suspect it won’t shock you to learn that Vulcan eventually became displeased. No matter how much obsidian and marble I delivered, no matter how many shrines I built to honor Vulcan, what Caecilia and I did didn’t work. The ground still shook and rumbled. And it soon became clear that the time for prevention was over, and the time for preparation was upon us.
Anno 117: Pax Romana excels at shifting gears. What had been for several hours a slow and methodical campaign of production and expansion turned instantly into a period of bracing for impact. The underlying game remained the same, but the ticking clock changed how I played and what I did. Now I was stockpiling food and making sure that I had Vigiles (fire stations) everywhere. I built so damn many fire stations that I created a de facto fire station kingdom.
The music changed, too. Drums pounded, urging me along. As I scrambled, Caecilia descended into something like madness. She blamed herself, just as she said she would.
Then the music died. The world turned gray, the volcano exploded, and ash flew through the air. Whole neighborhoods throughout the entire world I’d tended into existence were reduced to rubble. Even my ships took damage. Every mine I’d built shut down because of the constant earthquakes. My people freaked out. A plague of alcoholism burst out. The emperor, who is a jerk, became displeased.
I lived for the next hour in darkness, rebuilding where I could, sharing the stockpiles of bread, olive oil, rope, and more with my decimated neighbors.
Then the fog lifted, and the game’s weather phase changed to Bloom, where “the fertile ash makes for a spring unlike any other.” Happiness and productivity increased, and the destruction that the volcano brought also produced extremely fertile soil.
And I start again. I know just what to do.
I’m a good governor, great at spinning (and re-spinning) up a civilization. And I think next time, I’ll be much better at preparing for the inevitable disaster. Vulcan cannot be placated.
There will be a next time. In the meantime, Caecilia suggests that we rebuild the main temple to the angry, fiery god.
“We must not abandon Vulcan,” she says. “Not even while we grieve.”
Anno 117: Pax Romana – Prophecies of Ash is available in the Epic Games Store.