You wouldn’t be doing your job as a Roman governor correctly if you didn’t try to become ever more efficient at your job and find the best ways to tackle the challenges your population, rivals and the emperor himself are throwing at you.

So, let us today take a look at the Discovery Tree feature!

What’s the Discovery Tree?

The Discovery Tree in Anno 117: Pax Romana allows for the research of technologies (discoveries!), which offer additional options as well as improvements to many aspects of your governorship.

As you can see below, the Discovery Tree is split into three categories: Economy, Civic and Military – the names being rather self-explanatory as to what kind of discoveries await you in each.

Researching any technology requires knowledge (more on that further below), with technologies further down in the tree costing you more knowledge.

Why a Discovery Tree?

Here we also come back to the topic of “choice” we have mentioned at various points before.

With the three different categories, you can set the focus that’s currently (or in general) important to you and invest time and resources into what fits best to your playstyle. The unlocks also expand your toolkit and allow you to tackle challenges in a different or more efficient way.

It also helps us to better highlight features and mechanics to players and make sure they’re not getting lost amongst tons of other unlocks. For example, the repair crane in Anno 1800 simply unlocked through progression at some point amongst various other new buildings – but was never explained to players. With the Discovery Tree, unlocking the repair crane is a conscious choice and assures that players will know that they unlocked it and can now use it to repair their ships.

Finally, similar to the Optional Needs the Discovery Tree also allows us to expand your options later on in postlaunch, potentially adding new discoveries and therefore more options and choice for you.

Knowledge is Power

How to research (knowledge)

Okay, now we’ve given you an overview – but how do you discover new technologies?

First, you require Knowledge. Knowledge is one of the eight attributes we talked about in a previous blog, and is gathered in the same way: needs and building buffs let building generate knowledge points.

Your first way of doing this will be by building the Grammaticus, a public service need for the Plebeians, which let’s all buildings in its vicinity (even the pig farmer!) generate +3 knowledge points. As with other buff buildings, the more houses and other structures are within the radius, the more knowledge you generate.

Another way to generate those points can be, for example, to supply your Eques (Tier 3 residents) with Writing Tablets (also +3 knowledge), a household need. Regular practise with those makes them smarter, of course, and helps your research faster. Wine on the other hand buffs your belief but counteracts your education efforts to a certain degree.

You see, we very much try to tie all the different systems in Anno 117: Pax Romana together.

Alright, now you have gathered some knowledge points, let’s discover a new technology!

Each technology has a certain knowledge point cost, and the more points you produce, the faster the technology will be discovered. The time is displayed directly in the Discovery Tree.

To progress through the tree, some technologies have to discovered in a certain order – and, you will occasionally have to fulfill certain conditions to unlock certain “gates” we call “Inspirations”.

For example, setting up trade routes, building a certain number of aqueducts or reaching a specific city status. Focusing on what’s important for your current situation and your general playstyle therefore becomes even more important – even if you ultimately, with enough time, are able to discover everything. We didn’t want to lock you out of certain technologies entirely, so, there are no “it’s either path A or path B” decisions.

Some technologies, and “gates” also are province specific. For example, only if you expand from Latium to Albion will you be able to research a discovery that allows your woodcutter to plant trees in those wide meadows, instead of relying on forest-areas.

Examples

Give us examples! What kind of discoveries have you hidden in the Discovery Tree?

Alright, alright, let us walk you through three examples in a bit more details.

• Paved Roads: Not only do they look much nicer than dirt roads, they also let your transports travel faster, which extends the street range of buildings. A classic.
• Blood of Terra: If you just dig deep enough, you’ll find iron everywhere! This allows mining of iron ore even on islands without a deposit – albeit at a greatly reduced rate.
• Protective Entourage: A personal guard never hurts. This discovery increases the morale and toughness of your Auxilia troops.

As you might imagine, the feature underwent multiple iterations over the course of the development. Both visually – improving the structure and readability, making it easier to see in which direction you need to progress – as well as regarding its content: which discoveries make sense, where do we want to put a focus on (see the “why” section at the beginning), etc.

Summary

All in all, there are over 150 discoveries waiting for you. While you can queue the research of several of them, it’s always worth checking back to see if there’s a new Discovery that would help you now that you made some progress – or which requirements the next gates have, so you can work towards unlocking them.

While discovering new technologies is optional, they do provide you with a wider range of possibilities to build and supply your cities, optimise your production and get an advantage over your rivals.

Any questions on the Discovery Tree left? Do you want us to tackle a specific part of this feature in more detail in the future, for example in a livestream? Let us know!