The Anno veterans among you will remember: back in 2009, Anno 1404 introduced the item mechanic for the first time to the series. Items are objects or people in the game that you slot into specific buildings or ships to modify some of their values, for example:
Increase the productivity of all sheep farms within a certain radius
Increase the happiness of all residence buildings near a market building
Increase the sailing speed of a ship
And many similar effects
The idea behind the introduction of this mechanic back then was, to deepen the puzzle aspects of an Anno game by letting you boost certain productions further, specialize your fleet for e.g. higher speed, or simply get the most out of a densely packed city. They are a tool that provides more choice for you, the player, on how to tackle the challenges in the game.
How items were handled differed a bit from game to game: Anno 1404 allowed slotting items in ships and your trading post, while Anno 1800 not only greatly expanded the number of items in the game but also added special buildings (Townhall, Harbor Master and Trade Union) where these items would be slotted to affect buildings in their vicinity.
Following the release and throughout post-launch we eagerly followed the discussions around the item mechanic (and the sheer volume of different items) in Anno 1800 and decided to adjust it on some levels for our next game – but don’t worry item-lovers, there’s still plenty to tweak and puzzle.
Hiring Specialists
Let’s take a look at how we’re tackling the topic in Anno 117: Pax Romana then.
Firstly, we did a small renaming: “items” are called “specialists” in Anno 117: Pax Romana. The reason is that all items are now people who you invite to work for you and who provide their services and special skills to your cities – therefore: specialists!
The specialists can mainly be obtained via quests or by visiting traders – they usually have some specialists visiting who you can hire for a certain sum. Additionally, the Discovery Tree and the Hall of Fame also offer ways to obtain specialists.
These specialists can then be slotted into either your villa and officia or your ships.
There are a total of 4 rarity categories for items. Higher rarity specialists have stronger effects but are – as their name suggests – harder to obtain. Specialists can affect residences, production buildings, public service buildings and ships.
Employing specialists
We acquired a few specialists, let’s put them to good use and take a look at where you can employ them.
Villa
As probably the first places you will slot a specialist in, your governor villa is your home as a governor and – especially in Albion – a symbol of Roman power and prestige. It has a large effect radius for items slotted here and provides other benefits, for example allowing you to recruit some personal guard units to defend your city in case of war.
It’s important to protect your own villa on each island, since capturing the villa is the way to overtake other player’s islands.
A villa comes with several slots to put specialists in. The higher your Prestige attribute, the more slots you unlock. Prestige is earned via certain needs and public buildings, as well as your city status and ornaments (incl. the beautiful marble roads).
If we look at two examples of specialists that you may want to employ in your villa, we’d have:
The Vesseler: Reduces the needed workforce (-25%) and upkeep cost (-50%) of taverns in range
Iain Thespis, Brightener of Days: Increases the Happiness of all residences in range by 1.8
Officia
With the villa having a large but limited radius, the way to affect other parts of your islands with the buffs from specialists is by building Officia.
An Officium is a smaller administrative building with a smaller radius and just two item slots (later three, when you've progressed far enough in the Discovery Tree). The radius of a villa and officium, or multiple officia, cannot overlap.
How many officia you can build per island depends on how many “permits” you have acquired. Additional permits are unlocked via your island prestige, as well as the Discovery Tree.
Ships
Some specialists are experts at guiding ships. These captains can only be slotted in naval vessel, with each ship having exactly one slot for such a specialist. Things are rather straightforward here, so, let’s also check out two such captains:
Thunderous Bolter: Increases the accuracy of ship scorpiones (+15%) and their attack speed (+20%)
Unburdener: Decreases trade prices (-5%) and reduces cargo weight slowdown (-25%)
How and to which degree you are going to make use of specialists is up to you. For us it was important to provide another mechanic for you to specialize your cities and fleet but also further boost production buildings or tax income and this way enabling you to squeeze the most out of the limited space you have on each island.