Anno 117's New Hippodrome DLC Is More Fun Than It Has Any Right to Be

It's just one building, Praetor. How much could it add?

Historically, middle-of-the-season DLC in Anno games tends to be weaker than what you'd get at the start or end. It's something for later expansions to build on, not necessarily an exciting addition in itself. So I had measured expectations for Anno 117: Pax Romana's Hippodrome DLC, and that was shortsighted of me. Sure, it's just one monument-class building. But this thing's great.

The gist of the DLC is that it unlocks a new research branch that lets you build the Hippodrome. Historically in Byzantium and Rome, these buildings had immense, multi-layered political significance. Nobles and commoners would be in the same space for the same purpose (watching chariot races). The emperor would frequently use the location for ceremonies, executions, and other big state events. Anno 117's Hippodrome DLC doesn't add executions, so this one's just for chariot racing. Well, not just for chariot racing, but I'll get to that shortly. The pomp surrounding it is just as important as the real historical thing, though.

Some context for those who haven't bothered with Giant Buildings yet. Construction of marvels is splendidly chaotic. It happens in phases, and each phase requires a gargantuan amount of resources. It takes hundreds of tons of timber and concrete, which, okay, those aren't too hard to source, and then hundreds more of marble and mosaics. Depending on which difficulty setting you chose and how cruel the world generation was when it decided which islands could provide what resources, you probably don't have that many ways of getting marble or the pigments necessary for mosaics.

The Hippodrome is the same, only it requires additional materials like cloth — hope you've got enough togas on hand, 'cause your flax fields ain't for making those anymore — and granite from Albion, which was a bigger surprise. In my current run, I had paid little attention to the marshy, eel-ridden province outside of getting consumables for the Roman elite. So I hastily built up a modest little society there that could support granite cutting, acquired new islands where I could actually get granite, and started the lengthy process of shipping it to Rome.

All that production chain chaos is just part of building a marvel. You need workers by the hundreds, which, thanks to my shortsighted planning on some of my islands, severely restricted where I could build the Hippodrome. Thank the gods Cinis, the big island from Prophecies of Ash, exists. When I covered that expansion, I pointed out how Anno 117 lacks guided purpose from the mid-game on. Building the Hippodrome and the kind of society that can support it is another step toward adding that much-needed structure.

Once all that production was finally done, and the four construction phases ended, the Hippodrome opened to the public, which was when I started enjoying it even more. The Hippodrome has a splendor level and provides production buffs to the entire island, and raising that splendor level increases the power of those buffs. It's an interconnectedness that Anno 117 normally doesn't have. Your bakery might add income buffs and fire risks, but it has no interactions with other buildings. Even the amphitheatre, the other monument in the game at the moment, required buildings to support it, but only offered prestige as a bonus. I'm hopeful future updates, like the Delta expansion later this year, really go hard on that kind of interplay between buildings and make your layout choices even more important.

Speaking of prestige, it's something Anno 117 sorely underused elsewhere. It's still not the most useful thing in the game, as you just need it to attract specialists, but the free 2.0 update that launched alongside the Hippodrome DLC makes it more important. The update added a new Heroic class of specialist that's easier to attract with high splendor and prestige, and they do some properly marvelous things.

One of them removes the need for pigment production chains entirely, freeing up limited mountain slots for other production. Another lets you swap bronze for gold, one boosts marble and mosaic production if they're placed near mines, and there's even one that lets you use wood to replace chassis production. I mean, if you aren't building chariots, then that last specialist isn't so useful, but the option to just skip an entire chain is pretty damn good. Most of this is end-game stuff, admittedly, but it's enough to finally make me see the appeal of sticking with a world for a long time, making it as big and prosperous as possible, instead of ditching it for a new one as soon as I get the itch.

So far, it seems more balanced than the way Anno 1800 handled production skipping or boosts. Some DLC add-ons in that one, like silos, made entire modes of production almost too easy. They're handy for late-game scenarios where you're supporting massive cities, but until then? Not so much. Anno 117's more limited and piecemeal approach works much better for me.

Anno 117 still has plenty of areas to grow. But after Prophecies of Ash and now the Hippodrome smoothed over some of the game's rougher spots and added some unexpected features, I'm more eager than ever to see what Ubisoft Mainz has in store for the future.