Anno 117 — After Strategy

Anno 117 Patch 1.6.1 Is Live — The Hippodrome Needs Albion Granite

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Six weeks before the Hippodrome, Ubisoft Mainz clears the decks

Anno 117: Pax Romana patch 1.6.1 landed today, July 9, 2026, without fanfare. Four targeted fixes, no new mechanics — and a clear signal that the runway is being cleared for the summer’s main event: the Hippodrome DLC, scheduled for mid-August alongside Update 2.0.

What patch 1.6.1 changes

Four fixes worth knowing:

Cinis expands: Earthquakes have unlocked additional building space on the volcanic island. The change is savegame-compatible — no restart required.
Crash fixed: A crash tied to resolving large incidents in late-game sessions is now gone.
Commerce exploit closed: A gamepad input trick allowed free goods from traders. The exploit is removed.
Vigiles repair fix (Prophecies of Ash): Vigiles now repair buildings destroyed by volcanic activity and tremors — a bug that had gone unaddressed since the DLC launched.

None of these are headline changes, but they clear out technical debt accumulated since Prophecies of Ash shipped.

The Hippodrome: Anno’s largest monument yet

The numbers frame the ambition: over 60 tiles long by roughly 25 tiles wide. That’s nearly twice the length of the Amphitheater, currently the only monument in Anno 117. The Circus Maximus held up to 250,000 spectators — the scale reference isn’t accidental.

The DLC lets you host chariot races inside your city. Two practical results:

Governor prestige increases, improving your diplomatic position and island bonuses.
New specialists become recruitable, providing production, happiness, or military efficiency buffs when placed in existing buildings.

Included in the Year 1 Pass, with a standalone purchase option for those without it.

The strategic catch: Albion granite

Here’s the detail the general roadmap didn’t emphasize: the Hippodrome can only be built in Latium, and it requires Albion granite — a resource exclusive to the Celtic province of Britannia.

The implication is direct. If your Anno 117 playthrough has been Latium-first with Albion on the back burner, you now need to:

Establish or expand your Albion presence to access granite quarries.
Build a maritime trade route to ship granite back to Latium.
Plan the footprint: 60 × 25 tiles of contiguous space in Latium takes serious urban planning.

With six weeks before the DLC drops, there’s enough time to adjust production chains without a crisis. A player who waits until the Hippodrome appears in the shop to start sourcing granite will spend multiple sessions on logistics before placing a single foundation tile.

Update 2.0 and the August schedule

The Hippodrome ships alongside Update 2.0, targeted for mid-August 2026. Ubisoft Mainz hasn’t detailed the full contents of that update yet — expect Anno Union posts in the coming weeks.

After the Hippodrome, the Year 1 Pass closes out with Dawn of the Delta in November 2026 — a full Egyptian province built around the Nile delta, introducing new populations, deities, and production chains.

For context on what came before, check our Prophecies of Ash review and full 2026 roadmap breakdown.

Start sourcing Albion granite now.

What matters is that the Hippodrome turns a prestige building into a logistics check. Players who secure Albion granite and Latium space beforehand will use the DLC immediately; everyone else will be building the supply chain first.

Sources: Anno Union — Patch 1.6.1 · Ubisoft — Year 1 DLC Plans

Anno 117 Pax Romana: Full 2026 Year 1 Roadmap — Patch 1.6, Hippodrome and Dawn of the Delta

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Anno 117 Grows: Patch 1.6 Recap and What’s Coming in 2026

Anno 117: Pax Romana is delivering on its post-launch promise. Since its November 2025 release, Ubisoft Mainz’s Roman city-builder has attracted over 1.17 million players and maintained a steady stream of updates. Patch 1.6, released on June 18, 2026, sets the stage for the second half of the Year 1 content calendar — two major expansions are now locked in: the Hippodrome in August and the Egyptian province Dawn of the Delta in November.

Patch 1.6 — Blooming Cities Pack and bug fixes
The Hippodrome — chariot races arrive in August
Dawn of the Delta — Egypt comes to Anno in November
Going further

Patch 1.6 — Blooming Cities Pack and Prophecies of Ash Fixes {#patch-16}

Released June 18, 2026, patch 1.6 accompanies the launch of the Blooming Cities Pack, Anno 117’s second cosmetic DLC. It introduces an organic system for placing flowers and trees throughout your islands, along with fountains, decorative walls, and the Temple of Flora as a grand centerpiece.

On the technical side, several bugs from Prophecies of Ash have been resolved:

Main Prophecies of Ash quest no longer fails to trigger for certain players.
Vulcan’s shrine buffs now correctly include gold and coal.
Construction grids no longer vanish unexpectedly during building phases.
Landscaping Patterns category added for all players with two free garden patterns (Ambrosian Forest, Celtic Forest) plus Albion and Latium-themed brushes.

Co-op players can now swap object skins to ones they own, even if the original skin belonged to another player in the session — a long-requested quality-of-life fix.

The Hippodrome — Summer 2026’s Signature Monument {#hippodrome}

The Year 1 Pass’s second major DLC arrives in August 2026: The Hippodrome, modeled after the Circus Maximus. Ubisoft describes it as the most impressive monument ever built in the Anno series, both in scale and in the gameplay mechanics it introduces.

The Hippodrome lets you host chariot races inside your Roman city, delivering:

Governor prestige gains, improving diplomatic standing and triggering island-wide bonuses.
New specialists that can be slotted into existing buildings to activate production boosts, happiness multipliers, or military efficiency upgrades.

The DLC is included in the Year 1 Pass and will also be sold separately. Pass holders get automatic access at launch.

Dawn of the Delta — Egypt Joins Anno in November 2026 {#dawn-of-the-delta}

The Year 1 Pass closes with its largest chapter in November 2026: Dawn of the Delta, a fully new province combining vast desert landscapes and a fertile river delta. This is the most ambitious piece of content in the first year of support.

Confirmed features so far:

New population tiers with distinct needs and beliefs, entirely separate from the Roman social ladder.
A Roman-Egyptian cultural balance to maintain: Roman imperial ambition must coexist with deep-rooted Egyptian tradition.
New deities to worship, extending the religious system already present in the base game.
New Egyptian military units to integrate into your forces.
Exclusive production chains tied to the region, unlocking resources and economic routes unavailable elsewhere.

Dawn of the Delta functions as a self-contained province — comparable in scope to Albion in the base game — but transporting your governor into the Egypt of Trajan’s era, 117 AD.

Going Further {#going-further}

Missed the volcanic island Cinis from the first DLC? Our full verdict is in our Prophecies of Ash DLC review. Anno 117’s 2026 roadmap confirms that Ubisoft Mainz is committed to substantial post-launch support — between regular patches, cosmetic DLC, and major expansions, Pax Romana has a lot more to offer before the year is out.

Sources: Anno Union — Patch 1.6 · Ubisoft — Year 1 DLC Plans

Anno 117 Prophecies of Ash: what the volcano really changes

Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cinis offers roughly twice the buildable land of the largest island in the base game. At its center, a volcano can shut down mines, hurl rock across residential districts, and cut output from farms and fisheries. Anno 117’s most generous terrain is therefore also the one that demands the deepest reserves.

That trade-off is more precise than a vague promise of “volcanic content.” Caecilia, obsidian, coal mines and the cult of Vulcan tie the disaster directly to production chains. They let us read the DLC through its systems without pretending to have spent two weeks on the island — which is exactly what the earlier version of this article wrongly claimed.

Cinis expands Latium instead of adding a side session

Prophecies of Ash released on April 30, 2026. The DLC extends northern Latium with six islands: three medium, two small, and Cinis. That last one is not a separate region you load from the world map. It slots into the existing province and can be added to a save already in progress.

That choice matters. Trade routes, population and established chains all stay relevant. Cinis does not force you to restart an empire to reach its content. Instead it offers a new center of gravity, with more beaches, rivers and mountain slots than ordinary islands.

Ubisoft puts its buildable surface at roughly twice that of the base game’s largest island. For megacity builders, that is the immediate selling point. For Anno’s design, it is also a risk: an enormous island softens the logistical pressure that normally gives sea routes and island specialization their value.

The volcano exists precisely to put friction back into all that space.

The volcano is a five-act economic loop

The official cycle has five phases, not four. During the calm, the island runs normally. The prelude brings tremors and light damage. The eruption interrupts anything built on mountain slots while flaming rocks strike buildings. The volcanic winter that follows drops the productivity of farms and fisheries, along with several well-being indicators.

The final phase, the bloom, flips the logic. Rain clears the air, lifts happiness, and turns ash into an agricultural bonus. Each eruption raises Cinis’s soil level. That bonus is first capped after three cycles; research then lets you push the ceiling to five.

This structure avoids a purely punishing disaster. You are not just handed a repair bill — you accept a spell of disorder to earn more productive land. The strategic problem becomes temporal. You need stockpiles before the winter, protection for exposed buildings, and a plan to exploit the rebound rather than simply rebuild what was there.

Obsidian ties the disaster to the economy

The eruption also produces obsidian. It appears as a by-product of mines and quarries after a cycle, and some hurled rocks can be recovered once the danger passes. The resource feeds statuettes and Latrunculi game sets, or trade with Caecilia.

So the new trader is not just a portrait bolted onto the harbor. Her missions introduce the story of Cinis and how the volcano works, while her specialists can alter an island’s fertilities or mining capacities.

The cult of Vulcan completes the picture. Its boons cover mining and fire safety, and it unlocks coal mines. Those can occupy any mountain slot without needing a particular fertility. The DLC thus links its theme to several layers of the city-builder at once: extraction, production, religion, trade and risk management.

Turning the volcano off changes what the DLC is worth

Ubisoft lets you tune the volcano’s intensity or disable its disruptive phases. That safety valve keeps a disaster mechanic from making Cinis unusable for players who build mainly for aesthetics.

The disabling is not neutral, though. Without new eruptions, the soil level and the farming bonus slowly fade. You keep the enormous canvas, but you give up the loop that mechanically justifies the abundance.

This is where the buying decision clarifies. If your goal is simply the largest surface in the series, Cinis delivers that directly. If you want new chains as structural as a full Anno 1800 region, the scope is more modest. Prophecies of Ash deepens Latium; it does not create a second economic game.

The real cost is in the preparation

The eruption does not threaten every activity equally. The explosive phase halts production tied to mountain slots. The winter that follows hits farms and fisheries. An economy concentrated on Cinis therefore stacks two successive weaknesses: extraction stopped, then food slowed.

That sequence gives warehouses and outside routes a concrete job. Importing food from another island shields your population during the volcanic winter. Holding coal or mined goods keeps a downstream chain from stalling when the volcano blocks the mountains. Visible damage is only part of the problem; the flow interruption can outlast the fire.

The bloom bonus then rewards players who kept their city running rather than those who only repaired quickly. With enriched soil, the same farms produce more and gradually offset the reserves you burned. The full loop reads less like “disaster, rebuild” and more like “prepare, interrupt, accelerated recovery.”

Difficulty settings also change how much damage and obsidian each cycle produces. Lowering the violence can be smarter than switching the cycle off entirely: you keep the bloom and the obsidian economy without turning every eruption into a maximum test of your reserves.

Who Prophecies of Ash makes sense for

The DLC looks most relevant for two profiles. The first wants a far larger Roman capital without leaving their current save. The second enjoys systems where a temporary disruption can be turned into a production advantage.

Players who hate seeing their chains interrupted can soften or cut the volcano, but they will neutralize much of the strategic angle. Conversely, anyone hoping for a constantly punishing disaster may find the bloom too generous: the system is built as a cyclical investment, not permanent survival.

The useful question is therefore not whether Cinis contains enough land. It plainly does. It is whether you enjoy building redundancy into an economy well before the warning arrives. A second food route, spare warehouse capacity and production spread across several islands become part of the design rather than emergency busywork. Repair services, supply discipline and mountain-slot placement matter before the first projectile falls, not after it. That is a narrower appeal than a new region, but also a more coherent one: the island asks you to use systems Anno already has with greater discipline.

For where this content sits in the game’s year, our Anno 117 Year 1 roadmap also covers The Hippodrome and Dawn of the Delta. Prophecies of Ash does not reinvent Anno 117 — it gives an identity to an island that could have been mere oversized terrain, and the volcano turns space into a genuine choice: build bigger, provided you organize the empire to weather the next winter.