Anno 117: Pax Romana sends players to Roman Egypt on November 5, and the new pyramids trailer settles a question fans had been asking since the expansion was first teased: you do not build the pyramids. They stand on the map from the start, older than Roman rule, and the governor’s job is to put them back in order. The paid add-on is called Dawn of the Delta, and Ubisoft bills it as the biggest of the three gameplay expansions in the game’s Year 1 Pass.
A province built around a river
Ubisoft’s own outline lists a new province, Aegyptus, with desert, a large river delta, extra population tiers, more gods and fresh military units. Announcement material and hands-off previews from Gamescom in August fill in the rest:
- The delta floods with the seasons. High water can ruin plots near the banks, yet it also leaves them richer, and a research branch adds basins that make dry ground farmable.
- Local laborers called threshers sit at the bottom of the ladder, with potters and scribes above them. As in the Celtic province of Albion, you choose how far to Romanize them.
- Gods including Sobek and Isis join the pantheon.
- The announcement promises 27 new goods and resources and 30 research options.
- Kushite archers, strong but costly to keep, and camel-mounted Dromedarii join the army.
Egypt is a natural closing act for a Roman city builder. Octavian took the country in 30 BC, it became an imperial province in 27 BC, and the emperor ran it through a hand-picked prefect rather than a senator. It was the wealthiest province outside Italy, and its grain fed Rome. A game whose whole loop is moving goods between islands could hardly ask for a better setting than an empire’s breadbasket with a temperamental river.
What the trailer shows, and what it leaves out
The clip premiered during an online fan showcase this week and works as a mood piece: sand, monuments, a working river. It is honest about the premise, since the pyramids are framed as a restoration project, which fits the history better than letting a Roman governor raise new ones. Viewers expecting a construction megaproject in the style of the Hippodrome will find something different.
What it does not do is sell the systems. Flood timing, the basin research and the new units are the reasons this expansion could change how the game plays, and none of them can be judged from a cinematic. That matters most for combat. When the base game launched on November 13, 2025, critics liked the city building and the naval fights but faulted the story and the land battles. Archers and camel riders arrive in exactly the part of the game that drew the weakest reviews, so we would wait for hands-on footage of them before treating them as a selling point.
How it compares with earlier Anno expansions
The series has handled water as a resource before. In 2020, Anno 1800’s Land of Lions opened Enbesa, a region modeled on the Horn of Africa, where players built irrigation to beat a water shortage. Dawn of the Delta flips that puzzle: the river brings too much water at times you cannot control, rather than too little. Older entries made do with one expansion each, from The Sunken Dragon for Anno 1701 in 2007 to Venice for Anno 1404 in 2010. Anno 1800 went the other way, with twelve major packs across four seasons between 2019 and 2022. Anno 117 is on the Anno 1800 track so far, and it has the audience for it: it sold faster than any earlier Anno and had reached 1.17 million players by April.
For buyers, the arithmetic is simple. The Year 1 Pass is listed at $34.99 on Steam and on Ubisoft’s store, so each of its three gameplay expansions works out at roughly $11.66 ($34.99 divided by 3), before counting the five cosmetic items thrown in. The store pages we checked did not show a separate price for Dawn of the Delta alone. You need the base game, and the expansion is due on PC through the Ubisoft Store, Steam and the Epic Games Store, on PS5 and on Xbox Series X|S, as well as through a Ubisoft+ subscription. The release date to circle is Thursday, November 5.
Further reading
- Wikipedia: Anno 117: Pax Romana
- Wikipedia: Anno (video game series)
- Wikipedia: Anno 1800
- Wikipedia: Egypt (Roman province)
Image: Ricardo Liberato, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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