u/Spacer176

Over the past few days I have been watching one after the other of Echoes of History, a history podcast that works in partnership with Ubisoft. Mostly they do various videos covering Assassin's Creed, but lately they've done a couple of promotional videos for Anno 117.

The biggest revelation of this video is learning that the idea of "The Roman Peace" could be better understood as a peace of the heartland more than the whole empire or its sphere of influence (which makes sense because that's where all the wealthiest Romans are living). Plenty of frontier wars and rebellions like what we do in Albion, but so long as there's no war in the core provinces, you have pax.

Emperor Lucius sending Calidus to conquer Albion (or you, or Calidus' campaigns in Parthava/Parthia) while touting his reign as an age of peace is not a contradiction. He and others likely would have imagined this as a time of real, lasting peace because Rome itself wasn't under threat.

Hello, something struck me recently. As I've been in several discussions about villas and other staples about Roman life, and how it might translate into game features for Pax Romana.

Then the other day, I remembered 2205's 6x6 residencies. A double-sized footprint (as opposed to the usual 3x3) that functioned effectively as four houses in one space. The purpose being to maximise housing space and justify a much taller skyline for the game's themes of megacities the scale like no installment before it.

This sort of thing would be particularly enticing for Latium, where ideally you want residences as far as the eye can see. It could also, thematically, fit into Roman architecture of the time. Whenever I've chimed in about residences on subjects like "why cant' we have villas as a housing type?" I often bring up that wealthy Romans would have an urban residence called a domus, The main architectural feature of a domus? A rainwater pool occupying the open-air space of a courtyard.

https://preview.redd.it/h10cs72uo40h1.jpg?width=729&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a2333ee00e5624da24326332a66150d49cc0b895

https://www.worldhistory.org/article/77/the-roman-domus/

Boom. Right there. We have a layout for a larger residence. A courtyard surrounded on all sides by the building, shops on the front face (could be more than one side). And while in most cases such residences were rarely higher than two floors and often on the town's outskirts, some Romans would live in more lavishly furnished apartments in insula. So there is precedent for a taller residential building that fits Anno's gamplay mould of bigger cities having wealthier citizens living in the densest parts of it.

I nterms of design, it could be as simple as tweaking current residence design cues to surround a courtyard, plaza, fountain or rainwater pool. Maybe the floors of these buildings are slightly taller to lift them above the regular skyline.

Now that I think on it, 1800 was doing something similar too; the 4x4 hacienda residences which had neater arrangements of three houses on slightly fancier grounds than the base houses of the respective tier. What's more, we don't need to invent a new social class to justify these. They give extra population per tile which is what Latium was designed for. But both approaches in Hacienda and 2205 gave the same result: more housing for less roads.

Post-launch I'll admit, it may work better as a mod more than an official DLC (the latter might need something 'extra' to give mechanical incentive. Like how The High Life introduced luxury shopping and goods that were specific to skyscrapers).