Breadbasket, Optional New post Dawn of the Delta is the most beautiful province nobody needs

My first city in Aegyptus lasted about as long as a Nile flood. I’d picked a strip of land in the middle of the delta and brought a plan – half Egyptian, half Roman, the best of both worlds, obviously – plus the firm intention to build a harbor. What I got was a dock: one dock, room for exactly one more building that touches water, and then the coastline simply ran out. No row of shipyards, no warehouse district, no repair cranes, no decorative pier to stand on and admire the sunset from. If you’re used to the huge, mighty imperial ports of Latium and Albion, the delta is a real – excuse me the term – dockblocker.

So I did what every self-respecting governor does when a province bites back: I closed the session, opened my old savegame (88 hours and counting, haizz) and switched the DLC on there instead.

Dawn of the Delta is the third and largest expansion in the Year 1 Pass of Anno 117: Pax Romana, released on November 5, 2026 alongside the free Update 3.0, at 24.99 USD on Steam. It sends you to Aegyptus, the far southeastern corner of the empire, and it’s big: GameStar’s test puts the new province at roughly the size of Albion, which makes it about half of the base game stacked on top. I’ve put a little over 16 hours into it – and I’m nowhere near done.

Dawn of the Delta launch trailer

A delta instead of an archipelago

Aegyptus breaks the oldest rule in the series: there’s no ocean dotted with islands. You settle river islands and the mainland edges of the Nile delta, sailing the narrow arms in between, and the whole thing is handcrafted – the same map every playthrough, with only the resources and fertilities shuffled. Every island comes in three layers: sandy drylands in the middle for houses and workshops, a green belt of farmland and dense forest, and the floodplains right at the water, swampy and fertile and slightly treacherous.

And it’s gorgeous. Anno 117 was already the most detailed Anno ever made, and the art and level-art people in Mainz have built a region every bit as pretty as Latium and Albion, if not prettier: tall rocky cliffs, lush delta forests, wetlands teeming with life, the Nile itself, and NPC cities so stuffed with easter eggs that I caught myself scrolling and rotating through them for no economic reason whatsoever. The new temples and observatories are exceptional. The Roman buildings sometimes stand around like foreign objects – which, to be fair to the art team, they historically were.

The sound is where it got me, though. When the camera sinks low over a floodplain at dusk, you can practically feel the shimmering heat and the humming of the sand, the wind rustling through the palm fronds, frogs croaking somewhere in the reeds, the ripples the breeze pushes across the river – all of it carried by a soundtrack of Oriental, Arabian and Egyptian motifs that dropped me straight back into Pharaoh and Assassin’s Creed Origins. Within a minute you know you’re in the desert now.

Egypt also gets bonus points from me before the first warehouse even stands: Pharaoh, Assassin’s Creed Origins, Age of Mythology, a bit of early Tomb Raider – my whole gaming biography has been drifting down this river for ≈25 years, and I’m biased beyond repair.

Shemu, Akhet and a childhood in Pharaoh

The Nile has two moods. During Shemu, the harvest season, every production building in the floodplains yields an extra ton per cycle – which for a slow farm amounts to doubling it. During Akhet, the flood season, the river spills over the banks, floodplain productivity drops by 75%, the whole province takes a health penalty and, as a small consolation, fire safety goes up. Ubisoft says each season lasts about two hours; in my save the whole cycle felt closer to three. On top of that, floodplain farms come with smaller fields than regular ones, so as long as you can store their harvest they’re the most efficient farms you’ll build – though you have to research them first, while grain on ordinary farmland is available from day one. Arguably that should be the other way around.

The flood itself never scared me, though. I’m used to it since the prehistoric Pharaoh times, back when the Nile flooded on schedule and the only real danger was a cheat that wrapped hippos in pink tutus and sent them dancing (and stomping, quite lethally for any citizen in the way) across your city. The hippos are back, by the way – wallowing in the marshes and briefly starring in the launch trailer. No tutus – I checked.

Where Akhet does bite is construction. Mud bricks replace wood as Egypt’s main building material, and both mud and reed only come out of the floodplains, so a city founded during the flood can sit there for a long time waiting for enough bricks to grow beyond a fire pit and a date farm.

To survive the flood you build granaries: storage buildings for agricultural products only, each adding 100 t of space, plus a productivity bonus of +15% and a population bonus for all farms in range, all of it upgradeable through research. The productivity bonus makes total sense; the population bonus doesn’t. A grain silo that pulls settlers in like a small colosseum is a strange piece of design, and I suspect a balancing patch will agree with me sooner or later – a productivity buff alone would be plenty. What I do love is the overflow: store more than the granary can hold and you risk rats, which lower health and eat into your stock. That’s the rat plague from Anno 1701 back in business, and it’s far more immersive than a generic debuff (it can be switched off in the settings, for the faint of heart). In a large savegame the rats become a near-permanent guest, though, which is why Isis-Bastet, whom the devblog calls the mother of all rat terminators, isn’t just a pretty face.

Then there’s irrigation, the Anno classic since the Orient in Anno 1404 and Enbesa in Anno 1800. The Aegyptian way gives you basins on the coast and canals inland, watering a strip of eight fields on either side; the Graeco-Roman way, once you’ve reached Gymnasiarchs, gives you a giant noria that scoops water into aqueducts and cisterns. Both are lovely to look at and both are currently unnecessary, because the islands already come with more fertile land than you can use, and with far too little coastline to spare for basins and norias anyway. To make irrigation matter, Ubisoft would have to cut the natural farmland down – and while they’re at it, sand refineries should only work in the actual desert, not on perfectly good fertile ground.

Fast boats, slow galleys

The Nile flows, and the game takes that literally: goods travel faster downstream toward the sea than upstream against the current, and the heavy Roman triremes struggle badly in the shallow river. So Aegyptus has its own shipyard and its own boats – the small Skiff with 3 cargo slots, the bigger Aba with 5, and a military Aba with archers on deck. None of them are modular, which sounds like a loss until you remember how rarely anyone actually bothered with civilian ship modules. They’re quick on the river and useless on the open sea, so you end up splitting your traffic: river boats for the delta, Roman ships for the Mediterranean, and a trading hub at the river mouth where one hands cargo to the other.

It’s been a while since an Anno gave me a real logistics puzzle, and the session layout pushes you into island-hopping to dodge long transport routes. In theory that’s great. In practice it collides with the harbor space I complained about up top; the transshipment hub every delta economy needs has to squeeze into a coastline that barely fits a dock.

Then there’s the Kandis of Kashta, the new local raider, who wants to revive the old High Egyptian kingdom and finance it with your money. She raids unless you pay her ransom, goes for fields, warehouses and granaries, and her troops set your grain on fire, which is rude. Her river boats also outrun Roman galleys with ease, so you fight fire with fire. Her base sits far to the south in the Valley of the Pharaohs, and I haven’t set foot in it yet. What I’ve seen in streams and tests is enough: a winding canyon maze, far from any supply route, where entire squads keep pouring out of tombs at every corner – a Nile flood of enemies. I have huge respect, and I’ll be building a truly ridiculous army before I even think about trying.

Same caveat for Decimus Naukratius Nerva, the new rival governor, whom I only know from other people’s footage so far: a brutal Roman warlord with enormous military power who spreads the Roman way aggressively and starts in Aegyptus before expanding everywhere. He feels slightly cheaty, but so did the classic Anno AIs, and watching seasoned players get overrun by him tells you how much Anno 117 needed opponents with teeth. One thing irks me, though: Decimus is the father of Marcus and Marcia, the protagonists of the main campaign, and if you play as one of them, he doesn’t react to his own kids at all. That’s lazy, and it’s the kind of thing a single line of dialogue would’ve fixed. Alongside him come two new land units, the camel-mounted Dromedarii and the elite Kumatic Archers, and a technology that finally lets you recruit legionaries outside of Latium.

Bread, beer and a lot of déjà vu

Aegyptus brings five new population tiers. Everyone starts as Threshers, farmers who know the river, and then you choose: stay Aegyptian and upgrade them to Potters and finally Chanters, temple priestesses with a taste for blue lotus tea, perfumed oil and bronze sistrum rattles – or Romanize them into Scribes and then Gymnasiarchs, a Greek merchant elite with decadent requests like exotic appetizers, ivory caskets and bathing milk. As in Albion, the choice changes your gods, your production chains, your army and the look of your cities.

A surprising amount of that is shared with the base game: bread, olive oil, porridge, cheese, beer and soap all make a comeback and can be produced locally, which I think is the right call. Reusing chains means shared logistics, and thanks to the riverbanks and all that space, much of it runs more efficiently in Egypt than back home in Latium. The new chains themselves – talismans dyed blue with copper and sand, scribing sets from papyrus and mineral pigments, sistrums from bronze and floodplain beads – are pleasant, but they lack the depth of the monsters from earlier games. Nothing here comes close to the toys, steam carriages or gramophones of Anno 1800.

Fertilities don’t help. You need exactly one to reach the third tier; pick a starting island with copper and mineral fertility, and you never have to expand at all. And the needs system suffers from the same problem as the base game: fulfilled needs simply don’t pay out enough attributes to be compelling. Raise their attribute output, nuke the annoying city status entirely, and supply shortages would turn into an interesting logistics puzzle instead of a chore.

Three gods with an appetite

The gods, on the other hand, are a highlight, especially if you grew up on Caesar III and Pharaoh like I did. Religion is still one of Anno 117’s biggest strengths because it nudges you toward specialized islands, and all three newcomers are versatile enough to matter beyond the delta.

Sobek, the crocodile, is my personal favorite and available right from the start: he boosts roast beef, beer, cheese, sausages, stuffed geese and Sanga cattle, which makes him a perfect fit for Albion, and his global devotion unlocks dovecotes that make plantations far more efficient than their Latium counterparts. Isis-Bastet has to be researched first and is basically Ceres on steroids – less consumption, better scaling, a higher maximum productivity bonus, plus buffs for lavender, perfume and dates, and big cat shrines that raise population, income and prestige. Thoth Trismegistos buffs glass, wine, writing tablets and scribing sets, which makes him the obvious pick for tertiary islands in Latium, though I’d argue his palette would’ve fit Apollo better. It’s also nice to see older gods pick up Egyptian goods, like Minerva buffing Egyptian clothing. Every new god tied to a new production chain is a gift for Anno 117, and I’d gladly take a dozen more.

Hauling granite to a ruin older than Rome

The pyramids are ≈2,000 years old when you arrive and look it, so the emperor wants them restored as a show of Roman grandeur. They’re a province project near the port of Naukratis rather than a building on your own island, and they’re rebuilt in phases, each demanding hundreds of tons of tiles, granite and marble, tunics and food for the workers, and dromedaries to speed up the hauling. According to GameStar, later phases also ask for consumer goods and intermediates like bread, papyrus and gold bars. You can’t plant a warehouse next to the site either; everything arrives by ship, which turns the whole thing into a proper logistics siege. If rivals are in the game, it’s a race, and whoever delivers their share first gets the stronger buff. Every finished phase lowers your imperial land tax and raises prestige on all your islands, and that alone makes the Pharaoh vibes worth the trouble.

I’m mid-delivery right now, hauling alongside the other governors, and it’ll take a good few more hours. The final reward is what worries me: province-wide prestige, a service need for the third tiers, a temporary boost to your chance of heroic specialists and the option to hold ceremonies – which means shipping hundreds more tons. Heroic specialists are powerful, sure, but the Hippodrome already hands those out. Compare that to the DLC regions of Anno 1800, which I only finished because they unlocked so much: The Passage ended with an airship and Arctic gas for more efficient power plants back home, Land of Lions with a research institute that let you design your own items. Restoring the pyramids will mostly be worth it so my skyline stops featuring a ruin.

The story is a murder mystery, and a charming one on paper: Nymphaeus, a beloved local celebrity who championed Kumatic and Hellenistic coexistence, is fished out of the Nile, you’re tasked with his mummification, and the body tells you it wasn’t an accident. GameStar mentions the developers took inspiration from Agatha Christie, and I’d love to tell you whodunit. Unfortunately I’ve played every single Anno and have never finished a single main campaign – only the Sunken Treasures, Passage and Land of Lions questlines in Anno 1800, and only because they unlock half the region. I’m the endless-game kind of person, and the name says it all. In 2021 I closed my Anno 1602 revisit with the claim that even an endless game ends at some point; five years later I’m still waiting for proof. GameStar did finish it and found the final deduction hard to follow, so take that as the verdict until I get there.

A tech tree in a separate drawer

This is where things get messy. The Egyptian research tree is its own DLC tree, completely separate from the economic tree you share in Latium and Albion, and you feel it the moment you start fresh in the delta. My 50/50 city fell over partly because of it: the tree is built around the Aegyptian path, so the Roman half of my town felt underpowered from the start. From what I can read in the tree, piers, third-tier warehouses and depot permits sit behind Phlogistic and Wetland Research in the base game, and the water discoveries for irrigation live elsewhere too, so an Egypt-only start is noticeably harder than an Albion-only one. (It’s not impossible – Epistrategos Heron in Naukratis even sells Latium goods). A single economic tree for every region, with three smaller regional branches, would be much cleaner. As it stands, the Egyptian tree pads itself with pointless attribute buffs and locks away basic concepts, like planting grain on fertile land.

Update 3.0 arrived on the same day and brings two features straight out of Anno 1800: stamps for saving and reusing layouts (welcome, if a bit hidden and tedious in the UI), and a statistics screen that finally has a storage tab and a full overview of all specialists and where to get them. It also makes “normal” the default consumption setting and adds a “very hard” one with +75% consumption. I read that in the patch notes and was firmly convinced my own save had been rebalanced, too. It hadn’t; the change only applies to new games, a classic bias trap. As a fix it’s a band-aid anyway: too little consumption is only a problem for some needs, while goods like soap have the exact opposite problem. Speeding up Latium’s mills from 30 seconds to 20 seconds doesn’t fix river slots either, and gold washers and sturgeon hatcheries still produce so slowly in the name of immersive scarcity that it simply doesn’t play well.

The English localization is superb; you’d never guess this is a German game. The voice acting is meh. Some voices don’t fit the characters, and others are repetitive and annoying. But major praise to the engineers in Mainz: the release isn’t entirely bug-free, but it’s solid and stable. Somebody clearly learned from the messy launch of the Prophecies of Ash DLC that a buggy start drags the whole experience down.

Rome could never have shrugged at Egypt

My actual problem with all this is older than Anno 117. In Anno 1800 and Anno 2205, new DLC regions were optional by design: your existing regions could benefit from them, but they kept working just fine without them. The New World in 1800 and the moon in 2205 were different – they were part of the core game, and your engineers simply didn’t happen without New World coffee. The DLC regions were nice-to-haves, and whether you connected them depended entirely on your own motivation.

Anno 117 makes that worse, because with three independent regions, expansion is optional from the very first minute. You can start in Egypt and expand into Latium and Albion, and you’ll be rewarded for it, but the game works just as well if you don’t. There’s no race to the New World anymore, no ticking clock, no scarcity, no competing faction pushing you across the map. The breadbasket idea is real: Egypt grows grain so efficiently that you can move your farms out of Latium and Albion and free up land for city expansion; Albion’s reed and mud can in turn feed Egypt’s brickworks, and suddenly every region produces for another. That domino effect is genuinely satisfying. But my cities had worked perfectly well before, too. Dawn of the Delta rewards you for connecting the empire – and never once requires it.

History disagrees rather loudly btw. Rome’s cura annonae (the state-run grain supply) drew its bread grain from Egypt, North Africa and Sicily. Africa actually shipped more, but Egypt was the emperor’s own grain, and controlling it was power: in 69 AD, Vespasian used the Alexandrian exports as a weapon, and by the end of that year Rome was down to stocks for ≈10 days. Senators weren’t even allowed into Egypt without the emperor’s permission, because a grain embargo was a standing threat. Trajan, the emperor who died in 117, had just enlarged the grain harbor at Portus. The real Rome of the year 117 would’ve called an optional Egypt a coup risk.

Now that I think about it, there’s a game mechanic hiding in there. Imagine a little ice age – crop failures in Latium, a famine creeping through Albion – forcing you to seek new land and build up your grain industry in Egypt before your existing cities start to decline. It doesn’t have to be Frostpunk. A handful of small challenges that make the new region feel like a necessity rather than an optional add-on (or, well, downloadable content) would have been enough. GameStar describes the result as drowning in options, and I’d put it differently: there’s simply nothing pulling you forward. Integrating Aegyptus properly would’ve meant touching the mechanics of the two existing regions, maybe even restructuring them, and on that front the developers lacked the courage to take on the challenge. Update 2.0 proved that small changes can have a huge impact; this would’ve taken the audacity to make breaking changes, and Dawn of the Delta doesn’t have it. For now it’s another optional region, interchangeable at its very core.

Four stars for a tacked-on province

So why still four stars out of five? Because the setting, the graphics, the sound, the love for detail, the atmosphere – it’s all fantastic. As a standalone game, Dawn of the Delta would actually work very well; next to the other regions it just feels tacked on rather than integrated. A solid four, then: not a perfect five, but too good for a three and a half. If you’re a master builder, it’ll give you gorgeous opportunities. If you want 20-30 hours per playthrough, it delivers. If the base game’s pain points annoy you, they’re all still here.

One day I’ll start a fresh game in the delta and expand from there toward Latium and Albion, because that genuinely sounds exciting. Probably once a Year 2 pass is fully out in 2027 – which, knowing Ubisoft, will bring yet another region with it, so who knows how that plan turns out. Until then, the pyramids still need granite, and the hippos still need a tutu. 🦛

Anno 117: Pax Romana – Dawn of the Delta at a glance

Personal rating:

Developer:

Ubisoft Mainz

Publisher:

Ubisoft

Release date (Steam):

5 Nov, 2026

Genre:

City-builder, strategy (DLC, requires the base game)

Where to buy: