Anno 117 for Skylines players is a strange first evening. You know city builders. You have untangled a motorway junction at three in the morning. Then Ubisoft Mainz hands you a Roman province in Anno 117: Pax Romana, and almost every reflex you built in Cities: Skylines quietly works against you.
None of this means Anno is harder. It means Anno measures a different thing. Skylines asks how well you move people around. Anno asks how well you feed them. So here are the four habits worth dropping in your first hour, and what to do instead.
What Anno 117 for Skylines players must unlearn first
There is no zoning. You do not paint a residential area and wait for houses to appear. Instead, you place every single building yourself, one at a time, and the game holds you responsible for each one.
Roads change job as well. In Skylines the road network is the puzzle, and traffic is the enemy. Here, roads simply connect your structures to your trading posts. Ubisoft’s own guidance is blunt about the storage side of it too. “What’s deposited at one warehouse is accessible at all warehouses.” In other words, you are not routing lorries across town. You are making sure everything touches the network.
Because of that, your first build order is unglamorous. Put a Woodcutter in a dense patch of forest, add a Sawmill to turn the logs into Timber, and connect both by road. Nearly everything you construct later needs Timber, so a province that runs dry on wood stalls completely.
Growth is not automatically good in Anno 117
This is the habit that hurts. In Skylines, upgrading density is free money, since more residents mean more tax. Anno 117 does not work that way at all.
Your starting residents in Latium are Liberti, and Ubisoft explains the catch plainly. Upgrading them “replaces your Liberti with Plebians,” which can “lead to a Liberti workforce shortage if you’re not careful.” Your buildings still need Liberti labour. Upgrade too eagerly and the jobs sit empty while your shiny new Plebeians demand more.
Meanwhile the money side genuinely does tempt you, because fulfilled Liberti generate income and fulfilled Plebeians generate even more. So treat an upgrade as a purchase rather than a reward. Ask two questions first. Can I supply what the higher tier will want, and do I still have enough lower-tier workers for the buildings I already own? If either answer is no, wait.
One island will never be enough
Skylines gives you one continuous map and lets you buy more of it. Anno gives you islands, and no island holds everything you need.
The Albion region shows this clearly. Ubisoft describes marshland where “eels and reed are harvested,” but warns that “not all types of buildings can be built in the marshes,” and that roads there “must be connected to a very specific point of your buildings.” Your Skylines instinct to bulldoze and flatten simply does not apply.
Look at the top of the ladder and it gets starker. On the Celtic path, Aldermen ask for pelt hats, chariots and Latium wine. On the Roman path, Nobles want Togas imported from Latium, plus Roman theatres and Aqueducts. Those goods come from a different region entirely. Consequently ships and trade routes are your real infrastructure, and they matter far more than any road you will ever draw.
A first hour plan for Anno 117 for Skylines players
Start in Latium rather than Albion, because Latium runs one straight population path while Albion branches into Celtic and Roman cultures with separate shopping lists. Learn the loop once, then go and complicate it.
Next, cover the basics your Liberti actually ask for, which are food, public services and fashion. Keep those green before you touch anything else. Then watch the arrow when you place a building, since buildings affect their neighbours and the game shows you a green arrow pointing up or a red arrow pointing down. That arrow is doing the job your zoning tools used to do.
Finally, hold the upgrade button. A slightly small province with full supply beats a bigger one full of unhappy citizens every time. If you enjoy management sims, we compared two of them in Two Point Museum vs Jurassic World Evolution, and looked at resource discipline in Vladik Brutal: A Real Ammo Economy Guide.
Frequently asked questions
Should a Cities: Skylines player start in Latium or Albion? Latium. It follows a single population path, while Albion splits into Celtic and Roman branches whose residents demand completely different goods.
Does traffic matter in Anno 117? Not the way it does in Skylines. Roads exist to connect buildings to trading posts, and every warehouse shares the same stock, so congestion is not the core puzzle.
Why did my economy break after upgrading houses? Upgrading swaps your Liberti for Plebeians. That can strip the workforce your existing buildings rely on, while raising the demands you have to meet.
What should I build first? A Woodcutter in dense forest and a Sawmill beside it. Timber feeds almost every later building, so wood shortages stop everything.
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