To grow your population in Anno 117: Pax Romana, dropping brand-new houses on the map is a great first step, but certainly not enough. In fact, if you don’t fulfill your citizens’ needs or ignore area effects, the houses will remain empty. And you can’t build your own Rome without citizens, can you?
Here’s how population and its related “workforce” stat work, plus everything else you need to know to boost your population in Anno 117: Pax Romana.
How to grow your population in Anno 117: Pax Romana
The first thing you need to grow your population in Anno 117 is residential buildings. If you build more houses, new citizens will flock to your island. However, the number of residents per house depends on island-wide “need” fulfillment and area effects. If you don’t produce any goods with a population buff, your population will remain stuck at zero, no matter how many houses you build.
If you click on a residence, you will see food, public service, and fashion needs. To fulfill the food needs, for example, you can produce sardines or eels. Both food types offer +1 population, which means that every residential building with access to sardines or eels gains +1 population. So, if you have 30 residences and a thriving sardine fishery, you gain +30 population.
Most end products have an island-wide effect, including sardines, but in some cases, the population buff is an “area effect” which only boosts residences within range. Public services, such as a market, work with area effects: If 20 residences are within the market’s range, you gain +20 population.
If you fulfill a residence’s every need (food, public service, and fashion), the residence will become available for an upgrade to population tier 2. Higher-tier residences usually hold a higher population because they have more needs, and therefore more opportunities to gain population buffs from goods and services.
To illustrate, on the Latium map, Liberti (tier 1 resident) can gain a maximum of +3 population per residence from food alone (sardines and porridge), whereas Plebeians (tier 2 resident) may gain a maximum of +5 population from food alone (sardines, porridge, and bread). Higher residential tiers may benefit from lower-tier population buffs, but not the other way around.
How to boost population fast in Anno 117: Pax Romana
In Latium, the best early game population boost (+2 population) is almost immediately available: porridge. However, since porridge produces nothing else, it may be better to start with sardines instead. Once population tier 2 is unlocked, producing bread is the best way to grow your empire, as it grants a +2 population bonus.
At the start of a new game in Albion, every end product in population tier 1 provides +1 population, so it doesn’t matter which products you pursue first. When you reach population tier 2 (Smiths), producing cheese is the best way to grow your island as it provides +2 population and is fairly easy to produce — all you need is an ox farm.
To further boost population growth in Anno 117, choose Ceres as your empire’s god. Upon reaching certain devotion thresholds, she will increase your population. Keep an eye out for Specialists with population buffs as well — you can obtain them from quests or buy them from traders. Equip a Specialist on a governance building, such as your Villa, to activate the effect.
How to grow your workforce in Anno 117: Pax Romana
As you may have noticed, the first workstations on a new island, including the woodcutter, sawmill, and warehouse, will operate just fine at zero population. The reason is the difference between population and workforce in Anno 117. While most of the workforce is derived from the population, some buildings come with an inherent workforce, including the trading post, which always adds +25 workforce (tier 1) to an island.
This is incredibly handy, because it allows you to set up a basic, functioning settlement even before you’ve had the opportunity to grow your population. However, you cannot rely on alternative workforce sources in the long run; if you place two woodcutters, two sawmills, and one warehouse in a fledgling town, you’re already facing a workforce deficit.
If workstations lack the desired workforce, they’ll be marked with a hammer and pickaxe icon as seen in the image below.
Workstations without enough workers can still operate at a slower pace, so if you ever face the situation as described above, be sure to place a building that provides a population buff by fulfilling a need or providing an area effect. In a brand-new town, this would be the fishing hut, which provides +1 population and +1 income (making it a great building to generate more money as well).
Beware that only some of your population will become part of the workforce within their respective tier. The higher the population tier, the smaller the workforce derived from that residential group. In tier 1 (Liberti and Waders), 50% of the population becomes workforce, so having a population of 20 Liberti would translate to 10 Libertus workforce. In tier 2 (Plebeians and Smiths), it’s down to 30%, and only 20% of the tier 3 population (Equituus and Aldermen) joins the workforce.
To boost your workforce, be sure to grow your Anno 117 population as much as possible, but also consider researching workforce upgrade such as “Albionic Loyalists” (+25 Wader workforce) and “extra Horse Power” (+50 Equitus workforce)
