As someone who has played plenty of strategy games over the years, I thought I knew what I was getting into when Ubisoft PR sent me an email and asked if I wanted to preview Anno 117: Pax Romana. After all, it's another city-building franchise, right? How hard could it be? Dear reader, believe me when I tell you that I was not prepared. Anno 117: Pax Romana is not just a strategy game. It is a lesson in debt management.

Anno 117 starts out like many other city-building strategy games. You get an empty island, place your governor's home, and start lining up basic resources. See those trees? Place some woodcutters. Want workers to inhabit your town? Better build them some homes. You'll need to feed the workers, so you'll also need to plan for a farm. Don't forget to place some roads, so they can all connect.

When things didn't seem to be progressing, I realized that I had overlooked the secondary factories. I needed a sawmill to cut the wood into useful things. I had to build a porridge kitchen to process the oats into actual food. If there's no food, the workers won't move in. Warehouses to store the final products were also a necessity, or else the products couldn't easily be traded.

After accomplishing the basics, I was pretty proud of myself. Then I looked to see that I was running a deficit. As time went by, my bank account just kept ticking down. What was I doing wrong? It turns out there weren't enough workers. I quickly built more housing, hoping to get out of debt by growing my population. Reader, this was not a good idea. I was reacting, rather than planning, and this was the first step in my debt spiral.

While I had managed to get my income to a positive level, I had destroyed my savings. Anno 117 allowed me to keep building and let my bank balance go into the red. I told myself that this would just be a temporary thing, as I built out the next level in the tech tree. After all, my residents were happy, healthy, and well fed. I was running a small, positive surplus each week. Life was good! Alas, I had forgotten to account for natural deaths.

Just as in real life, Anno 117 takes civilian deaths into account, and as such, your population is not constant. It ebbs and flows as people move in, move out, are born, and die. There is no greater terror in Anno 117 than seeing your (already negative) bank balance drop even faster into the red as your population trends downward.

It turns out that this whole planned economy thing is actually somewhat difficult to pull off.

As I looked back at where I went wrong, I quickly realized that Anno 117 has a wealth of information to help you plan your actions. It's not all easily accessible if you're a new player. I'm not sure if this is something specific to Anno 117 or simply because we didn't have a tutorial before jumping into the demo, but it wasn't always clear to me why my production would dip when I thought I had met all the necessary requirements.

Sometimes it was an issue of not having the right kind of workers. As you level up your housing, the type of worker who lives in it changes, so you can't just upgrade everything. You need to have a blend of housing.

Other times, it was a matter of not having proper coverage for a support building (health, fire safety, etc.) or not placing enough warehouses (a common error, according to my demoist). Having smartly placed warehouses is key to this game. I would've loved a helper tool to tell me when certain production was underserved. After all, a good governor has to optimize trade (both internally and externally).

Speaking of trade, before I bankrupted my province, I did manage to build some ships and explore other islands. You need to expand to other islands or trade with other governors if you hope to fully develop your own towns. As you move up in the tech tree, you'll find that necessary resources simply are not available on your starting island. You'll need to find them elsewhere, trade for them, or take them by force.

In addition to the core tech tree that you explore by building the prerequisites, you can also choose a religion for your followers and unlock various skills and enhancements via the research tree, which is split across civic, economic, and military.

While Ubisoft likely didn't intend Anno 117 to make a political statement, the complexity of its systems provide a striking contrast to the broad strokes that the American government is currently trying to apply to trade policy. Trying to apply broad strokes in Anno 117 is a losing strategy. You cannot react in this game. You have to proactively plan if you want to succeed in Anno 117.

If someone asked you to make a version of SimCity with the challenge level of Dark Souls, you'd probably end up with something like Anno 117. This is a game for micro-managers. If you're the type to sweat the details and meticulously plan your town — from early industrial base to thriving metropolis — you'll do well. You also have to be willing to cut industries that are no longer necessary or are not producing at an optimal level. Sometimes trade (or war) is the more efficient way to achieve your goals.

One aspect of Anno 117: Pax Romana that I didn't get a chance to see, but Ubisoft talked about, were the Celtic lands. While my demo allowed me to explore islands in the Mediterranean province of Latium, the full game will also include the Celtic lands of Albion. That area promises to be a bit harsher than what the Romans are used to, and the natives still follow their traditional ways. In other words, it's even more challenging. Bring it on, Anno 117. Bring it on.