Assassins Creed Brotherhood

Most of what our six Assassin's Creed Brotherhood pages describe is not found but unlocked, and the game keeps a counter for each kind of unlocking: sequences synchronised, Borgia flags collected, shops reopened, guild levels reached, lairs cleared, glyphs solved, uPlay points spent. Laid side by side, the cheats and rewards page and the collectibles page carry 76 reward lines between them, and eleven of those name two routes to the same thing. Eight of the eleven use Borgia flags as the substitute for story progress, which makes the flags the game's second key and the reason the flag page is the longest of the six. This guide reads Rome counter by counter, in the order a player meets them, and says where the second key fits.

Reading Order

Burn the Towers First

There are twelve Borgia towers and the story burns only one of them for you. Each of the other eleven is the same job: kill the Borgia leader who holds it and set it alight. The tower page is blunt about why it comes first. Every tower burned adds a slot for an Assassin recruit and turns the tower into an Assassin base where those recruits are managed, and burning a tower is also what allows shops to be renovated, so the towers sit upstream of every counter in the sections below. The Tower Offense trophy is the payout for all twelve.

Flags: The Second Key

The flags page gives step-by-step routes to 49 Borgia flags: 26 in the Centro district, five around the Vaticano, and three inside each of the six Romulus shrines, with the shrine flags described as detours from the lair's own path (a pedestal past a switch room, a gate to swim under, a beam to back-jump onto during a horse chase). The page does not route Antico or Campagna street flags, and the cap that rewards a full collection needs 100, so the four district flag maps are how the rest are found. Those maps are themselves a flag reward, which is where the substitution starts. The Capture the Flag trophy is for all of them.

That is eight of the eleven two-route rewards across the two pages, and in each case the flags are the key that does not wait on the story. The Feathers map is the one entry here with nothing behind it on our site, since the collectibles page mentions a separate feathers guide that is not there.

Rebuild Rome, Then Shop

Once a district's tower is down its shops reopen for a fee, and the cheats page tracks two counters on top of that. The first is a plain shop count: five blacksmiths put the Cavalieri Mace and the Butcher Knife on sale, ten add the Spadone Longsword, four tailors add the Knife Belt Upgrade and the Large Medicine Pouch, eight tailors add the Large Poison Vial, nine restored stables give a battle horse that respawns, and finishing the whole Rebuilding Rome meta game earns the Auditore Cap. The second is a set of six shop quests, three at blacksmiths and one each at the art merchant, the tailor and the doctor, each paying a specific item.

The weapons page is where the florins go. It lists 32 entries, rates 27 of them out of 15 (five points each for damage, speed and deflection) and prices 21, from a 300-florin Stiletto to the 17,200-florin Condottiero War Hammer; buying every priced entry once costs 112,270 florins. Seven entries are listed at no cost, and reading those against the cheats page shows why: five of the seven are rewards there (the Common Sword and the Pistol are the other two), and the two that score a perfect 15, the Dagger of Brutus and the Sword of Altaïr, are both earned rather than bought. The best purchase by the page's own numbers is the Bone Dagger of Romulus, 12 out of 15 for 1,900 florins, the same rating the War Hammer charges nine times as much for.

The three guild weapons are the other three two-route rewards, with a challenge rank standing in for a guild level. The rest of the guild ladder on the cheats page runs: level 2 in every guild for the Courtesans, Thieves and Mercenaries crests; Thieves level 5 for guards who pick pockets; Rank 5 for a faction crest and, from the Courtesans, guards who poison; Rank 10 for a faction discount. Two things the join cannot place: the Cavalieri Mace and Butcher Knife carry prices of 6,400 and 5,000 on the weapons page while the cheats page lists them as a five-blacksmith reward, so read that reward as putting them on sale, and the Spadone Longsword from ten blacksmiths appears on no weapons list at all.

Under the City: The Six Romulus Shrines

Every shrine is marked with a wolf icon and every one pays a trophy on the way out, which is how the shrines page is organised. Two of the six have no enemies in them at all.

The flags page lists three flags inside each lair under a slightly different set of names: five match, and its sixth entry is Terme Di Diocleziano in the Campagna district where the shrines page has Cloaca Maxima, which nothing on our site reconciles. Clearing all six yields the six Keys of Romulus, and the collectibles page places the vault they open beneath Prospero da Siena's Borgia tower, with the Armor of Brutus inside; the cheats page adds the Dagger of Brutus to the same room.

Glyphs and The Truth

Ten glyphs are hidden on Rome's buildings, visible only through Eagle Vision, and the glyph page recommends hunting them after the campaign because some routes are shut during it. They sit on the Castra Praetoria and the Caserma di Alviano in Campagna, the Rosa in Fiore in the east of the city, the Palazzo Senatorio, the Pantheon and the tall tower at Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Centro, the broken aqueduct at Acquedotto Claudia, the Aventino tower and the Colosseum's northwest corner in Antico, and the south wall of the Castel Sant'Angelo, which is guarded heavily enough that the page suggests loading the Femme Fatale memory to get in. Each glyph opens a cluster puzzle, and all ten solved together open the sealed Animus area called The Truth, Subject 16's secret. On PlayStation 3 that has a second use: after the truth file is opened, quitting to the menu and re-entering the story puts Desmond in Ezio's place in Rome.

What Only the Story Hands Over

The remaining counters have no second key. Full synchronisation of a sequence pays a cheat, and the cheats page lists seven of them with no entry for Sequence 7.

Total synchronisation, the percentage on the DNA tab, is a separate meter and unlocks Cristina's five memories at 15, 30, 45, 60 and 75 percent: a tail through the rooftops and a fistfight, an escort and three bodies carried to a boat, a timed chase after Manfredo with three targets, a letter planted on Cristina found by Eagle Vision in a crowd, and a smoke bomb and four assassinations against a very short clock. Killing each of the six named targets, from Cesare Borgia to Micheletto, hangs that target's portrait in Ezio's hideout. The four War Machine missions each leave a model in the hideout (Hell on Wheels the tank, Flying Machine 2.0 the bomber, Outgunned the machine gun, Loose Cannon the naval cannon) and finishing all four is when Leonardo hands over the parachute. A Bronze medal or better in every Virtual Training mission unlocks the Raiden skin; the cheats page marks this PlayStation 3 only and the collectibles page does not.

The Codex Trick

One route on the cheats page substitutes replay for florins. At Ezio's first meeting with Leonardo the choice is one of three Codex inventions, the Double Blade, the Higher Jump or the Poison Dart, unless there is enough money for all three. Replaying Memory 8 of Sequence 4, An Unexpected Visitor, from the DNA menu brings the offer back with the owned invention greyed out, and repeating it collects the rest.

Outside the Animus

Three counters run outside Ezio's Rome. In present-day Monteriggioni five artifacts are lying around the sanctuary shelves and the town, and the collectibles page gives ten minutes to find Mario's Sword under a tree south of the villa, the Medici Cape in the church to the southeast, Claudia's record book in Mario's library, Maria's feather chest on the villa roof and Ezio's belt on a low roof past the fence west of the main gate. Two caps, the Medici and the Venetian, are paid for reaching level 30 in Assassin's Creed: Project Legacy. And uPlay sells the outfits and the pistol upgrade, at prices our two pages disagree on: the cheats page charges 20 points for Altaïr's armor and costume and for the Florentine Noble Attire, 40 for the multiplayer Hellequin and 3 tokens for the pistol upgrade, while the collectibles page lists the same three outfits at 2 tokens each and the Hellequin at 40 tokens. Neither page is dedicated to uPlay, so take the disagreement as a warning rather than a price.

Questions Our Pages Answer

What happens if you collect all the Borgia flags? The Borgia Cap arrives at 100 and the Capture the Flag trophy at the full set; the useful thresholds come earlier, at 15 for the paintings and 25 for the maps.

How do you find the Romulus treasure? Finish all six shrines for the six keys, then go to the vault under Prospero da Siena's Borgia tower for the Armor and Dagger of Brutus.

How do you activate a glyph? Switch on Eagle Vision near the building, climb to the glowing symbol and interact with it; a cluster puzzle starts. Ten solved puzzles open The Truth.

How many sequences are there? Our pages do not state a total; the sync cheats run to Sequence 8.

What These Pages Do Not Cover

There is no sequence walkthrough and no full trophy list here, though eight trophies are named across the flags and shrines pages. The glyph page gives the ten locations but not the cluster puzzle solutions, and refers to a video it no longer carries. Feathers have a map and no page. Everything above is what the six pages can support, which is the unlock side of Rome rather than the story side.