Glory of the Roman Empire review

Glory of the Roman Empire is the latest city builder from CDV and Haemimont Games. Set in the increasingly popular glory days of the Roman Empire it sees you cast as a jobbing governor moving from town to town developing them and moving on. There are 3 game modes, challenge, campaign and sandbox. In Campaign you get a series of short challenges where you have some control over which mission to take on next.

The challenge mode is a series of 4 tougher challenges which must be completed in order. You can make them more or less difficult by modifying a few parameters and all of this affects your score at the end. The more rounded the settlement is at the end the better your score. The final mode is the sandbox mode where you can create the city you want without the constraints of the challenges.

Planning Permission

The campaign starts with a short tutorial to get you accustomed to the controls. From there it gradually gets more difficult holding your hand as you progress. This is the bulk of the game with some 30 missions to complete. The only real problem here is that it never really gets very difficult.

It's great for beginners in the genre but for more experienced city planners it seems a bit too light. There's a bit more depth to the challenges from Caesar but only really because you can vary some of the parameters to make it tougher on yourself and your aiming for a score that will depend on various aspects of your city building. There's no multiplayer mode although you can compare scores in the challenges mode.

Resourcing

Of course, any city builder relies on the resource system to make it challenging. In Glory of the Roman Empire you have a variety of resources and ways to collect it. Your main resource is the people and you can affect your population by building more houses each of which can accommodate a fixed number of people. Once you have a few citizens you need to make sure you have the same number of slaves. The citizens will work in industry and the slaves will be put to work building and transporting goods. The citizens all need something to do so you can build food and resource buildings for them to work at.

The resources include mining for rock, marble and gold as well as timber. These are all needed to produce the food resources like the butchers and the pig farms. These structures all have to exist within a certain distance of each other so that they can use each others resources – the butchers has to be near the pig farm for instance. This can be avoided where large distances are involved by building warehouses and marketplaces so that your resources will be available throughout the city. If you want anyone to work at your buildings then you also need to place the houses close the buildings, people will only commute a short distance.

The Glorious Empire

It's not just about food and mining though you can build the expected parks and roads as well as public buildings and monuments. The monuments provide prestige and sometimes more practical things like water. Public buildings can be theatres or army barracks as well as a home for your prefects. The prefects are particularly important as they break up any riots that might start and help to put out any fires. As your city develops you will be allowed to build more impressive monuments and structures like arches and coliseums.

That depends on getting a good population by having plenty of houses and employment as well as having prestige for those houses. You can increase the prestige by placing an alter or other monuments close to the houses. This can cause them to increase in rank from wooden buildings to stone buildings and so on up the scale. If you want to know your citizens needs then you can either click on them individually or you can build a tavern. A tavern will serve the houses within a small distance from it and from here you can view the gossip which will provide a summary of the needs of that neighbourhood.

There's a lot of resource management and town planning to take care of here with plenty of scope for graphical flourishes. Glory of the Roman Empire doesn't disappoint on this score. There are plenty of building types and resource types and they're all easily identifiable even from the widest zoom. The map is nice and colourful although I found navigation to be a bit confusing at times.

I particularly had trouble with the mini map which I think is a mirror of the big map so you have to navigate it backwards. That aside the presentation is pretty good throughout. The menus and the loading screens are workmanlike but are usable. Once you're in game the level of detail isn't astonishing but it's good and everything is distinctive. The campaign and tutorial missions have a brief spoken introduction from a terrible voice over actor but at least they're short.

Listening to You

The sound track for Glory is a bit lacklustre although functional. Good events that occur are greeted with a cheer like a baby being born or the population reaching a milestone. Bad events are greeted with battle sound effects like a plague or a marauding barbarian army. I think having no background music is always a mistake and Glory provides a simple soundtrack that doesn't annoy largely because I had the sound low enough that I could hear it but not be irritated. Strategy games really should have a decent score that I can turn up and enjoy listening too.

The main obstacle they have is that you often have no action on screen for long stretches and you need to make a coherent, non-repetitive score for a game where the player may be playing for several hours at a stretch and concentrating on managing their resources. Still I think it's possible to be a bit more imaginative than Glory is. Controlling the game is much like any other strategy game of the last few years. As I mentioned the mini map seems to be backwards compared to the main map which makes finding your way around a challenge. It's easy enough to access the in-game build menus and to handle the game. I did find the zoom a bit annoying initially in that it tilts as it zooms so you can't just set and angle and a zoom level, the two are directly connected.

Imperial Rule

Glory of the Roman Empire has a lot going for it. There's lots of variety in the buildings and in the resources that you need. There's also a small element of people management and constraints on the city building that you can do to do with proximity of buildings. It sounds like it should all add up to a deep title but it somehow misses on that.

The campaign is a bit too easy although there is scope to replay the missions and try out different approaches. The challenges and free create mode are more likely to be where experienced city builders will spend their time and I just don't think there's enough of that to keep them coming back. This title could win on its simplicity by introducing more people to the genre but it's not one for the experienced player.