Battles, nitpicks

Battles are significantly faster than in Medieval, but if you played the Rome demo and were disappointed, fear not – the game is much tougher than the demo and battles last longer. In fact, the speed depends much on the activity of the participants. If one side is infantry-heavy or has little faith in its cavalry, it’s unlikely to move the cavalry away from the safety of the infantrymen. A player who has brought in siege weapons is not going to leave those expensive toys far behind his lines, but once they’re in range, they’re often very effective at convincing the opponent to engage quickly, before his army is blown apart at long range.

The detail of the 3D models is amazing. The way they walk, run, charge and fight is conveyed in a remarkably believable fashion, all things considered (ie, that there are often 3,000 of them on at a time). That’s not to say things are perfect, but it’d be criminal nitpicking to point out animation errors with so many units on screen.

Actual problems

However, that’s not to say that all’s perfect with Rome.

The game includes an option to scale unit sizes. At its smallest, a cohort will contain 40 men. At the largest scale, it will have 160. There are even larger units, like peasants, that can get up to 240 men in one unit. This is all fine and dandy, but it has huge strategic consequences in the campaign.

Since units are built out of a city’s population, it’s very possible to depopulate a city with the huge unit sizes. The AI seems to be very poor at realizing this and appears to build units at the regular rate, without consideration for future city growth. Unfortunately, since it is so aggressive, this usually means that the player is forced to play ball on the same terms, also depopulating his cities in order to defend himself.

The unit sizes present other problems as well. The various hoplites and phalanxes, not the most maneuverable units in even the most ideal conditions, become even more unwieldy when they grow twice as long as 240 men make up the ranks. On the one hand, they’re more effective because of their length, but the moment the battles turns into a war of maneuvers, the phalanxes can be forgotten. No wonder the Seleucids copied Roman legions.

The game is also unclear on quite a few concepts. The Senate, for example, has policy settings to each existing nation in the game. Should you ally with say the Thracians, the Senate might endorse a conciliatory policy towards them, suggesting peaceful Romanization. Oddly enough, there is no way to peacefully subjugate a people. Protectorates can only be established through overwhelming military might and a few displays of force against a foe’s cities.

There are bugs as well. Once a unit has secured its walls in a siege and is ordered down through the tower, don’t dare issue attack orders or anything of the like until the entire unit is on the ground. Pathing gets totally confused unless the entire unit is coherent. On the strategic map, during the Roman Civil War that develops when one of the factions makes a bid for ultimate power, don’t attempt to establish a protectorate against another faction. While this may seem like an easy win, it didn’t work for us. The Scipii accepted, then the already wiped-out SPQR promptly deemed the Scipii illegal, the Scipii declared war on all other Roman factions (including the defeated SPQR) and yet in the diplomacy screen remained a protectorate of mine despite continued hostilities.