Glory of the Roman Empire
June 28,2006 -

Even the most hardcore gamers need the occasional light and airy diversion, and most of them will tell you that complexity does not always lead to superiority. And so we have games like Glory of the Roman Empire, Haemimont’s user-friendly city builder. It’s a pleasant distraction, featuring plenty of laid back gameplay and a simple interface that makes it easy to manage your empire. Of course, the casual nature of Empire is apt to disappoint veteran strategists as too familiar and undemanding. However, the core gameplay is balanced enough to stay entertaining for quite a while, and if it isn’t all that innovative, at least it’s as comforting as a cup of hot chocolate on a cold winter morning.

Glory of the Roman Empire has a few sandbox maps, but you’ll want to start with the lengthy campaign to get a feel for things. The campaign does an excellent job of introducing new challenges and strategic elements without getting cumbersome. That’s not to say it ever gets all that difficult. The essential goal of any map is to keep your citizens happy; additional challenges may include dealing with attacking barbarians, ridding your town of the plague, or dealing with buildings prone to catching on fire.

You always start with a Town Hall, which also functions as your central slave headquarters. You’ll first construct houses, but it’s soon apparent that your citizens need more than shelter. Other constructs include linen shops, taverns, barracks, mines, altars, and plenty more. The symbiotic nature of the buildings is the driving force of Empire: your citizens want meat, so you need a butcher shop—but the butcher needs a local pig farm to make sausages. You need gold to buy more slaves, but there is no local gold mine, so you sell wine to your neighbors—but you need a vineyard before you can make wine, and a trading post before you can trade.

The primary challenge is that each edifice has a limited area of influence. Your bakery only feeds those within the allotted circumference, so you need to be conscious of where you’re placing individual buildings. It then becomes a fight to use the limited space you have with maximum efficiency. Just when you think you have all your ground covered, your prefects have no wells for extinguishing fires, and there isn’t enough room to extend your aqueduct so that you can build one. You might finally get all of your mines operational, only to find that you don’t have enough wood to maintain them.

In the meanwhile, you also need to worry about your slaves. If you click on one, he may tell you how happy he is to be building altars, but make no mistake: your unpaid work force gets cranky. You don’t necessarily want to queue up countless building projects, because your slaves will get overburdened and eventually revolt. Warehouses can be built in remote locations and function as a serf headquarters, so that they don’t have to travel all the way from Town Hall to the next project, but warehouses alone don’t ease the workload. Purchasing more slaves alleviates the dilemma, but you need to spend gold to do so, making maps without a source of gold a particular burden.

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