Legion Preview
Rule the Roman Empire with this turn-based strategy game from Slitherine.
Two of Slitherine Strategies' founders are world champion tabletop wargamers. While that may seem like an inconsequential factoid, that history is very apparent in the company's first game, Legion. Set in the formative years of the Roman Empire, Legion is a turn-based strategy game that involves large numbers of nations and tribes in a series of historically based campaigns. While similar in some ways to Frog City's acclaimed Imperialism games, Legion promises to combine economic development, city management, and military conquest in a way that resembles tabletop board games and PC games at the same time.
Legion is made up of two primary components: city building and combat. Like the board games from which Legion draws inspiration, both areas are simple in execution but promise great room for strategic depth. The city building aspect lets you expand your city in primary ways so that you can support a larger army and expand your empire. There are three resources in the game: wood, metal, and food. Most buildings increase your production of one of the primary minerals, while others augment your production in some other way.
Building a town hall will increase the area of land you can build on, as well as increase your city's population. This gives you more people to assign as workers or to recruit into your army. Each city has a limited number of residents, making a simple yet hopefully effective balance between military might and economic production. The town hall can be later upgraded to a city hall, which adds even more land and more people. Lumber mills increase your wood production, mines increase your metal production, and farms your food production. Other buildings include the shrine, which increases the effectiveness of workers assigned to buildings and garrison buildings for civic protection. Buildings also determine what types of troops can be recruited. For instance, a city can produce cavalry units only if it has a stable.
Resource management is an important aspect of Legion. Your resources not only determine your ability to produce troops but also your ability to maintain them. If your troops are starving, their numbers decrease, and eventually, they desert your cause altogether.
Keeping your troops mighty will be key, since combat is the focus of the game. Legion focuses solely on land-based combat, so those hoping for the nautical aspect of the era will be disappointed. But it's in keeping with the simple yet complex philosophy behind the game. There are a number of troop types available, and the combat system itself is, if nothing else, unique.
At the start of a battle, your troops are displayed on an overhead view of the battlegrounds. Each group of units is represented by a single unit, and you give orders to each stack individually. At this preparation screen, you choose their formation and their orders. Formations include the basics such as wedge, column, row, and checkerboard. Once you've chosen the units' formation, you give them orders. Orders for battle determine the army's movement, with varying combinations of holding and advancing. The numerous combinations of orders and formations make for a wide variety of available combat strategies.
Once you've given the orders, you send your troops into battle. What's interesting about Legion is that you have no control over your units once the battle begins. The combat system forces you to consider all the variables of the upcoming fight, including terrain and the actual troops in your army, before the battle commences. Once it does, all you can do is sit back and watch how your plans play out.
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- GameSpot Score5.9mediocre
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- Strategy First
- Slitherine Soft.
- Historic Turn-Based...
- Release: Jun 3, 2002
- ESRB: Teen
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