Glory of the Roman Empire First Look

CDV recently revealed its two latest titles to us, and both are city-building strategy/simulation games. However, while City Life is being prepped as a modern city-builder for the SimCity crowd, Glory of the Roman Empire is geared as an ancient city-builder for fans of classic games such as Caesar and Pharaoh.

Glory of the Roman Empire is being developed by Haemimont, and this is a traditional empire management/city building game set in the Roman heyday. Your job will be to build up an elaborate Roman city from scratch by laying out roads, constructing scores of different types of buildings, and ensuring that your citizens have jobs, food, security, places to worship, and more. Of course, this won't be an easy task, as you'll have to deal with all sorts of issues, ranging from poor city locations with limited amounts of expansion room to the occasional barbarian tribe with all their looting and pillaging.

The game is being designed to be easy-to-play but hard-to-master, and from what we've seen of it, it follows the classic formula established by its spiritual predecessors. Starting with just a handful of workers, you must create a viable working city. For example, you need to build houses for your workers and families, which means building the appropriate resource-gathering buildings, such as woodcutter camps. You've got to feed everyone, so that means establishing farms, as well as mills and bakeries to process the raw product to food. People have religious needs, which means you'll need temples, and luxury needs, which means you'll need specialty crafters, and each of these has their own needs. So your job is to balance all of these needs and develop a city that can thrive and grow. There are more than 50 different professions and dozens of different building types to balance, though, so it's no wonder that if you do a good job, you get rewards such as statues that you can place around your town. There will be more than 30 missions in the nonlinear campaign to go through.

The focus in Glory of the Roman Empire is on city building, and combat takes a back seat. That's not to mean that you won't be building barracks and weapon smiths, though. That'll be part of your job as a Roman governor, and you'll need to train troops that are sent into the countryside to pacify those pesky barbarian tribes. Of course, you can try and peacefully coexist with those tribes, as well, by trading with them, but you'll need to build a marketplace first to do that.

It's been a while since we've had an ancient-city-building game set in Roman times, but it looks like CDV and Enlight are on the right track to deliver this era to fans of the genre. Glory of the Roman Empire is set for release sometime this summer.