I liked it more than I thought I would. When you pull off an assault against an entrenched enemy with minor losses and combined arms, it really feels nice. It looks pretty good, too and the reinforcement based on objectives is a great way to encourage action and progress.

Ultimately, it comes apart because the interface is dated and confusing. You need to clutter up the screen to figure out which of your infantry are which and the supply line micromanaging adds a level of complexity that calls for better tools. Because the battlefields are so huge, managing a real time offensive means you need good peripheral vision to keep an eye on the minimap while you plan an attack somewhere else. Vehicles move fast, though, so if you see a red line of something or other on the other side of the map, it’s probably too late to do anything. Better sound cues that tell you that you are under attack would be greatly appreciated. Horns, alarms, flashing lights…anything.

One thing I didn’t talk much about in my review was that your troops can steal enemy tanks and guns. Enemy guns I can see, I suppose. But was there a lot of tank jacking in WW2? Were the designs so interchangeable that an American mechanic could swipe a Tiger in the night, repair it and then go nuts on the battlefield?

With the release of EU: Rome and all the fun I’m having with Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor, I missed a bunch of news and updates about the upcoming expansion pack for Europa Universalis III. There are some major changes on the way and I think I’m more excited about In Nomine than I was for both Napoleon’s Ambition and Europa Universalis: Rome.

So let’s go through what we know and what we don’t.

1. The new mission system will be historically appropriate. If you played the original EU or EU2, then you probably remember their stupid mission system. It was an attempt to add some variability and short term goals into the game but was a failure because you would get some really strange demands. Things like “Keep the Poles out of Africa” or “Engineer a royal marriage with your best friend.” Easy victory points, there. Now some missions will be generated based on a national list of priorities and historical exigencies. This is one of many attempts to introduce more variability into how nations play, since the interchangeable nature of Poland and Portugal was one of the most common and legitimate complaints about the core game.

2. Rebels with a cause. By giving rebels something to fight for, and the possibility of greater strength or leadership, the decision of when and where to put down rebels matters. Some rebels will be limited to national borders, which means no more hoping that a huge rebel army will cross the border and attack your enemies. Traditionally, rebels have needed to take a lot of land to bring down a government, though, so I wonder how this will work for nations with large overseas empires. How would this work for English rebels in a nation that holds half of France? Will rebels get ships? This recent AAR shows that some rebels are religious insurgents, carrying a heretical faith with them. Anything that makes religious wars more likely works for me. To this point religious unorthodoxy has been a minor financial problem at most. You can negotiate with rebels, too, provided you have met certain conditions.

3. New colonial management issues. Colonies now grow on their own depending on national investment in colonial growth, giving options to those nations that want some colonial outposts but don’t have enough regular colonists coming in to pump that overseas population into the “city” category. This, of course, means a new expense on the ledger, a big challenge considering that they’ve also made the riches of colonies more difficult to reap. You now need a real navy to keep trade free from pirates or pillaging enemy fleets. No production income means that the money you’d usually spend on more colonists now has to go to the Admiralty. This as much as anything could slow down the race for America since colonies will now need some sort of protection in order to be worth the trouble at all.

4. Resources work. The prices of goods are now driven by a more appropriate supply and demand model. Blockades, occupation, the timeline and a plethora of other factors affect the value of goods.

5. A new map. More provinces in the Balkans, the Rhineland and low countries and South Central Europe. That means more countries, slower wars, and maybe an impediment to the blobbification of Europe. Still, even a few two province minor states can impede rapid annexation. And check out the pretty atlas screenshots in this thread.

6. Historical Events Are Back. Sort of. Only they are called Decisions. Provided you have met certain conditions, based on national standing or completed missions, you can enact decisions that are historically appropriate. Since these decisions don’t necessarily follow in a lockstep timeline, it doesn’t violate the new Paradox Credo that historical events are lame when you can see them coming from a mile away.

So we have more differentiation between nations, colonization as a strategy that may or may not pay off and higher stakes in managing rebellions. Plus an extended time frame.

You have to wonder how many of these changes are a response to player outcry and how many are things that were planned all along but difficulties in implementation slowed Paradox down. Many of these changes will make the game a little more difficult for newcomers, I think, but anything that makes the game feel more period appropriate plays to the strengths of the series.

No news on a release date yet. More information as it become available.

This will probably be my only post about Grand Theft Auto IV, a game which has been dubbed not only “great”, but “important” by a number of very savvy critics. Seth Schiesel’s review in the New York Times epitomizes the form, being (as usual) well written enough to persuade my wife that GTA4 is something we should try and wide ranging enough to put the game in a convincing societal and design context.

But, like I said, we haven’t tried it. Like many people, I suppose, I’ve never been attracted to the gang warfare/criminal themes of the GTA series but there is a growing sense that I have missed what could be one of the most important game franchises in the history of the industry, both in terms of design creativity and cultural importance.

I guess it comes down to gamer literacy. As a critic I play as many things as I can, but I’m a genre specialist so I’m more concerned with trying marginal Euro-RTSes than I am with, say, marginal Euro-FPSes. Games are expensive, but I try to use my media credentials for good instead of evil; I suppose I could get a lot more stuff for free, but I feel weird about getting games that I *know* I’m not going to review or preview or write about. Now that I write columns, though, I guess that attitude can change. Of course, to catch up and be literate I’d have an even larger backlog to get through than I already do.

I’m a bit of a hypocrite here, too. I’ve often said that no one can meaningfully comment on film comedy unless they have seen Dr. Strangelove, The Producers and Some Like it Hot. I have similar lists for other pastimes.

If GTA4 is important because it does new things with narrative complexity then anyone who thinks about storytelling in gaming is required to play it. If GTA4 is important because of how it uses emergent gameplay, then anyone who thinks about games as more than rulesets is required to play it.

This isn’t an issue of GTA4 being “canon“; it’s too soon for that in any case. But as a professional, I am obligated to play it, right?

So how do I get around my personal ethical issues with the game? I like ethical complexity and gray areas in games, and I’m not one of those blue stockings who thinks that the games are dangerous, but I will confess to being uneasy about car jacking, especially considering where I live - not exactly a low crime area. (I will nuke the French though, without much thought. Strange how our calculus works…). I also hate driving games, because driving is no fun in the real world either.

Of course, it’s easy to say “suck it up” and play, but this is a fifty or seventy hour enterprise we’re talking about. Every hour spent getting up to speed on the latest Important Game is an hour taken away from work that I know I can sell or from that book that I still have to finish.

So I ask you, gentle readers. What are the limits of gaming literacy? Is this an entertainment division that is impossible to stay on top of?

My interview with Paradox boss Johan Andersson is now up at CG.

I tend to like interviews where you give the subject enough room to just ramble, and Johan was happy to do that on this occasion. He took time to call Hearts of Iron a “buggy piece of shit” and to deem the development of Crusader Kings “cursed”.

Though the interview was conducted just before the release of EU:Rome, I knew that it would take a while for the interview to hit anywhere I might get paid for it, so I thought it best to talk a little bit about Rome, but mostly about how Andersson sees development and the Paradox model.

I wish that EU:R had turned out better than it did, since that would give this interview a little more importance, I think. The finished product is probably the weakest Paradox game since Victoria, mostly because Diplomacy doesn’t count.

(By the way, there are a lot of great interviews at Crispy Gamer. I tend to focus on the strategy related ones, but Paul Semel seemed to have a new one published every day last month.)

“Luck” is a very useful attribute in Galactic Civilizations II. You never know when you’ll stumble upon something useful in those anomalies or on a planet. I always take Luck for my race, because it’s cheap.

I’m in the middle of a campaign in the new GalCiv 2 expansion, Twilight of the Arnor. I’m in the middle of a war and then the luck kicks in. I uncover a Ranger class ship. For those of you not familiar with the game, these are random discoveries and Ranger outclass pretty much any default small or medium vessel. One can take on and destroy a fleet of six or seven enemy frigates.

Within ten turns, I discover two more. I now have three Ranger ships anchoring my invasion of Altarian space. Nothing can stand against me.

Though my soldiers suck, so those planetary drops will have to wait.

RTS evangelist Tom Chick devoted his most recent column to a celebration of Rise of Legend’s second anniversary. He talked to Big Huge Games head honcho Brian Reynolds about the game - why it worked and why it wasn’t the huge success it deserved to be.

This exchange capsulizes the prevailing thinking on why the game never really took off:

Chick: One of the criticisms of Rise of Legends — one with which I actually don’t agree — is that even though you guys were doing the fantasy genre, you disregarded a lot of the standard tropes, the elves and dwarves and whatnot, so there was no hook for the average player.

Reynolds: I guess I agree with both you and the people making those criticisms. We intentionally avoided the standard tropes, thinking that would make our material fresher. There were a lot of games out there — some of them highly successful — that deliver that fantasy universe, so we thought, “What’s going to differentiate us? We’ll go for something people have heard of, but that won’t be exactly the same things.”

That’s why we went with the Leonardo da Vinci devices with steampunk. That’ll give people a little bit of a hook, but it won’t be just orcs and elves. Clearly, we would have been more accessible to more people if we had just given them the basics. If our goal was just to get fantasy, we could have done that with lots of magic spells and huge dragons and things like that without having gone to the more esoteric steampunk, etc. thing. In that sense, the people who [criticized us] both before and after were somewhat right. So maybe that was a mistake.

Unlike Chick, I think that the setting was central to why the game wasn’t a sales success, but not because it abandoned standard fantasy tropes. I doubt that an elves and sorcerers RTS would have done much better; it didn’t seem to help Kohan. It’s not that RoL had an original bunch of races; it’s that it had 3 original races that had never been seen in the same place before.

As Reynolds says, they led with the most familiar race, the Vinci. A Renaissance steampunk world with muskets and airplanes and robots is a nice bridge between science fiction and history. Players like having entry points to games, and of the three the Vinci were the widest door. Not that the other two weren’t interesting or accessible on their own. Elemental magic armies like the Alin or the Chariot of the Gods inspired Cuotl can find inspiration and analogs in a lot of other games and pop culture artifacts, I suspect.

But then you plop all three races down in the same world and things that already make little sense start to look downright bizarre. The games media spent a lot of time repeating BHG talking points about battles between science and magic, but the game really wasn’t about that. The campaign certainly didn’t embody any large philosophical struggle over the nature of power, and I suspect a lot of players who tried the demo came away from the experience with the feeling that BHG was being strange for the sake of being strange.

As Bruce Shelley noted in my interview with him regarding Age of Empires, people know what an archer is for and that swords are better than clubs. You might not know anything about the Shang Dynasty, but even people who hate history have an idea how things are supposed to work.

And, individually, people would probably get into the Alin or Vinci. Together? That’s a huge risk.

The risk carries over into the multiplayer world. Rise of Legends is great because even though the faction play styles are remarkably distinct, the strategies available to you can be very subtle. You almost always have an option. But since you need to play a while to figure all this stuff out, the people who are really big on climbing online ladders can’t just walk in and know everything that they can do. The unfamiliarity of the setting is compounded by the variety of strategies open to you. Note that Supreme Commander, a game with largely interchangeable sides, is a multiplayer success story; everybody who plays knows what to expect so the battles come down to epic thrashes between giant robots. There is some subtlety at the highest levels of play in SupCom, but most people don’t get there.

None of this should be read as a complaint that RoL should have had conventional units. Rise of Legends is brilliant precisely because it is so original in so many ways. Because it looks so different, you know it’s going to play different. Few RTSes in recent years have so well epitomized the idea that visual cues can be part of the interface as much as tooltips and menus. It’s a visual wonder that requires more than a build order in order for you to succeed.

Message board dwellers, bloggers and editors like to bemoan the lack of originality in games today, hearkening back to some golden age when everything was original (which is mostly because everything was new, but that’s beside the point.) Rise of Legends, I think, demonstrates the perils of originality. Though I wouldn’t have had them make it any other way (I like the Cuotl even if they were rushed as Reynolds says) I’m sure that Microsoft would have rather had Rise of Nations II - it would have been a sure thing - the first sequel to a hit game is usually bigger than the original. The strategy environment is littered with the detritus of original titles that never moved beyond cult hits (Majesty and Kohan are my two favorites on this list.) True originality has always been a tough sell, and with AAA budgets exploding you can forgive publishers for being unwilling to support creativity at the expense of the bottom line.

Sometimes I wonder if gamers really want strange, though. They will accept original game play elements more quickly than they will accept original settings. Every now and then you get something like Katmari Damacy but the best selling games of all time borrow familiar worlds or accepted tropes and make them better. The Sims, World of Warcraft, Halo, Grand Theft Auto…none break the bank on “You’ll never believe this!”.

I’m more than a little guilty of this, of course. I like my historical strategy games. Replaying Gettysburg or the rise of Russia or the conquest of India gets me more excited than leading space grunts against alien invaders. But the gaming world would be a much poorer place if people like Brian Reynolds didn’t dare to show me things I’d never even imagined.

There are 26 letters in the alphabet and ten numerals. So can you please stop using Os and zeroes in your registration codes? Or at least make it clear to me which is which? Use a font that puts a strike mark through the zero or makes the letter O really fat.

I wish I had time to dwell on all the dud Roman themed games that have passed in front of me. The half finished Pax Romana and Great Invasions, the laughable Legions, the boring Hannibal: Master of the Beast, Haemimont’s Roman city builders, Haemimont’s RTSes. Most of these games aren’t very interesting as reflections on or of the Roman world and their failings are the failings of every bad game. Buggy, poorly paced, duller than dirt…. I’ve written about some of them elsewhere. Of those duds, only Pax Romana comes close to having a good idea (its political system) and not even EU:Rome bothered to copy it.

Here are a few thoughts that occurred to me as I worked through the “significant” titles.

1. BC beats AD: My friend and colleague Brett Todd is an “empire guy”. He’s really into the history of the mid and late empire, the story of keeping a major enterprise going and the constant wars over who should run it. I’m a “republic guy”. For me it’s all about the expansion and the politics and the crises of winning the world while maintaining a regime based on power sharing. Game designers agree with me. Caesar is more popular than Vespasian, Hannibal more popular than Zenobia, Spartacus more compelling than Attila. This is largely because building is more fun than holding your own. So setting a game in a time frame where things keep growing gives you a better narrative to work with. Annals of Rome gives you both the rise and fall. Rome: Total War had an Imperial expansion pack. But for the most part, we want to see the city on the Tiber be the Little Village That Could.

2. Spectacle Trumps History: This shouldn’t be a surprise. Gladiators and rampaging elephants and exploding catapult shells look great on screen, so you might as well use them to sell. These are video games, so visuals matter. But I think the problem with this is that even though spectacle can be fun, it is not inherently fun. I would have traded fireballing onagers in Rome: Total War for a better way to control squalor than mass crucifixion. I would have traded chariot races in Centurion for a better diplomatic model. I would have given up the funny voices in Caesar III for less emphasis on puzzle maps. But remember that…

3. History is not gameplay: You can’t just add history and stir to make a good game, and sometimes the best games fly boldly in the face of history. Rome: Total War, Age of Empires, and Praetorians are all very good and all raise the hackles of those pedants that insist that realism is always more fun. Yes, Annals of Rome and the Great Battles series embraced history completely. The former’s legacy is more conceptual, however and the latter was the first and last we’d see of GMT in electronic gaming.

4. Rome beats Greece: I couldn’t do a Ten Significant Greek Games, at least not without repeating two or three of the games already on this list. Rome holds our imagination in large part because of the spectacle. Red robed legions marching. Gladiators killing each other. Marble temples and fights for the purple. And it’s not simply because Rome “won”, it’s because our popular culture, from Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur to the present, has used Rome as a proxy for our own interests worries. The decadent Rome of mid-century sword and sandal movies, redeemed by Christianity or slave rebellion. The imperial overstretch of Rome as a warning to contemporary America. The stoic Roman as the model of masculinity and duty. Greece may have lay the foundation of Western Civilization, but for game designers it is the imagined Rome that rely on for instant recognition. Plus, in most of these games, your average Roman general could sleep through a battle with a Macedonian army. Nerf Metellus.

5. Swords Beats Plowshares: None of the strategy games has a good diplomatic model. The ancient Roman world is seen as one of continual war or planning for war. You could call it the William Harris model if you were confident that anyone who made these games had read the book. This is, to be fair, a problem with many strategy games; peace is what you do while you decide whom to kill next. But the focus on legions and triremes obscures many of the reasons for war in the ancient world and how important (if individualized) negotiations were.

So where does the recently released Europa Universalis: Rome fit on this list? It’s not a top ten list (though I did one of those recently) and even if it were, I’m not sure EU:R would make it. Rome is clearly the star of Paradox’s efforts (it’s big, rich and unstoppable unless the AI is in command), but the Roman world is not. For a developer so keen on approximating history there are no pirates, minimal class conflict, minor differences between how you manage a Republic and an Oriental Despotism. Barbarians are constantly on the move and never settle on their own. Diplomacy is always conducted at sword point and you need total victory to get a minor peace. There are friends and rivals but easy to way to track how they stack up against each other. Historically, religion should not be the big deal that it is made out to be.

The game issues are different from the historical ones. The AI is too weak at war and too hardass in peace negotiations. The hundreds of characters means hundreds of character events, too many to follow, and there are no shortcuts from the event to the character profile. Only a couple of the omens are even worthwhile using, and are too chancy for anyone but the Greeks early on.

But otherwise it fits well in this list, primarily because it has drawn on many of them. Why does Paradox insist on including a “city view” that no one uses? Because people are used to being able to see their cities grow. Why does it stop in 27 BC? Because that’s when Octavian assumed the title Augustus, marking the traditional beginning of the Roman Empire. Diplomacy is so ill thought of that you can just execute ambassadors - historically a very bad action, even in the ancient world.

So what do I want to see in the Rome games of the future?

1. Remake Encyclopedia of War: Ancient Battles, with lots of different armies and a better editor.
2. An AI good enough to make Republic of Rome viable, or at least make a good MP client.
3. A good game that tells the story of Roman expansion from the point of view of the conquered. Maybe a SimCity type thing where you need to keep the proconsul or prefect happy by pacifying your people. You can call it Herod.

Feel free to fill the comments box.

I hope you enjoyed this series. I may do another one along a different line in the future. With the summer release schedule starting up, I should have more regular opinions on games to report, so hopefully this sort of repetitive stuff won’t be necessary.

There’s been something of a resurgence in American Civil War strategy games lately, with AgeOD and Western Civ both delivering very different visions of the conflict in recent years.

Now Gary Grigsby is turning his eyes to the War Between The States.

Taking gamers back to the American Civil War, Gary Grigsby’s War Between the States allows players to experience the trials and tribulations of the role of commander-in-chief for either side. Historically accurate, detailed and finely balanced for realistic gameplay, War Between the States is also easy to play and does not take months to finish.

Does not takes months to finish? Are they sure this is a Grigsby game?

The maps don’t look very interesting and there seems to be a lot going on in those screenshots. But the Civil War works as a setting for a wargame because both sides are similar in equipment but different in capabilities; one side needs to end it quickly, the other needs to drag it into a war of attrition. The leadership stuff sounds like it came straight from the AgeOD playbook, but I’m sure Grigsby will put his own spin on it.

No word from Matrix Games on a release date, but I’m still waiting for Lock ‘n Load in any case.

It’s hard to believe that Rome: Total War is almost four years old, let alone that the Total War series is not new anymore. Shogun: Total War debuted in 2000, was an instant hit, and Creative Assembly has never really paused since. Aside from a couple of ill-advised forays into action gaming (Spartan: Total Warrior and the recently released Viking: Battle for Asgard), CA has focused its efforts on making their crown jewel series shine.

You can divide the Total War games into three eras based on the engine used. The 2D Shogun and Medieval were followed by the 3D Rome and Medieval 2. Empire will use an even more advanced engine. But Rome did more than just introduce a new look to an already attractive game. It made some fundamental changes to the way the campaign played out, changes that made the series better in many significant ways.

Though I think that the traditional division of strategy games into RTS and TBS is pretty silly, there’s always a weird problem of definition with the Total War games. Many people want to stick them in the real time strategy box for some reason, even though it’s an awkward fit. The battles are real time, but that’s it. And those aren’t “strategy” as much as they are a mini war game that is derived from your actions on the campaign map. I would argue (in the face of people smarter than me) that the Total War games are primarily turn based. And, battle engine aside, almost every other improvement to the game you saw in Rome was focused on making the turn based campaign more interesting.

Take the map. All the games use provinces to divide the map, the first Total War generation used province movement, sort of like Risk or the EU games. Rome has a map with free movement through forests, roads and fields meaning 10,000 separate battlefields. Instead of remembering which provinces have river battles, you can plan to use rivers or mountain passes to block an enemy advance. Terrain isn’t something you work with just in the battles now, it is something you can plan for on the fly.

The “mission” system is probably the biggest step forward, though. The Roman factions (Julii, Scipii and Brutii. Ugh, by the way. Those should be Julii, Cornelli and Junii.) have to deal with a Senate that gives orders and rewards those who fulfill them promptly. The Senate’s whims could clash with your plans. You might not want to attack Macedonia yet. And maybe Sardinia just isn’t much of a priority for you. The rewards for completing the missions were often pretty good - elite units, cash - and the penalty for failure was usually just a stern warning. Most importantly, the missions served to direct your energies.

And of course, there were the character traits and retinue of followers. Introduced in Medieval, traits were taken to a new level in Rome, influencing just about every aspect of the game - likelihood for office, taxes raised, city unrest, fertility, and military competence. The level of personalization in the game made user created narrative much more compelling. I think every long time Rome player can tell you a story about that one general who could be counted on to turn the tide of battle, or the promising talent who slowly went mad after years of butchering civilians in the East.

Though the Caesar series has, over the long run, been more successful, Rome is probably more important in terms of both framing and reflecting how people think about ancient warfare. There was advance promotion in the form of the brilliant British historical game show Time Commanders. The 3D battles made for better than average teasers and trailers with elephants throwing legionnaires in the sky and onagers pummeling city walls. Few strategy games have been as well marketed to and well received by such a range of gamers.

Its popularity is one reason why its gross historical errors bother so many people. Ptolemaic Egypt is rendered a holdover from the Pyramid builders, scythed chariots notwithstanding. Wailing women, head throwers, war dogs and druids march beside warbands, principes and phalangites. Siege weapons become commonplace pieces of field artillery. Elephants and scythed chariots are the WMDs of the battlefield.

Like Age of Empires, Rome is a cartoon version of ancient history, and it is one that privileges variety of experience over historical fidelity. After the Seleucids and Carthaginians, how many pike, horse and elephant armies do you need? So make the Egyptians some sort of unholy marriage of Ramses and Stargate. How do we differentiate the Germans from the Gauls and Britons? Can we get some women in here?

But focusing on the things Rome gets wrong obscures the brilliance of the entire model. Yes, the battles move a little faster than they do in earlier Total War games, but that’s designed to get you back to the campaign map as quickly as possible. The variety in units and army composition means that you need to adjust tactics a bit and not just rely on massing your heavy infantry.

In many ways, the battle engine in Rome is the inverse of the wargame model in the Great Battles games. You can use historically appropriate tactics to win, but you don’t need to. This is partly because the AI is very weak. It will waste time deploying after a battle has started, will split its line of spearmen to hunt down isolate skirmishers and will send its general straight into the jaws of death. But it’s also because this game is not “that sort of game.” Remember in Gladiator when Russell Crowe led a cavalry charge through a dense German forest? That’s what kind of game this is. Wholly improbably and wholly engrossing. And much better than Gladiator.

But don’t let the historical errors overshadow the historical facts. You need to keep your phalangites in a straight line. You need to guard those flanks. The testudo gives you protection but you lose mobility. Roman heavy infantry could take down almost anything in a straight fight. There is certainly no shortage of bad lessons here, but there are good lessons, too. Rome is certainly not a great simulation of ancient warfare, no more than it is a great simulation of ancient politics.

The great weakness of all the Total War games has been the diplomatic model, and Rome’s remains terrible. Good relations are difficult to keep up and, as if fully aware of how weak the AI is, you almost always have two enemies at once. “Total war” is an appropriate title since most wars end in near total conquest. If you want peace, you must first finish the war.

One issue I have with Rome: Total War is the end game. The Romans get a great end game - one faction gets too big for its britches and you need to fight it out for the rule of the Eternal City. No other faction gets anything as cool or even a Senate to challenge them to missions. That’s probably why you have to unlock the other factions (or edit a data file) in order to play them - the Romans are the star and they have all this stuff for you to see there. (Similarly, Medieval 2 starts with only the Catholic factions available. All the better to show off the Pope.) So while the non-Romans get some neat units, they don’t get any overarching goal beyond conquering 50 territories.

To Creative Assembly’s credit, they fixed this somewhat in the Barbarian Invasion expansion. Success for each faction was contingent on conquering specific territories. It wasn’t quite as compelling as crossing the Rubicon or the Nile or whatever river you had to cross to invade your former friends, but it was something.

Though it was the third Total War game, you can make a strong case that Rome is the most important strategy game to come out in the last five years. It married cutting edge graphics with some serious strategy wonkery and even if it had little real effect in bringing people to history, it undoubtedly brought people to the genre. Though the Total War series was certainly respected before Rome, it was this game that I think lifted the series into AAA+ territory, making CA a brand name in both design and technology.

For our purposes, it also had the effect of being on the leading edge of a raft of ancient themed games. By my (not entirely scientific) count, the five years from 2004-2008 have had twenty ancients games released, including expansions and sequels. That’s as many as were released in the entire decade from 1992 to 2003 - and a quarter of those were Impressions city builders. Thanks to Rome, the ancient world has become the second choice setting for historical strategy games, mind you a distant second choice to WW2.

On the negative side, Rome has set a very high mark for ancient games that follow it. You need to compete with either its spectacle or its variety, because if you try to compete in both you are going to get your ass kicked. Modders for Rome have tried to improve on it, but for my money have failed because they either get the pacing completely wrong (Rome Total Realism and its dozens of cities) or innovate in ways that highlight how weak the strategic AI is (Europa Barbarorum). Rome: Total War is not perfect, by any means, and some days I prefer the elegance and simplicity of Annals of Rome, but it has raised expectations for whatever comes next - both for better and worse.

On Wednesday, I’ll wrap up with some thoughts on the ancient theme in general, missteps along the way and what games tell us (and don’t tell us) about the ancient world.