Where the market was once starved for game with a sword and sandals theme, there is now a glut of projects in development or on the way. Longbow Digital Arts, a small Canadian gaming house heretofore focused on small arcade games including the excellent Breakout clone DX-Ball 2, has announced that it is making an ancient strategy game along the lines of Rome: Total War.

Hegemony: Philip of Macedon will focus on the career of the father of Alexander the Great. Philip was one of the great military innovators of the ancient world and is often credited with creating the unstoppable force that Alexander would use to conquer much of the known world.

The early video just shows soldiers marching, many with the Spartan lambda on their shields – an annoying but forgivable historical error that I fear Rome is reponsible for.

With Rome already out there (with an expansion on the way), Legion: Arena and Rise and Fall well into their development cycles, the piling on of ancient battle games has even me exhausted at this point.

What I really crave is a remake of the old CCS game Encyclopedia of War: Ancient Battles. It was an easily customizable game with a plethora of battle options. You could play not just Alexander’s army, but different variants on that army. Think of playing DBA with a very generous friend. There was no strategic option, but it still has the most wide ranging and flexible army list ever made.

Well, I think I crave that. Maybe I just want an end to the cycle of ancient battle games and the broader the next one is, the less pressure there will be on me to buy whatever follows.

Anyway, no release date for Hegemony yet. And no word on whether or not there is a strategic component.