CDV has announced that it and Enlight Software are working on a city-building sim set in ancient Rome called Glory of the Roman Empire. Jason Ocampo has a brief preview at Gamespot. Videos of the game are also available at the site.

Ocampo writes “It’s been a while since we’ve had an ancient-city-building game set in Roman times”, apparently oblivious to the fact that this makes three on the schedule for the next year or so. So while it is true we haven’t had one in a while, we’ve been watching the development of a couple for quite some time.

Heart of Empire: Rome from Deep Silver via Paradox will be hitting store shelves in mid-May. Tilted Mill is hard at work on Caesar IV, which we will be seeing some time in the fall.

From this standpoint, it’s not clear what the differences between the three will be. All will be city-builders, all will have trade, limited combat and a scenario based campaign.

The big question for me is “Why Rome, now?” Historical city-builders have always been in short supply, and have almost entirely come from one development house – Impressions. Rome has always been more attractive for game development because of the near universal familiarity with its look and history. And there could be an element of Rome catching, since Creative Assembly’s battle strategy game was a huge international hit, bringing in people who had never played any of the other Total War games.

For the former Impressions people at Tilted Mill, Rome is familiar ground. Their wonderful Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile introduced a lot of new gameplay elements that revitalized a subgenre that really had little new to offer from one civilization to the next.

Since I’ll play anything with togas, all three will make my buy list. I hope they will have something to distinquish themselves from each other. It’s a pain paying 150 bucks for three copies of the same game.