Now that their website is up, the makers of Great Invasions have announced 15 July as the date that their game hits “your favorite store”. They have announced Digital Jesters as the UK publisher. No word on when or if it will make its way over to America.

If you haven’t heard of this game, don’t be too surprised. It is the sequel to Pax Romana, an overambitious mess of a game. The lead designer, Philippe Thibault was one of the brains behind the original Europa Universalis board game and helped with the transition of that title to the computer arena.

Full disclosure: I was a beta tester for Pax Romana and was assigned to be a beta tester for Great Invasions. I never spent much time on it, and haven’t played the game since I downloaded the first build all those months ago.

Great Invasions deals with the collapse of Rome and the rise of barbarian empires through the dark ages. It also has religion as an important characteristic of your state culture, including both Catholicism and Orthodoxy as well as the rise of Islam as a challenger faith to the east.

Will it get a US release? Strength and Honour from Magitech is still looking for a publisher in the UK and US, so indie developers are seemingly having troubles finding a distributor for ancient grand strategy. Strength and Honour has been in Australia and Poland for months, and Magitech is a Canadian developer.

Anyway, if any of you see either of these games floating around your local shops, drop me a line.

As I work my way through Supreme Ruler 2010, I am astonished both by its ambition and its solutions to overreach. Though you will have to wait until the review is published to get my full opinions on it, I can confidently say that it does a much better job than Superpower 2, the only other modern geopolitics sim out there.

Part of their solution to user confusion is rife with peril – the assistant manager.

The use of a territorial governor to handle micromanagement is an old answer to a growing problem. As games get large and more complicated, designers are confronted with the basic fact that gamers either can’t process all the information they being fed or they have no desire to deal with the increasing levels of micromanagement. If these duties can be delegated to an AI helper, the player can focus on the big picture.

In Civ III we see this in its most barebones form. The production queue and resource management of cities can be given to a “governor”. The governor is assigned a priority (happiness, city growth, production, etc.) and then the player doesn’t have to worry about it. It works well enough for some chores. It can manage happiness reasonably well, and can prevent unrest in many circumstances. When it comes to military production, it tends to create a more balanced force than is usually necessary for your basic game of Civ.

It’s certainly much better than the infamous governors in Masters of Orion III, who would produce hundreds of transports even when their orders were overridden. Though patches did ameliorate this to some extent, the developers were never able to make the viceroys trustworthy.

Supreme Ruler uses cabinet ministers to handle government policy and my opinion is still being formed on how well this works.

But efficiency of the governors is only part of the problem. If developers can make an AI that can manage my cities as well as I can, I would be an idiot to not use them. But, if they can get to that point, what is the player supposed to do? Micromanagement is really an essential game mechanic in a lot of strategy games and if it is removed the designers need to find something else for the player to do.

Right now, most players don’t use automated governors because they like the micromanagement but because the AI substitutes are so terrible. So the choice is between queues and losing. Most gamers will choose the queues. And complain all the way.

But if Civ, for example, had good city managers the player would have little to do beyond set the priorities for each city, choose the next research topic and conduct diplomacy. If Civ had a large canvas with a wide range of diplomatic options and conditions (like Europa Universalis) this would be more than enough. But then, it wouldn’t be Civ.

So now, with Supreme Ruler, I am trying to find out what my role is. Am I a senior bureaucrat or a leader? Or does Battlegoat Studios see those as two sides of the same coin?

Christian Game Developers will be holding a conference in Portland, Oregon at the end of the month. Their “three-fold mission” includes the usual exchange on game development and making contacts with developers with similar interests as well as the not-quite typical prayer session for the industry at large.

Given the secular nature of popular entertainment at large, the lack of obviously Christian or religious games on best-seller lists should not be surprising. Given the reluctance of most game developers to deal with Ideas at all, their unwillingness to include messages of faith (or lack thereof) is standard operating procedure.

So, we have role-playing games with clerics who pray, but their faith is usually unmentioned. We have cultural distinctions based on religion in grand strategy or even Crusades, but the player never really engages with the religious issues that surround them. Religion, when present, is either an historical curiosity or a route to a flamestrike spell.

Probably the most famous Christian game is Catechumen, an odd first-person shooter that had the player converting enemy soldiers by zapping them with a magic sword. But there was no real religion or faith there, so even Christians don’t know how to make really Christian games.

Civilization IV will include historic religious faiths, and this idea is rife with peril. The religions will have to have “bonuses” of some kind, but this risks reinforcing preconceptions of what religions are like. Not to mention that, in treating historic religions as interchangeable parts of a society, they miss the fact that many people take their religions as truth, not cultural constructs. I don’t subscribe to the idea that this is another example of Sid Meier’s insidious leftist agenda (if anything, the Civ games privilege conservative realpolitik over internationalist ideas), but it does just place religion into the scale as just another part of a civilization – something all cultures have, but no more.

And there is nothing wrong with this. Even Christians like myself can appreciate alternate views of the place and purpose of religion in the development of humankind. As a mainstream Protestant, I probably have an easier time with this than my evangelical brethren.

But there is a great challenge to be taken up here. How do we communicate values in a game? Role-playing games seem to be the obvious avenue for this since they require the player to make choices. If the trade-offs are meaningful – if there is a sense of temptation to follow a certain path – the player could get a window into their own souls. Bioware’s dark/light role-playing system in Jade Empire and Knights of the Old Republic is a very crude version of this, since “light” inevitably means healing and “dark” means all the cool pyrotechnics. Apparently the good doctors at Bioware never read Genesis.

As I said above, the inability or unwillingness of game designers to confront religion is just a symptom of a larger reluctance to have their games confront anything beyond frame rates and unit balance. Games aren’t messageless, but what they communicate is more by what they don’t address than by what they do.

I spent a good part of the winter obsessing over Tilted Mill’s Children of the Nile. It was the perfect little city builder, and coming from some former Impressions developers, was everything I expected and more.

Most of the critical responce was more tepid than my own, but the game seemed to be received well enough for Tilted Mill to keep in business. Still, there is no word of either a new game on the way or an expansion or sequel for Chidren of the Nile.

Meanwhile, it looks like Deep Silver will beat them to the Roman punch with Heart of Empire: Rome, a very pretty city builder being developed by deepRed. IGN has a lot of screenshots and a nice E3 preview here.

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.

The second edition of the Carnival of Gamers is now up at Mile Zero. Read some of what the gaming blogosphere has to offer.