Alea Jacta Est
Alea Jacta Est (hence AJE) simulates Roman-era warfare at a strategic level, and it is probably the best one on Steam.
As any good strategy game, AJE is a game of informations, and its brilliance shines the most in how these informations are acquired: unlike other “arcade” games (e.g. Rome Total War 1/2) the map does not show true data, but just a patchwork of rumors, whose reliabililty depends on factors under the player’s control (e.g. own army composition, scouting), factors out of control (e.g. subordinates' skill, or lack of it), and enemy’s actions.
– Real player with 153.2 hrs in game
Read More: Best Rome Grand Strategy Games.
Sooner or later, when playing Rome Total War, you start getting this uncomfortable feeling that what you’re doing on the strategic map is just a stage prop for pixel soldiers to run around in pretty period costumes.
Alea Jacta Est, though very nice to look at, is not about eye candy.
Instead, it gives you a very detailed strategic and operational view of what the opposing sides were dealing with. When battles or skirmishes take place they are resolved abstractly, though the abstraction gives a pretty detailed depiction of the tactical characteristics that were likely to be in play.
– Real player with 85.7 hrs in game
Grand Ages: Rome - Reign of Augustus
Re-live the reign of Augustus in the official expansion pack for the hit PC title Grand Ages: Rome. Reign of Augustus includes a brand new campaign comprised of 12 missions, new maps and a wealth of enhanced gameplay features.
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Campaign with 12 new Missions
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12 new maps
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6 new multiplayer maps
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4 new buildings: Senate, Tax Office, Odeum, Hospital
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20 new estates bonus
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Roads - connect your city to the major roman roads to gain additional resources, units travel faster on roads, certain buildings generate additional resources when placed next to a road
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Authority - certain buildings (both new and existing buildings from the first game) generate Authority that can be used for various effects that benefit the player or hinder his opponents - putting out or starting fires, summoning an allied squad, accelerated research, etc.
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New talents for each family (21 new talents total)
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Remove tool for roads, trees, platforms and decorations
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New decorations – statues and gardens
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God Mode - free build map with few disasters and unlimited resources
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New campaign intro video
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Additional multiplayer features: Pre-built towns & pre-built town walls etc.
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3 new patrons (Agrippa, Nero, Drusus)
Read More: Best Rome Historical Games.
Caesar™ 3
The “Don’t Escape Trilogy” is a collection of three short first-person point-and-click adventures with static screens (no camera movement, no scrolling). The games share a creepy atmosphere and a few gameplay mechanics, but are otherwise unrelated. In the first game, you play a werewolf trying to lock himself away before a full-moon night, so that he won’t kill anyone when he turns. In the second game, you’re trying to barricade a house and protect yourself from a zombie horde. In the third game, you’re the only surviving crew member on a spaceship and need to stop “something” from getting out.
– Real player with 5.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Rome Historical Games.
Even though the entire trilogy is available for free on Armor Games, I chose to purchase this game series on Steam because that’s how amazing ScriptWelder really is. The Deep Sleep and Don’t Escape series were some of the first PC games I ever played, and I have ScriptWelder to thank for making my early experiences so magical. I have followed each and every game you have published on AG, hunted down every achievement, set of choices, and walkthrough I could find… simply, because every single second I spent in any of your games was one of either awe, wonder, fear, or curiosity.
– Real player with 5.1 hrs in game
Caesar™ IV
Many years ago, when I was a member of GameTap (before Steam), I became addicted to CivCity Rome. Fast forward a decade and some change later, I found Caesar IV on Steam and thought I’d give it a whirl. Having loved CivCity Rome, I figured Caesar IV would be equally as satisfying.
I was right, and I was wrong. Right because I loved Caesar IV from the moment I started playing. Wrong because it is far superior to CivCity Rome in a plethora of ways. Not knocking CivCity Rome, but Caesar IV has so many additional features and perks.
– Real player with 441.4 hrs in game
As someone who has spent more than 1000h+ in Civ V and VI, I’d say this is a great city-builder game. Easy to learn, hard to master style. As I write this I’m trying to complete the last campaign mission @ prosperity path, already completed the game in the military mode at hard difficulty.
I can assure you people who complain about scenarios being too small have only played the tutorial missions, which are small indeed, but it’s just the tutorial who tries to teach you how to optimice the space you are given to build. All other scenarios give you far too plenty of space.
– Real player with 148.1 hrs in game
CivCity: Rome
I love this game. I have played it plenty. I am desperate to see it get brought into the 21st century and become an awesome roman city simulator idea…The core game is already infinitley playable and with a bit of depth honestly is a £30-£40 game for me.. Features/direction I would love to see any developers go….(off the top of my head as i get so many ideas when playing this game it does that…
1 Focus on the non army aspect and make it a city builder
2 Focus on the ecomony part of it. Larger number of different products and shops..i.e more detailed items of clothing, diverse food
– Real player with 146.4 hrs in game
I once played 10+ hours of this as a kid, ca. 2006, racing against a laptop that had started flickering with the blue screen of death.
I was delighted to find this and my all-time favorite game, Sierra’s city-builder Pharaoh, on Steam as an adult.
So, as a grown-up, what’s my verdict on CivCity: Rome?
It’s a lost opportunity for a truly great game and what could have been the flagship for a CivCity series.
Now, it’s fine to have a red herring or two in a mission to keep players on their toes, but in CCR the mismatched and misplaced items are just sloppiness. For example– if there is NO OVERSEAS TRADE or even NO OCEAN in a scenario, you have access to a boat wright and trade dock in your build menu. Marble can only be used for trade, with no role in construction, but it appears in almost every map. If it’s not on your map, you’ll still have access to a marble quarry in the build menu.
– Real player with 97.2 hrs in game
Imperator: Rome
its good now, actually. i hope that someday they look back on this title and add some more content.
– Real player with 610.3 hrs in game
I spend few hours in this game and I’m glad that I bought it (but on bargin for ~20€). There is a lot more microeconmic mechanic than other games, like EU4 or Stellaris have, so it is even harder to maintain big empires (witch is good thing becouse big empires don’t last forever). Of course Imperator has some issues, but even EU4 after 8 years still has and it’s not like this bugs makes this game unplayable. I hope Paradox will realase new updates or DLCs soon (maybe after They realase Victoria 3) becouse this game have a lot of potencial.
– Real player with 449.0 hrs in game
Imperium Romanum Gold Edition
English :
This is a great game. The “Grand ages of Rome” is the sequel of it and has somewhat better graphics, comes with a plague of fires all the time. In Imperium Romanum that doesn’t happen. You have a lot of time to put up the fires and enjoy your city view & achievements. In this game you can relax but not so in Grand Ages of Rome. Tips: Plant trees near the wood cutter’s cabins, this way you’ll have a continuous flowing supply of wood. Extend your aqueducts to the maximum they can reach and build wells where fires occur more often. If you have enough money anything can be built in a flash. Don’t harass the barbarian tribes until you are really ready to face them. Build wooden walls around your town center to avoid attacks. I give 10/10 for this game and I am very pleased to have bought it!
– Real player with 50.0 hrs in game
A true successor to the game CivCity Rome, this simulator carries over many of the familiar features of the classic game with numerous improvements. Most significant is that a lot of the micromanagement has been removed, and game is not bogged down by de-evoling houses who don’t get every supply they need, even though for instance they live directly next to a butcher, tailor shop, and fruit store yet cant get meat, tunics or fruit. With that said, warehouse management is a bit too easy, since in the old game warehouses had to be watched carefully and supplies “donkeyed” between them to serve other parts of the city. This is now gone, and simply building a warehouse and marketplace next to a cluster of houses magically supplies all their needs.
– Real player with 24.6 hrs in game
Qvadriga
TL;DR SUMMARY
One of the most enjoyable strategy race games in many years. The worst part is the non-sensical pricing strategy of the publisher ($19.99 on PC, $9.99 on Android, $4.99 on iOS - all for the same game). Put it on your wishlist and wait for the price to hit $9.99 or less on Steam. Most negatives about this game center on the price, not the game itself. This is mispriced gem.
DETAILED REVIEW
This game was so enjoyable, I spent dozens of hours experimenting with factions, upgrading my drivers, chariots, and horses, developing racing strategies and collecting game data about different cities, just so I could successfully manage teams to the Circus Maximus at Rome.
– Real player with 51.8 hrs in game
You’d think “turn based” and “racing” would go together about as well as peanut butter and fish but Qvadriga really makes it work somehow. There are board games about racing and I’m thinking specifically of one by Avalon Hill called Circus Maximus that came out in the seventies, it would not surprise me at all if this developer hasn’t just pretty much ripped off that system and that’s the engine that runs underneath this game, it definitely has the same feel of that game and as a computer game it works very well. You have a group of commands you can give your driver to follow for the next ten seconds or so and whether or not he can follow them and what happens depends a lot on what all the other drivers on the track choose to do. The races aren’t terribly different but there’s a lot that can happen to add variety each time. You make decisions about whether to take the shorter inside slow lane, or the faster longer outside lanes, trade offs between whipping your horses for quick speed at the expense of endurance, whether to attack or avoid your opponents, when to try to make your move to pass. Lots of Ben Hur stuff happens like chariots crashing and drivers getting dragged and by the end of the race a lot of times you’re just trying to dodge around all the debris. I don’t doubt that there’s a lot of die rolling going on underneath the hood but the game obscures that from you. I had mixed feelings about that at first, I thought I’d like to more fully understand the implications of my choices but you do get a feel for it pretty quickly and I came to appreciate the “learn by experience” approach to it all. There is most certainly luck involved, but to me it feels a lot less like getting cheated by a die roll and more like the racing luck that the NASCAR boys all talk about. A broken wheel that ruins your race, an opponent blocking left instead of blocking right opening up an avenue for you… stuff like that. And the real kick of it is that individual races are only a couple of minutes long pushing that one-more-go feel that all the great games have to keep you up later than you intended to be.
– Real player with 22.4 hrs in game
Romopolis
I’m not going to recommend this game in general. It may be suitable in certain situations, though.
You should know what you’re going into. This is not a city builder game along the lines of SimCity or Caesar. It is more like a simple puzzle game with elements of time management.
There are 24 cities to build. In every city, the grid is 5x5 tiles - sometimes with a few tiles unaccessible to the player. In the beginning, only simple buildings are available. Later on, bigger and better buildings are available. Residential houses are the main buildings, as they provide you with an income. Other supporting buildings, like temples and hospitals, are available to increase happiness/income from the houses. Bigger houses need more supporting building types.
– Real player with 26.3 hrs in game
What a cute wonderful little simulation game. I picked this gem up today for $0.59 today. And man this is a steal for such a fun rainy day game. It’s pretty basic in it’s control; click a square, pick what you want to build and if you have the proper resources you then wait out the timere and vwah lah your new building is built.
Definitely a resource balancing game at it’s very basic. Balancing Houses, with cultural, market, and religeous buidlings against the cost of new workers, new upgrades, and new resources. Some maps have certain blocks that you don’t want to build houses around or suffer pentalites, and some of the maps offer difficulty for the goals laid out to complete.
– Real player with 17.3 hrs in game
CRIXUS: Life of free Gladiator
Life of free Gladiator in the fictional ancient roman city
CRIXUS is a single-player hack and slash game AND Ludus manager with base-building elements.
This game bears the name of Crixus, a Gallic gladiator and military leader, but it is not about his life. The story is yours.
Fights are organized in the arena where you as a free gladiator can access as you wish.
Fight in Arena to gain gold and reputation. Spend them on treats for your home and the pleasures of the city.
The target is to accurately recreate the architecture and equipment of the Roman Empire era.
Gladiator manager / Ludus management. Get gladiators, train gladiators, gear up gladiators. Be the proud manager of Ludus.
a story-based campaign to set you up on full experience. Fight for yourself in the arena.
You choose how many and how strong your opponents will be. (limit is only your PC compute power)
You can roam around the city, see how ancient Romans lived and buy new gear and explore. This is to provide calmness in-between the fights.
modify your home. Buy objects in shops, display your armor, Add achievements on the wall, etc.
