Customer Reviews

Europa Universalis: Rome

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Being a fan of Europa Universalis III, I naturally found this game appealing. Here are my thoughts:

The good
1. Large amount of depth from managing family tree and characters in your empire - from throwing celebratory triumphs for characters whose loyalty is wavering to assassinating enemies of your king, from carefully deciding which characters to honor with a governorship to deciding how to deal with a general/governor who will no longer obey your commands (although not yet in open revolt) - this is a wonderful addition!
2. Troop loyalty: troops get more loyal to generals they fight under; the more battles they have the faster they become loyal to their general. This is yet another reason to carefully watch, punish, and reward characters within your empire.
3. Barbarians spawning from unoccupied areas based on the size of the barbarian presence in that area. While this may get irritating after a while, I like that you can always send a large army through and clean out the barbarian populations (although they slowly regrow, which makes sense) to prevent most barbarian raids from happening.
4. Colonization is much slower than in EU3 but much more sensible.
5. Added level of resource depth- you now need certain resources to build certain troops (elephants and heavy infantry, for example). That being said, all resources offer some level of benefits to the territories that possess them or trade for them.
6. Technology tree improvements: making technological 'discoveries' is now based on chance and your particular tech level, which increases with more competent characters being assigned to research, rather than a guaranteed "get 558 research points and you will receive technologies a, b, & c"

The bad
1. Slower gameplay overall as there are fewer major wars and conflicts.


The addition of a family tree and managing friends/enemies of important characters in your empire is very enjoyable. Having to deal with all the issues surrounding character competence and, ahem, loyalty, adds some spice to the gameplay. Moreover, sending characters from your empire on diplomatic missions (rather than being limited by generic 'diplomats')gives a little more depth to the gameplay... On the whole, although the game speed is slower than in EU3 (ie. fewer wars, less action) I have found there to be significantly more depth and I would recommend purchasing this game.

This game is great... if you get Vae Victis, the expansion pack. The $[...] you will pay for it are indubitably worth it. There was a time when I would have given this game a 3/5, but Vae Victis makes this an almost perfect game.
A perfect game, that is, if you come to it with the right type of expectations. I was a newcomer to the EU series, having purchased EU 3 but never really taking time to play past the tutorial before lending it to a friend who proceeded to lose it. O, misfortune!
Anyhow, back to this game, there are things that are a bit different from other strategy games:

* You are the commander in chief, not every general in the land:
This is very important. You assign general to armies and give them marching orders. You get to decide where they will attack and even to manage the composition of your armies, but you do not have the luxury of invading the mind of your generals, taking over, and dictating battle tactics. In the same way, you are not the governor of every province. You appoint people with different attributes to your various regions and the result of the governance will depend on their attributes. Will you appoint the superb administrator who has questionable loyalty or a very loyal but corrupt and inept family member?

* It's not a clickfest type of RTS game!!! I stopped playing RTS games a while ago, because I hate trying to play "Any way You Can Click I Can Click Faster." I thought I had permanently switched to turned-based strategy, but I must admit that I like this system very much. You can alter the speed. I think there are five speed levels and depending on what you're doing you can slow down or speed up. If you're at peace and nothing is happening, speed up. If you're at war, you'd better slow and and pause before giving your orders or you'll, well, you'll see why you should have slowed down.

* Governments: there are a lot of government types: different types of tribes, republics, monarchies, empire, et cetera. Different types of governments give you different bonuses on research, military organization, ruler popularity, et cetera. With republics, there is generally a rotating consulate, with two censors and a senate. Most government types come with 5 ministerial/secretarial positions whose primary job is research in the following five areas: land/army organization, naval organization, construction, civic improvements, and religious advances. Again, in your appointments, you must decided whether you want to gain loyalty and play politics or appoint the best qualified person. It's rarely feasible to do both. The senate consists of members from for factions/parties: military, mercantilist, civic, populist (whom you will learn to hate with religious fervor) and religious. Having a consul from different factions gives you different bonuses, of course. The problem with not playing politics is that you run the risk of having the Populists take over your senate and block everything. They are anti everything and are basically isolationists, so that you run the risk of being in a situation where you cannot declare war on a weaker enemy because of lack of senatorial support. Sometimes, they become so strong that your only way out of this is to become a tyrant and proclaim a dictatorship. That, of course, decreases loyalty and makes civil wars more likely.

* Research: it's pretty straightforward, you appoint magistrates to different offices (again you have to decide whether you want competence or political advantages) and depending on their finesse level your research will be faster or slower. You can also speed up research with the right policies: making citizenship easier, making slave emancipation faster, adopting a republic confederacy...

Research gives you new types of buildings and new bonuses, but not new types of troops, unfortunately.

* Trade: also very straightforward. Each province has a resource that it exports and provinces that have different resources can export goods with one another. Trade generates benefits (for instance the ability to recruit certain types of troops or to generate more money from taxes, etc.) and of course, pecuniary remunaration. Trade routes that have been stable for years without disruption yield more bonuses.

* Diplomacy. You can try to take over the world or to build a network of alliances. Of course, it will be easier to trade with friendly nations and they are less likely to attack you while you're at war with another enemy. Allies will also usually come to war with you if you attack an enemy. When going to war with allies, the largest or most powerful nation will be the senior partner and negotiating peace with them means a cessation of hostilities with all members of the alliance. Negotiating with one of the minor members of the alliance puts you at peace with them and them only. Now, in order to attack another nation, you need to have a casus belli, literally, a case of/for war. It is not obligatory to have a casus belli, but it is better for your stability. A casus belli exists in case of poor relations, refusal of war-time assistance on the part of an ally, assassination of one of your emissaries, et cetera.

*Stability. Stability goes from -3 to 3, with 3 being the best, of course. You increase stability by sacrificing to the gods and by not having a superb leader. You decrease it by passing new laws and declaring war without a casus belli. You should not attack nations who pay you tribute (the idea being that they're bribing you to keep you from attacking them) or with nations with whom you gave good relations. A low stability level will make it more likely for revolts and rebellions to occur. You will need to keep armies in every corner of your territory to quell revolts when they arise, thereby limiting the number of troops you can deploy abroad.

*Barbarians: they are very annoying. Sometimes, a swarm of them come from hell or Barbaria or from wherever they come from and invade. They pillage and you can either send an army to crush them or negotiate with them and create a client state or give them land on which to settle. If you crush a barbarian army, you enslave a number of them. Slaves generate wealth and so one way of increasing your income, especially when you play as a small nation is to go barbarian hunting - make sure you don't bite more than you can chew - and capturing a lot of slaves. But watch out when the bearded men go nation hunting.

Okay, this list is in no way exhaustive, but it's probably more than too long and should give an adequate picture of what the game is like. It's very addictive and I think it's a better game than M2TW, though not necessarily better than ETW.

Try it out and enjoy.

If you are fan of Hearts of Iron or Europa Universalis, you will find Rome highly addictive, fun, and challenging. Game play is intuitive if you are familiar with these other products. Raising and deploying legions to deal with barbarians and rival powers is the heart of the game. But over extending yourself leads to manpower shortfalls and the danger of internal revolts(really bad if all your legions are tied up abroad). There is already rumor of expansion packs that will expand the depth of Europa Universalis' Roman experience. Paradox supports their products well after release (Doomsday, In Nomine) making them better and better. Buy the game, build a republic that spans the centuries, rule the world, then get up bleary eyed and go back to work.

A historical country-management game set in the Ancient era, EU: Rome seems interesting and in-depth at first glance but falls short in terms of production and design. While strategy games of this sort might be for a niche audience, even such people will not find much to enjoy in Rome.

"Europa Universalis: Rome" is a complex "grand strategy" game, similar in some ways to Total War or Paradox's other games. The player takes control of a country or tribe from 300 BC to 0 AD. The player is in charge of appointing leaders, generals, scientists, and so on for the country, as well as negotiating trade, diplomacy, and military agreements. However, the level of interaction that the player has with the world is somewhat "board game"-ish: You move armies around on provinces and make "big decisions", but the actual depth of the game is lacking.

For example, each province produces one trade good - grain, wine, horses, iron, etc. Trade routes between province give the benefits of one province to another in exchange for their own trade good. For example, having access to horses allows cavalry to be trained, having access to wine improves happiness, and so on. This is a fairly "board game" way to resolve the issue - reminiscent of Settlers of Catan, for example. While it works fine in the game, it's a really obvious "meta-game" point, which the game tries to make up for by having it be immersive in other fields.

Each country has a roster of nobles, who can be assigned to different roles: generals, governors, priests, and so on. These nobles have stats and traits, as well as their own opinions and loyalties. This is one of the game's most interesting points, though it's not exactly unique. For example, a succession crisis (with some nobles supporting one candidate and some nobles supporting another) might lead to a civil war, splitting the country and making it vulnerable for outside exploitation. Foreign politics are interesting, as well. Networks of alliances and trade agreements complicate the standard template of "conquer your neighbors", especially since war without a proper Casus Belli (motive for war) leads to political turmoil in your own country.

The setting, to be frank, disappointed me. While I really love the Roman Empire as a setting, especially with all the eastern and barbarian cultures around it, the time period isn't particularly great for a game of this type. If you start off as a large country (like Rome or Egypt or Carthage), you have to deal with a large amount of turmoil and work from the get-go. If you start as a medium-sized country, you're undoubtedly next to one of those larger countries and can get bulldozed at any minute if you don't play your cards right. If you start as a small country far away from the larger empires, you can't really do anything because it takes so long to develop your technologies.

Normally I wouldn't complain about the graphics for a game of this type, but in EU: Rome, the visuals are kind of unhelpful in terms of indications of what's going on. It's not just "simple" or "low-quality", the map is just generally not representative of what's going on in a given province. It would be okay if the graphics were more clear, but there's issues like one generic "army unit" to a province (rather than splitting up armies to show how many are present). This is on top of the fact that the game's already fairly simple - combat animation is just two giant soldiers (representing armies) attacking each other on the world map while numbers get taken off.

Overall, EU: Rome was a disappointment. The setting looked promising, and the political intrigue is pretty good, but the management and handling of the gameplay is just so boring that even strategy aficionados I've talked to have spurned the game.

Rating: 5/10.

This game has a steep learning curve, but if you put the time in to learn it, you will be rewarded with a deep and satisfying strategy game. The mechanics combine turn-based and real-time strategy in an effective way: the game moves in real-time, but you can set the speed of its moving, and pause when needed. With this system, you can make adjustments without being hurried into making mistakes, yet then speed through events that you otherwise don't want to sit through. It's not a title for the faint of heart, but if you enjoy immersing yourself in a strategy title, this one is an excellent choice.

Does anyone else have a problem with freeze-ups that require rebooting on this one? I ordered the new expansion today, and had the same problem.

When I get it to work, I'll be taking a leave of absence to figure it all out. Love it!

My expectations were way different from the actual product. It may be that I did not understand what a strategic game means. The tutorial is very disappointing, and does not let you interact at all, it just tells you stuff. There is very little video or animated action going on in the actual game, it is mostly dialogue, and just information. There are many things I cannot figure out how to do and the games does not seem all that intuitive, to me anyway. For instance I can figure out how to attack, but I cannot seem to call off an attact, very frustrating. Another example is that I can see I have a navy, but nothing I try seems to make the navy do anything. I can see that this game might possibly be fun if you knew exactly what you were doing, but to the novice it needs a way beefed up tutorial. I suppose I could "study" the manual, but then that sort of takes the fun out of a game. I don't mind looking up pointers from a manual to improve a game that is fun, but sorry, not having a lot of fun here. I do appreciate all the historical research that has gone into this game, just wish it wasn't so hard to figure out how to play it.

Surprise, surprise. Another flawed Paradox product. As I half expected, the program would not install and/or run property. Are they incapable of selling a product that works out of the box? This seems to be a pattern for them...

Not recommended.

The game crashes EVERY time it loads. I have NEVER BEEN ABLE TO PLAY IT. There is NO SUPPORT OR PATCH for this issue at the developer's site.

This lemon is produced by Paradox Interactive. Hmmm. I payed for the game but cannot play it. Does that constitute a "paradox?"

Purchased this via a link to a Direct Download vendor: this version was represented as Mac compatible. Most games aren't Mac compatible, and personally I dislike the Mac, but my wife needed one for her job. Anyway, the game was unplayable, since one of the menu bars couldn't be displayed on the screen. I don't know much about this stuff--obviously!--but I hope I can help somebody else from getting burned (by the game, I mean, not the Mac although it's no great item either.)