Customer Reviews

Glory of the Roman Empire

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

While the game is indeed very simple and easy to get into, it is incredibly tedious, and will take a certain degree of micromanagement. In the first few campaign missions, the game is wowing. The graphics are better then any other Rome-based city builder I have seen, the interface is simple, and there is minimal micromanagement. The smaller your soon-to-be metropolis, less micromanagement. But, you simply have to use micromanagement, as the game forcibley makes you enlarge your city. As soon as your city gets too large for just a few administrative and distributive buildings, the citizens start complaining about how they need this, that, ect. So, you must provide this, that, ect. for them. Then, maybe they, for some random reason, will catch the plague. Well you have to fix that! Or maybe a house will be on fire. That needs to be fixed too! Thus, you must lay out many scaffolds at once before you even think about houses. I liked how they incorporated slaves into the game, as workers, and how if you worked them too hard they would revolt. However, if you get a notification that a house is on fire, then it's gone. You can try to get a prefacture up to stop it, but it's already gone unless you begin rebuilding it right away. Add this to the fact that the learning curve may be a bit flat for you, and the game gets fairly boring fast. If you get bored with the campaign and jump the gun to the free-build, then woah! What the heck is a Domus? So, simply, you must continue with the campaign, because you can't start the free-build given the fact that there are too many unexplained buildings.
One of my favorite features (probably because I love Latin) is the ability to change the entire game lettering and wording into Latin, the ancient Roman language. The grammer is a sketchy at times (using "ad" in something such as "there are too many"), but overall it really does well. I would have liked to see some slaves that the Romans might have considered "exotic" (such as african, german, british, ect. people) as maybe a trade item.


The game gets a 3 for fun and 4 overall, it will entertain you garenteed for a few hours, but unless you take time to get through the repetitiveness, it will not continue to excite you.

It's limited in complexity compared to the old standards like Age of Empires/Mythology/Kings, and has more than a few irritating quirks. For example, the the panoramic view you are given seems more designed to show off the scenery (which is pretty nice) than to get you a useful view of, say, enemy troops. Unlike Black and White, which gives you full range of motion, here as you move upward for a good overall shot, your field of vision is restricted to only what is directly below you, which is a tiny fraction of the map. No horizon shots whatsoever. That combined with the fact that enemy soldiers aren't marked on the minimap means you are constantly surprised when angry Israelis come to kick you off their land.

I also dislike the lack of control over troops. Archers running out of towers to get slaughtered by axemen. Velits that won't show up to battle til they're good and ready. I also had a case of disappearing mercenaries on one map where the number dwindled to zero before the first battle. Never found an explanation for that. Overall, the battle aspect of the game from a strategy perspective is nearly nonexistant, so don't get your hopes up. No individual control over units means no say in how your guys respond to attacks, and its generally dull even when they manage a win.

Another quirk which I discovered in the challenge mode is that if someone burns down your only woodcutter's lodge and you have less than 4 units of wood stored, game over. It doesn't actually stop, you just can't build anymore buildings, even a woodcutter's lodge, *AND* all your existing buildings that need wood for upkeep go up in flames. Craptacular.

Also (this is the worst of all), the cheat codes don't seem to work. I tried them all.

One big plus, though, is the Latin. You can play the whole game with Latin narration and text. It's also the absolute first game about Romans I have ever played that didn't have British voiceovers. It sounds authentically Latin (to me). The producers are German, so I guess they don't suffer the same delusions as we anglophones. It's a nice touch.

Anyway, aside from the issues, it was an interesting diversion, but at the end of the day I'm going right back to Age of Whatever. Maybe the next version will knock my socks off.

To me Glory of the Roman Empire is a work of art and a really great game. The graphics are far above average. Learning to play is simple and the level of the game is not complicated nor demanding. As I mentioned in another interview elsewhere, you can play GotR without having to worry about Caesar making a lot of difficult demands which must be met within a certain period and distract from the actual city building aspects by forcing the player to spend time and exert himself in seeing these are met or, face the possibility of losing the game. There are outbreaks of plague and you will have fires but, these are easily dealt with by building a special building which doubles as a drug store and doctor and erecting fire stations to cover populated areas. All in all I find the game quite enjoyable and my only complaints are that most of the maps are not large enough and the game does not contain and editor.

I installed the game but then it asked me to get updates from the "proxy sever". I tried to get the updates but the next page in downloading the updates made wouldn't let me go on until I dowloaded them from its link. The link however wouldn't connect to anything and therefore I couldn't finish installing the game so I can't play it. I have five bars on my internet connection and since I'm writing this it must be working. However it wouldn't connect to the download site. Also the support links in the back would connect to anything except a suggestion that I try a differnt search which wouldn't work either. I wasted a whole day trying to get it to work but it won't work.