Customer Reviews

Nemesis of the Roman Empire

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

 

 

First of all, if you love Romans or eras with sword fighting and cavalries, don't wait any further and buy this game right now. It's very cheap for $25.

Now, this game doesn't require super-fast computers. I have a rusty Celeron 766 MHz with 128 RAM and 16 MB vid. card. It runs perfectly smooth on my comp...except for the cinematics. For some reason, they are choppy. But that's not our main concern here.

Tutorial starts off great with basic RTS elements which eventually leads to showing probably the biggest aspect of this game, the RPG feature. And eventually, you get a chance to defeat a Roman legion at the end of tutorial. I felt that tutorial was too easy to start a player off with but then again, like The Simpsons say, "99% of the games start off with easy tutorial level". But it pretty much lets you get a good grip on the game's interface, environment, etc.

If you have ever played Stronghold, you will notice that the way you can train troops and research technologies in this game is very similar to that of Stronghold. Just like Stronghold, you have a certain population you must manage while keeping them and your army fed throughout the whole scenario. Speaking of food, there is an interesting feature in this game which changes thing tactically. You must keep your army fed throughout the whole process. If they don't eat, they don't fight and morale goes down, and you lose. Therefore, you can make a pack mule from the tavern which will follow your army around. Make sure this pack mule doesn't die otherwise you can be screwed.

There is another interesting concept in this game which is heroes and their item carrying capability. Heroes are strong, generals who have certain experience level and some special abilites such as greater health or greater strength. These heroes or leaders can also lead a group of many different units under their command. You can minimize the tedious clicking and selecting the whole group or cycling through group numbers assigned to each group while remembering which group has which units, by assigning a group to follow a leader. Just by selecting leader, you select the whole group under the leader's command and it gets really easy for you to manage your troops. Groups also get certain bonuses when they follow a hero.

The only thing missing in this RTS is base building. In fact, this actually makes it more easier for the player to concentrate more on the troops and tactical aspect of the game while not worrying too much about micromanaging the economy or the population. If you've ever played Prateorains, you know what I'm talking about.

Animations are iffy sometimes but for the most part they are very beautifully depicted. The amazing swings of a macemen while the burning arrows fired by the archers and the brave fighting styles of a Prateorian will satisfy you to a great deal making you feel like you are watching a movie.

In the end, I must say kudos to Enlight for creating such an outstanding game, one of its own kind. Roman era buffs like me have been wanting for a game like this to be made and I can truly say that my wish has come true. Again, this game is worth $25 that you will spend. If you are having second thoughts, then don't. Just buy this great game. Kudos, Enlight, kudos.

I really really enjoyed Nemesis of the Roman Empire, for once we have a RTS game where we don't have to care about resource management. That's something for peasants to do! Instead the objective is to violently take over nearby villages that surround yours and your enemy's capitol city. Then you order the village to deliver food to your city and you can forget about them!

You don't have to build new structures, you don't have to care about harvesting grain from farms and ore from mines, all you have to care about is the war effort, and trying to take over enemy villages & forts without getting massacred (of course). I'm a huge fan of Rome: Total War, StarCraft and Age of Empires II -- Nemesis is right there up with those awesome RTS games except you just simply don't have to click-on-everything to keep your economy going! That rules for me since I basically hate resource management.

Hers how it Works...The Game action is great, but with some flaws. My main problem is with the editor function.You have to figure out everything by yourself and what really pisses me off is that you can not call for tech support. If they could change some things, i think the best thing would be the same format for units, buildings, and decorations and the such, with the format of Age of Empires: The Age of Kings. Instead, one has to take apart a existing game and re-arrange it or make a city without gates.... Hmmmm...Choices, choices, choices.

The adventure is solid, and provides good challenges, as does single player. As I read some of the other reviews, on of the main problems they stated was with building up food and gold resources. It is a very simple solution. First with gold. Lets say you start a single player game with Iberia as your team. When you begin, send 5000 gold to a STONE outpost, perferably nearby. The gold will gain intrest and if you leave it alone and don't touch it, supplenmenting it with the capital's gold every now and then. At the end of a two hour game, I usuly amass at least 100,000 gold. Food is tricky. You see, depending on what setting the AI is on,will depend on the results. If you have a few towns that you could reach quickly, let them build upto their max storage (5000). send the food to a stone out post, near your capital. Don't touch it unless you really need. To conserve food, don't station your troops inside of the main building, as this will drain your food quickly. Put them out outside, just near enough to get resuplied when they need it. The key to beating the game is food mangement.

This game is amazingly cheap at a mere $25. It is high-quality with good graphics and an interesting technique of playing. The system requirements are very low, allowing older computers with less updated parts. My problems lie with a few seemingly non-essential but actually important areas.
I am a history enthusiast. I am particularily interested in the Roman times and WWII. I usually buy Real-time strategy (RTS) games becuase of this. My first problem lies with historical innacuracies. Screenshots, packaging and advertising lead you to believe that this will be a game with the same amount of historical accuracy as Age of Empires One or Two. This is a lie. The game is actually more like WarCraft with ghouls, magical items and enchanters. I do not like this. When I bought this I felt it would be a game where you used actual Roman tactics to defeat Carthiginians, or vice-versa. Instead, you lead a troupe of characterized "heroes" through wilderness where you are ambused by wild priests.
My second issue is with the method of play. I will once again relate to Age of Empires I and II. I thought it would be a simple RTS game where you select units at the same time as building an economy. This is completely different. Once again, it is more like Warcraft. Characters and heroes lead small armies into battle with evil forces. There is no time to build an economy, and even if there was, you couldn't because there is no option to build. The game consists of taking groups from fortress to fortress scattered about the massive map, claiming them until you finally can take the town center of you enemy. THere is no oppourtunity to build, which the advertissements deny.
My final issue is with the resources. In this game there are two resources: gold and food. Gold is hard to come by. Villagers produce it and the only way to get it is by selling stuff or by waiting ages. There is the option, in the single player games, to equip your team with "Wealth", "Fortune", or "Riches", which produce gold automatically at different rates, but the campaigns do not allow this. Food is also a slow accomidating resource. Villagers once again produce it, but it is required for every person in your population and must be shipped from place to place by mules. Only the Roman civilization can buy food, making the campaigns even harder.
Now the positives. There are 5 civilizations to choose from, which, although not many, is a lot to deal with. Each has unique units and functions, as well as technologies. The units are barely historically accurate, but it's a game. It is challenging, but not impossible. There are several campaigns in which the main topic is the Punic Wars and basically what lead up to the fall of the Roman Empire. Races include: Carthiginians, Romans, Iberians, and Gauls. There are a number of interesting methods and techniques about going about winning these games. It has a single-player, a multi-player, and a scenario function, as well as a "builder", which I have not yet tested. Campaigns are mind-bendingly hard.
I guess what I'm saying is this: If you enjoyed WarCraft a lot, go ahead and buy this game, it's pratically a duplicate. But if you're more into games like Age of Empires, Stronghold and Stronghold Crusader, and Rise of Nations, ignore this completely. It looks appealing to RTS fans, but it really isn't. There's lots of room for improvement. But what the hell...it's just $25. It's pratically disposable. And you get what you pay for.

Nemesis of the Roman Empire (also known as Celtic Kings: Punic Wars outside the US) is Haemimont Games' follow-up to its well-received real-time strategy game Celtic Kings: Rage of War.

Nemesis is built upon the same engine as its predecessor but adds two new races, the Carthaginians and the Iberians, to the Gauls and Romans that were available in the original Celtic Kings. While on the surface Nemesis offers features we've seen many times before in the genre, such as hero characters and a lack of base-building, it also includes a clever logistics model and better-than-average artificial intelligence to help it stand apart from the numerous RTS clones on the market.

On the whole, Nemesis' presentation is easily the game's worst aspect--relatively speaking. The orchestral-style music sets an appropriate mood for a game based on classical wars between Rome and Carthage, but the few available scores grow repetitive rather quickly. Voice acting in the game is also rather bad, just as it was in its predecessor. Simplistic cutscenes are interspersed between the campaign missions, but for the most part, the characters in the game interact via text boxes, and mission objectives are given to you with more unceremonious text.

Graphically, the game is pretty good but not great, as the engine seems to have aged since the original Celtic Kings. There's a decent sense of scale between the units and buildings, as well as a fair amount of detail in the actual unit models. The animation is where things start to fall apart--while most units look fine while standing in place and battling, they have somewhat awkward walking motions.

Despite the superficial shortcomings, the engine is still pretty impressive in the bigger picture. Nemesis maps can be rather large, with dozens of units rendered on the same screen, and you can instantly jump from one part of the battle to another, via the extremely detailed and useful map screen. The game seems to be able to effortlessly render the activity of hundreds of units, possibly engaged in many different skirmishes at the same time, across an entire map. With a simple press of the space bar, you can examine a full-screen view of the level, including color-coded dots representing your troops and the enemy's troops, the villages and forts you control, and where those facilities are shipping their resources. Fog of war is a part of the game, but in many cases, you can still discern enemy troop movements and army sizes with a quick glance at the map screen.

Like in many other RTS games, there's no base-building to worry about, but you must keep track of standard resources like food and gold. You use food to increase the population of your cities, and it can also be sold for gold, while gold is used to train troops and buy upgrades. It's the logistical element that helps Nemesis stand out from the competition. Your troops out in the field consume food, so to maintain a standing army outside the city, you must make sure to have pack mules laden with food follow your army around and keep it fed. Even if you have your army garrisoned in a fort, you must maintain a steady supply of food to that fort to maintain combat efficiency.

The logistical aspects carry over to resource gathering. To obtain food, you must capture and retain control of outlying villages. These villages create food at a fixed rate, which must then be transported to forts--which can accumulate food--or to your city. Creating a supply link from one village or fort to another property takes just two clicks, minimizing hassle, but the capture and recapture of valuable villages and forts forms the basis of all conflict in Nemesis. The supply lines you create are also vulnerable to attack by your enemies, as mules can either be killed or captured. This means that the properties you gain make you stronger, but you also have the added responsibility of defending a much wider area.

The combat in Nemesis should feel familiar to fans of recent RTS games. Units can be attached to heroes, allowing them to move in formation and also gain bonuses for being under the command of a hero. Each race also has an array of units that are similar in look and feel but offer enough differences in attributes that each side plays a bit differently. For example, the Carthaginians have camel riders, instead of horses, that have a better attack than most other cavalry but are also more expensive. The magic users of each race also help differentiate the nations. The enchantress of the Iberians, for instance, has the very useful ability to train freshly recruited troops to higher levels without having them go into combat. Special structures, like ruins for your magic users to cast world-altering spells and cave systems that offer the ability to instantly move from one side of the map to the other, are also available in many levels to vary the gameplay.

The enemy AI is fairly clever, and it doesn't seem to cheat as in many other RTS games. You'll see groups of enemy forces scouting around the map, probing your forward properties for a weak point. If you leave a fort or village lightly defended, the AI will intelligently attack those instead of wasting troops on your more heavily defended properties. While sieging enemy cities, you'll see the computer attempt feints and harassing charges to try to draw your troops away from your catapults and bring your army into range of its own towers. At the same time, the computer is usually smart enough to not be duped by your own attempts to bring his attacking forces within range of your towers when the tables are turned. Our primary complaint is that getting all of your units in a large army to engage nearby enemies can be problematic. At times, you'll see half your army fighting, while the rest sit idly just a few feet away watching their comrades tussle.

Nemesis includes two good-sized campaigns: One follows Hannibal's march through Hispania and the outlying Roman territories, and the other depicts the Roman side of the war. There are three additional siege-style maps available as well. Once you're done with the campaigns, a robust skirmish mode is available to you for single-player games against up to seven computer opponents or for multiplayer action. The game will generate a random map for you, much like the Age of Empires games, and you can select from a number of settings, such as map style, disabling certain property types (like the ruins or caves), or allowing starting bonuses to certain players as a handicap. A server browser is provided for online play, but as with many lower-profile RTS games, finding an online Nemesis match may prove difficult since it has no true dedicated matchmaking service.

Overall, Nemesis of the Roman Empire is a fine follow-up to Celtic Kings, and a great real-time strategy game on its own merits. The new campaigns offer varied and interesting gameplay just like the original game, and the added races offer a new dimension for existing fans. The winning gameplay formula has been tweaked only slightly, with Haemimont not attempting to "fix" what clearly wasn't broken.

I've played many strategy games but this one is very unique and focuses a lot on the battle. If you like the classic battle movies like Troy where you have battles with many many troops, this game is for you.

After playing this game, you probably would not want to play other typical management type strategy games. This game comes with gold and food production which lets you focus more on battles.

The only downside is that there is virtually no technical support and many glitches with the multiplay.

My recommendation is try the demo first and learn how this game works in very unique resource management and battle style. If you don't like and would not play unless multiplay is always avaliable through gamespy, this game is probably not the best choice for you and you can get pretty much everything for the single play from the demo.

Full version also has map editor which you can create maps and adventure scenarios but this company never made avaliable any tutorials for that. So unless you know something about figuring out the program codes, you can only make maps, not the full scenarios.

Bottom line:

GOOD: One of the best battle games, Focus more on battle management and not on resource production and buildings, Coolest battle scenes with unlimited unit production like watching the movie "Troy"

BAD: Hardly any technical support, Hardly no one on gamespy, Many glitches with multiplay, Game gets boring after playing a number of single player games, Map editor is hard to figure out for creating adventures and no customer support nor tutorials

I bought this game at a book fair for a easy 15 bucks. but I got to tell you, it's worth WWWWAAAAAAYYYYYYY more!! in this game, you don't need to worry about any farms or making your stronghold! everything is already built so you don't need to constantly watch everything that isn't fun and focus on the fighting. Personally, i never really studied much about these civilizations. but the way these men are armored, you're gonna believe it's real! you can actually see the pieces of wood on your siege tower or the flames on your arrows. and you can train your men just like in real life. with an unlimited number of units, you can build your army from 100 men to 500 or even more! (but 500 is gonna be a little pushing it) but here's a tip. don't use food more your army! use it to sell in the trading post for more gold. all you need to do is get a LOT of priests, shamans, or druids to heal your men, that way, even when your in battle, your warriors won't die as quickly!!!! and here's a helpful tip, if you want lots of men that don't need to be very strong but can win by sheer numbers, go for the cheapest men that are usually the swordsmen and archers, if your playing for the Carthaginians, then the libyan footman and the numidian javelin throwers. but, if you like to have only about fifty men, then go for the Praetorian for rome, and just basically the most expensive ones they have. (but for gaul and iberians, don't try it) because they usually are the strongest. take the praetorians for example, i had 19 praetorians, 31 archers, 15 swordsman, and 35 horseman. after the first minute of attacking, all my 35 horseman were dead, there were 2 swordsman left, 5 archers, and 17 praetorians. and they were holding of a 200 unit army. but in the end the enemy got too many reinforcements and they died, but that was AFTER 20 minutes of fighting (that a lot of time) and I lost 100 men, they lost 280. but i am preparing another attack and this time, they won't hold (seeing as i have 30 praetorians) but if you want to have small armies that attack many times go for maybe 20 a time for about 8 times. and if you are going to have a lot of units, never train them past level 8, it takes too long and when I first tried training to level twelve, my enemy came and I was already crippled(cuz training give you injuries.
And if you want to insure the most entertainment, always switch maps every two games. if your use the same each time, it'll get boring. and don't use the same strategy each time, your enemy will learn it and he will use it as your weakness(they're really smart). like if you always get a huge army but it takes a long time, your enemy will launch small attacks which you won't be ready for. or if you try to do the same, they will get a very large army consisting of cheap men that can still overpower you. so try different ones each time and don't just focus on one civilization. each has a weakness. for gaul, the warriors are cheap but weak, for rome, only one is really strong and expensive, for iberia, they're dorky and weak, and for the carthaginians, they're really strong but VERY VERY VERY expensive and you can't train (ever!) for me, rome works the best, but you should try gaul if your a beginner, and carthage if your a expert.
Bottom line, this game is worth way more than it's priced, and you'll be satisfied no matter what!
FOR THE GLORY OF ROME!

This is a great game. I currently play as carthage. I built an army of 450 units, 8 heros, 21 war elephants, and 6 shamans(I lost about 350 units, 4 shamans 2 war elephants, and 1 hero). I am about to destroy the iberians, i conquered about 90% of their land, and they conquered 0%(easy difficulty level[defensive mode]) of mine. This game rocks, and I rate it 5 star. Buy it!!!!!!!!!!!