Grand Ages: Rome Demo Impression

Grand Ages: Rome is the spiritual successor to the Imperium Romanum series(2 being the last one). For the uninitiated, the Imperium Romanum series has always had a small loyal following while not really catching on with the general strategy audience.




Grand Ages: Rome is a strategy game that mixes elements of city building games like Caeser IV(the famous Impression games) and merges that together with combat elements of Age of Empires. What it esentially ends up is a sort of odd hybrid that may not cater to both city building or RTS gamers. With the demo released, I had a quick run through the demo.

Like all city building games, you will be tasked at building a flourishing colony in some far off place. Grand Ages: Rome follows that cliche and requires you to set up a colony. You need to build housing, provide them with food, and supporting structures to maintain them, entertain them and even military buildings to recruits units to wage a war(more on this later).




Schools are an interesting aspect as unlike other city building games, you use schools to research new buildings and technology(that can give you bonuses). All these leads to a very fine balancing act as you will need to build brickworks and lumberyards as housing constantly consumes them. But to have these buyidling you need your workforce from housing.

Later on as your city gets bigger you'll find you need to build higher level housing to get equites(they serve the backbone of your army as well as a host of other useful functions). My buildings constantly caught fire no matter how close a fountain was built. I was forced to build a forum(a requirement to build a school), a school to research prefecture building, an equite housing, and only then a prefecture building and even then I had the equite leaving because he didn't have some other resource. Oh goody! A real Nero in the making.




The building uses a zone of influence method of supply or receiving well...supplies. Instead of waiting for your citizens to move or wait for a walker, the buildings automaticaly just receive them. This of course leads to a much more easier system but your cities can be a bit of a mess as you try to just plonk down a building without worrying about the actual layout.




Speaking of citizenry, your plebs are of course present but only as a graphical oversight. You cant interact with them or find out about anyone's mood. They just go about doing their daily business. You can zoom out to the main map which shows a wider area of the entire map. You can plan your expansion based on the mineral deposit in this map.

The combat is unfullfiling. It's no Rome Total War, so don't expect to have any impact by flanking your enemies or using cavalry to crash into missile units. The combat is strictly based on numerical value rather than actual tactics.




Units can gain experience and you can train them to increase their experience. This improves their attack or movement speed but it isn't exactly clear what are these improvements though. All in all, the game is a mixed bag that never really does the combat or the city building as well as games that do them exclusively.

Download the demo here