This review was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor. Its format does not match our own but we support its content.

In the realm of city-builders and strategy titles, CDV Software has always aimed to take the standard mold and twist it just enough to create an affordable seller that’s a little (though not much) different from what PC gamers are used to. Glory of the Roman Empire, the company’s latest city-building simulation, appears very typical on the surface: it’s got an ancient civilization that built stuff, 3D graphics, and casts the player as God/Governor. The twist here is that CDV sought to create a sim that focused on the building and managing of a city, and not on combat and complexities; to this end the game encourages you to zoom in and observe the building and maintenance of your grand creations while retaining simplistic gameplay. The problem, however, is that not only is the feature a novelty, but Glory of the Roman Empire fails to become a stepping stone on to more intense city-builders; instead, players will be switching sims in the hopes of more functional, rewarding, and less frustrating gameplay.

As with all city-builders, there’s not much of a plot running events in Glory. Players are cast as a Roman governor in the service of a Caesar, and are tasked with completing building objectives for the glory of Rome. The majority of these objectives involve the creation of cities that will further extend Rome’s boundaries (and treasury); to enhance the game’s reputation of being an introductory sim, CDV sliced the primary objective (get your city up) into several secondary ones, which makes the gameplay slightly easier to handle. Now, instead of worrying about building an entire city, your immediate concern is planting a wheat farm and employing some bakers – sounds easy enough, but exchange “wheat farm” with “philosopher academy” and “bakers” with “philosophers” and we’ve got one hell of an increase in difficulty. 

The creation of a city in Glory involves four basic steps: spotting resources, building homes to obtain those resources, getting your crafters (i.e., bakers) up to refine those resources (i.e., bake bread), and then setting up distribution centers to filter these new goods throughout the economy. On the side, you’ll launch the production of impressive architectural feats, including archs of triumph, pristine golden statues, temples dedicated to specific gods, tiny yet immaculate marble heads on pedestals, and lots and lots of gardens. It seems that you’ll be building the perfect Roman oasis, if you can get past the details.

At the start of each initial mission (remember that each city you head will have several), you’re given a town center, 10 slaves, a small patch of road, a few houses, a well, and an aqueduct on the outskirts of town. Town centers keep track of your city’s status (which ranges from “small town” to “megapolis” ), house your pool of slaves, and control your supply depots, where goods periodically received from Rome or produced in excess are stored. The aqueducts can be extended and enable you to plot wells further inland, which keeps the population healthy (or at least healthier) and happy. To maintain the homes you’re given and to build a plethora of new things, your first objective is to set up a woodcutter’s lodge, where the woodcutters will stash the trees they cut down. Now the real gameplay begins, as you can’t hire woodcutters without houses (workers have to live somewhere), and you can’t build homes without the timber produced by woodcutters. This is the quintessential catch of Glory of the Roman Empire: practically everything you build requires a labor force, which requires that you raise more homes, which requires additional building of everything else, which again requires more homes, and so on.

After you’ve got timber production secured, the next concern is food, and Glory offers a decent variety: gamers can plant wheat farms, vineyards, and... pig farms, in addition to oil farms (a nice export) and flax farms (which produce the linen used by tailors to create cloth). Not far from the farms you’ll probably find a nice patch of land for basic industry, where you can build butcher shops (to create sausage), bakers (bread), and tailors (again... cloth); to increase the supply of meat, fishing huts can also be erected on pre-designated spots. For a tad bit more variety, CDV also included taverns (which distribute wheat porridge, wine, etc.,) to meet your poorer citizenry’s needs.

Beyond basic food production comes the management of larger industry. Mostly this involves the gathering of more resources; players can build mines for marble, iron, stone, and gold, the latter of which goes straight to the town center and is primarily used to purchase more slaves while the other items help raise buildings and statues. As mines (and for that matter, farms and crafters) are usually far from the town center and its supply depots, CDV wisely utilized the warehouse feature to speed up the production and transportation of goods. Warehouses serve as town centers for the immediate market and include 10 slaves a piece; if the work load becomes too much, players can also add slave shelters (again, 10 slaves each), which add slaves to the local warehouse’s jobs. The most important aspect of a warehouse is that it enables gamers to quickly get food from a farm to a warehouse and then to the town center and all other warehouses, where slaves can then take that food and deliver it to crafters so that the process can repeat itself. For more distribution concerns, Glory uses markets (which I like because they provide an instant tab of what resources are going in and out of the economy, and how fast) and taverns (which also give you the town gossip, i.e. who’s complaining about what). 

Despite the heavy focus on industry, redistribution, and keeping those slave shelters full, Glory works to keep you constantly concerned about your citizens’ needs, because the last thing a governor wants is an angry Roman mob setting fire to the bakeries that aren’t producing enough bread. Though taverns/town gossip provide some details on what the people want, altars – where the townspeople run for basic worship – give you lists of who’s happy, content, disillusioned (“Me thinks that lazy gov’nor drinks too much”), angry (“There’s not enough bread”), and rebellious (“It’s a scandal that there isn’t enough wine”). In typical Roman fashion, throwing money at the problem by donating gold to the altars lightens some of the complaints, but the only way to keep those ungrateful mobs at bay is to build more farms, bakeries, and butcher shops.

For increased difficulty, CDV also added more unique aspects of Roman life. Players can build general temples, philosopher academies, theaters and public baths, which all affect the prestige of nearby homes (along with altars); as that prestige soars, the owners upgrade from their shabby huts to comfortable villas – and richer residents require both more standard goods and a larger variety of them, as well as access to temples, academies, theaters, and baths.

Doubtless you’ll have more than the occasional riot, in which case prefectures (Roman firefighters/police officers) come in handy. The prefects put out the flames, scurry the mob, and even help defend the city when it’s under attack. For more protection, some cities require that you build a barracks and man each one with 20 soldiers, who utilize wooden or iron weaponry produced at certain shops along with a lot of cloth (armor?)

The most intense and enjoyable moments in CDV’s latest sim occur when the city is flooded by angry, anti-Roman barbarian hordes, as it’s the only time the music changes, the war drums beat, and the player finally sees some action. Barbarians typically set their sights on one particular Roman building at a time, which they then set aflame; if there are any prefects in the area, the barbarians will target them. If you’re fortunate enough to have a full barracks, however, the soldiers will automatically follow their captain out to slay the heathens, and a battle commences. As 20 soldiers are usually not enough to handle ruthless barbarians, having another barracks stocked and ready to go is a good idea, as even if you win the battle you’ve got to lay siege to the barbarian village in order to win the war. 

Managing these various aspects of your city simultaneously can prove a daunting task, so CDV threw in three convenient features. The first of these is a settlement overview, which gives a listing of how many of each type of building is in the works, is fully staffed, and/or is already up. The economy overview does the same, only with resources, and lets you know what goods you’re running out of and what you’ve stocked up on. The third feature is the game’s menu, which isn’t overlaid on the screen but invisible until you right-click to bring it up. Glory’s menu system is extremely simplified and breaks down into production (food), resource (mines, timber), aesthetic (roads, statues), public (baths, theaters), basic (homes, warehouses), support (trade posts, herbalists), and monument bubbles from which specific build options are selected. To test out the full list of everything you can create, you can opt to launch the campaign mode (complete with a tutorial and a handy aide, but it’s slower) or jump into challenge mode (which features bonuses to get you off your feet quicker) or free building mode (where you select missions ranging from easy to difficult).

But CDV is billing Glory of the Roman Empire as an introductory city-sim and not a game focused on combat or the miniscule operations of everything built under the Roman sun – which explains the game’s aesthetics and novelty features. To excite you at the prospect of building stuff, Glory allows you to zoom-in via the mouse wheel to get a better look at your carpenter raising the next house. From the ground level, you’ll spy slaves lugging goods from place to place (with tiny shackles on their feet – very cute), women working in the fields, priests performing rituals, fishermen reeling in a catch, traders exchanging goods, and little children at play. Clicking on a person brings up his details, including name, job, and comment (“I want more sausage”). If the populace is moving a little slow for your taste, feel free to toggle the game’s speed up, and if you’d like a traditional Roman feel, you can always turn the Latin option on (this presents menus, instructions, comments, and some voiceovers in Latin, which is cool even if you uneducated masses can’t read it – go Latin!)

Glory’s zoom-in feature is enhanced by the game’s visuals, which – while quite bland – give you some lovely water ripples, trees blowing in the wind, and detailed buildings/farms. Character models are of the tiny standard variety and are obviously recycled from pig farmer to wheat farmer and priest of Fortuna to priest of Bacchus, but there’s at least some amount of differentiation between job types (herbalist and priest, for example), which is a treat because you’re supposed to be zoomed-in and following citizens throughout their daily lives. Some of the terrain is highly detailed and massive, such that we’ve got very large lakes/coasts, mountainous regions, and forests. The realistic (non-vibrantly colored) 3D visuals offer a pleasant touch for those used to 2D city-sim classics, and are better experienced by holding down shift and using the mouse to turn the environment, which gives you a closer look at your people hustling around town. The only actual effects you’ll spot include flames, smoke, and dust (those messy carpenters), but as a real-time, in-game clock is included, you’ve got a smidgen of graphical variety (watching the sun set over the land is a bonus). 

One good thing about being a thorough reviewer is that by the time you reach this section, you no longer feel guilty about trashing a product that people spent years of their lives on, so let the trashing begin. Often, before you even start building a city, your winning/losing has already been decided, as whether you enjoy yourself and craft a lovely polis or sink in misery is directly determined by how much usable (flat) land area you’re given at the start. Cities like Syracuse get frustrating fast when you’ve got a small section of land surrounded by hillsides and instructions to increase the building of fancier homes (villas), as that requires a lot more space to plot baths, theaters, and temples next door to the residents. Simply put: you can’t do that which requires resources you don’t have. Like land.

It’s also annoying that the mission instructions are broken up, because I’m coming back to the same city anyway and will eventually have extended it to the point that the anonymous Caesar desires. Some of those instructions are also vague; in the final Syracuse mission, you’re tasked with building a megapolis by having so many villas – only you don’t have a clue how many villas that takes, because the game doesn’t tell you. You could build 30 villas and not move on, because planning a city requires knowing what stuff you need to get up, where, and how often. More annoying features abound, including those little pop-up icons at the top of the screen that let you know when some fool on the other side of town is starting to riot or some woman at the vineyard is sick. Because there are always problems the icons are always present, and there’s no option to turn off the notices – and I don’t need to know that such and such building is too far away from town, because I already know it is because I built it.

And when I built it, I had very little control over how quickly it was built and how often its resources were re-supplied, because while I’m able to move sites up in building priority, I can’t order my slaves to drop everything until the new pig farms are running; this becomes especially frustrating when half my city is burning down the other half because I’m low on sausage (and someone tell me why a man low on bread sets fire to the bakery of all places – does he think the bread produces itself?) This gets even more irritating when buildings sit, just one piece of timber from completion, for hours, as I should be able to just point, click, and order some pitiful slave to take a plank of wood to the desired spot. But of course I can’t. 

Back to Glory’s typical gameplay, there are two major problems, the first of which is that I’m returning to cities I’ve already screwed up because I’m learning the mechanics as well as what the game should be doing by itself and isn’t (like transporting linen from one side of town to a warehouse so that it can shoot out another warehouse on the other side and visit a tailor). Because you’re revisiting cities you’ve built – probably unwisely – it’s very easy to get stuck on the latter missions, and you can’t replay each Syracuse mission so that you can beat the fourth one. Another concern is circular gameplay. As your biggest problem is getting enough goods to your people so they don’t rebel, you’ve got to build more markets, warehouses, taverns, bakeries, tailors, and butcher shops, but this means erecting new homes and catering to the needs of an increased (wealthier, and therefore bitchier) populace. More people means more markets, warehouses, butcher shops, and so on, which will eventually require more farms, which will require more workers – and in the words of Ronald Reagan, “here we go again.” The constant struggle with the game’s requirements can overwhelm you very quickly, as you never feel like you’re making any progress when there’s always some idiot ready to burn down the world because he’s got to walk around the corner for a well and he’d rather have one in his front yard. Tough cookies. 

Some of the game’s features aren’t even taken advantage of. For example, gardens and beautification amount to nothing. Usually in city-builders, plotting a ring of gardens around a house will increase that home’s prestige/“desireability” and encourage immigrants to move in, but in Glory beautification – typical gardens, statues, roads – does nothing, making it another novelty you can do without.

The three gameplay modes – campaign, challenge, and free – are as far from fresh as a PC city-sim can get, and I’ve already mentioned how you can’t go back and repeat missions from the campaign mode – you’ve got to do them in order, so prepare to get stuck at least once. Challenge mode contains features that should have been offered during regular campaign, meaning bonuses that allow for some re-supplying from Rome. Free mode amounts to jumping in and building a stress-free city, but unfortunately the game mechanics prevent that, so what’s the point? 

The game’s presentation is quite bland, though that’s probably because CDV went for more realistic (that means green/grey) terrain. I do have a problem with the same background music for every mission I undertake, however, and it’s pathetic when I look forward to barbarian invasions because the music changes and something interesting actually befalls my city.

Now to be a touch petty: depending upon your system and how extensive your city is, you're going to encounter some lag. Mostly the game is still playable, but you will find yourself in situations where the fact that you can see every worker, child, elderly person, and slave going about his day slows the game to a crawl - at which point it's time to re-start the mission.

Billed as the Roman world’s city-builder 101, Glory of the Roman Empire is a functional game that moves you away from the conquests of other sims (literally) and toward resource management. If you tire of raising armies and would much rather plant a dozen wheat farms and watch those bakers go, CDV’s latest offering hits the spot. However, be prepared to spend several hours in frustration as you tackle the mechanics, rioters, annoying notices, periodic lag, and barbarian hordes. Everyone who isn’t a business major, stay away. 

It’s functional, but there are some extremely irritating problems.

Bland, but workable and in line with the game’s realistic tone. Nice character details.

You get one non-annoying song, two if you count the invasion tune, and sound effects are basic.

Starts off well but plummets as it overwhelms the player. When things work, though, it’s fun.

If you enjoy spending hours fighting rioters, you’ll finish, but chances are you won’t.