9 – Nemesis of the Roman Empire (Imperium II: La Conquista de Hispania)
Thanks to the great work of its Spanish publisher (FX Interactive), this game developed by Bulgarian Haemimont Games(famous for Tropico 3 and 4) was probably much more popular in Spain than anywhere else, so probably many people here has never heard about it. This game may seem like a simple RTS (you control one of four civilizations – Gauls, Roman, Punic or Iberian and have to destroy your enemies, but it has some innovations that made me love it.
First of all, the game gets rid of all the resource gathering and building construction of most RTS: you start with a city – with all its buildings - that automatically produces gold, and can conquer villages (that produce food) and fortress (with different uses) that you can’t destroy nor build. But this simplification is used in order to strengthen the strategic deepness of the game: food is needed to avoid attrition of your troops and the cities, so you have to create supply lines from your villages to your cities or fortress and bring food with your armies if you are raiding outside your territory, and the gold produced in a city (or fortress) can only be used on it, unless you move it physically to other place (and can be stole by the enemy). Simplification is used also in your army control: units can be assigned to a general (“hero”) and follow him, what simplifies a lot the control of big armies.
The game has other virtues: Both units and heroes earn experience with each battle, what makes them more powerful but also more valuable in case of loss, each one of the four civilizations has pretty different kind of units and technologies, what makes playing with each one different (and if you conquer another civilization city you can use its techs and units). The game also has an option to use magic and some kind of artifacts that can be used by heroes or other units, but I usually play with those options off, although if you enjoy an experience with some RPG flavor, you may like it. One of the best things in the game, though, is that it has a pretty good IA (with some exceptions, like being sometimes a bit incompetent sieging well defended fortress), at least in the higher difficulty, what make single player game very challenging: more than once the IA has been able to swing a battle I thought I had won, defending itself cleverly or with an unexpected attack.
