Review:
Grand Ages: Rome Review

What did the Romans do for us? Okay apart from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health. I pondered this very question as I watched my once prosperous Roman city being burnt to the ground by the angry Plebeians I had employed to work at my various butcheries, pig farms, brickworks and quarries. The answer was clear. Not enough.

Grand Ages: Rome is a mixture of real time strategy and city building from developers Viva Media, set against the backdrop of the Roman empire. You start off on the game map with a single building (the Outpost) and must build the rest of your city around it. Each building has a blue circle representing it’s radius of effectiveness. When first building an Insula for your workforce to live in, you must ensure it’s radius is contains at least one other building. This radius also affects the function of each building. Its all well and good building your butchery within the radius of several living quarters, but if it is out of the radius of a pig farm, then no meat can be produced and sent to your hungry workforce, rendering it useless. This lends a great amount of spatial management to the game, as you should always be taking notice of how much space you have around your buildings. Things such as steepness of terrain and ground littered with boulders also restrict where you can build, although steepness can be remedied by building a stone platform on the side of the hill. Not allowing you to place buildings outside of the radius of their essential counterparts or on uneven terrain is a good idea, meaning that the player does not make many mistakes when it comes to laying out the foundations of their city. It can also be argued that the game holds your hand too much in this department, but you will soon forgive this problem once your city is fully functional and lively. 

Building in this game is made incredibly easy by a neat and tidy radial menu. There are 6 options in the radial menu: Basic (living quarters, fountains, bridges) Production (quarries and brickworks) Food (farms and various shops to supply food to your town) Public (schools and places of entertainment like arenas) Military (for academies and camps) Commerce (ports, taverns and inns) and Monuments and Religion (temples and statues to give your populace something to worship). Simply click on one of the menu buttons and it opens up a sub-menu with all of the buildings in that category. From there it’s as simple as clicking on the building you want and placing it in the area you want. You can also rotate the building using the mouse wheel to make it fit better, or if you’re letting loose with you inner city-planner. The building system is overall very satisfying to use, and the promise of bonuses rewarding ideal placement gives the player something more to work towards.