3 hours ago
7
Thoughts on the early access launch
I have two dreams as mayor of an island town in Nova Roma, the new early access city-building game from Lion Shield and Hooded Horse. One is to erect a fantastic water network for my people - a sturdy yet poetic lattice of aqueducts, following their deft gradations down from the mountain rivers to cisterns gracefully spaced amid the insulae, forums, circuses and temples. In my reborn Rome, no populous bathhouse, tinkling fountain, or humble latrine shall ever run dry. With my other hand, I shall raise mighty dams, diverting the rivers away from my walls to avoid flooding in times of heavy rainfall, while exposing velvety expanses of buildable, tillable soil.
My citizens will learn to treat water frivolously, swilling and pissing it away in their decadence, much as they did in the Rome of old. The fools! For when my empire of hydration is complete, I will ascend the slopes and whimsically commission one final dam. Trusting in my stewardship – for what reason have I given them to disobey? - the citizens shall toil day and night to finish the structure. Then, when the last stone is laid and the sluices slam shut, they shall gaze in horror as a tidal wave engulfs their fair metropolis and sweeps all their precious bloody bathhouses away.
Hahaha! Hahahaha! I've already made some headway towards this endgame in my first run, but there is a thorn in my side: the gods. They are, in a way, my real citizens, the ones I have to work hardest to appease. Each Roman god needs a temple, and each god demands regular tribute in the shape of either specific constructions and progress milestones or a literal resource handout.
It's a symbiotic relationship, in theory: for every divine wish sated, I get points for new technologies, including all those wonderful methods of controlling, storing or using water. But if I neglect them for too long, they materialise and throw a tantrum, racking the vicinity with disasters and plagues. I've been trying to cultivate this one apple orchard for months, but whenever the fruits are near ripe, Vulcan has a tizzy over the shortage of charcoal and summons a bunch of meteors.
It's not much fun for the fruit pickers. Little do they know that Vulcan is inadvertently sparing them from an even greater, fluid-based calamity at my hands. I'm so busy mollifying the firegod that I can't make any progress on my sinister labyrinth of aqueducts. And don't even get me started about Jupiter, who eats gold like cornflakes and then gets mad about the absence of granaries and conjures a lightning storm. The last time he did this, he burned down the temple of Ceres, who went off with her nose in a sling and cursed all my fields.
The gods aren't that bad, in what I've played of Nova Roma. You basically have to take the same approach as with toddlers: accept that they are going to freak out eventually, and try not to pamper them too frequently, because every desire satisfied resets the invisible countdown to the next outburst.
The broad problem is that there's a bunch of them and they all have competing priorities. Playing on easy difficulty – look, mate, I'm not here to strain my synapses, I just want to raise a settlement and drown it before lunchtime – I've found individual meltdowns straightforward enough to manage, but I can see how, given a larger city with more points of failure, they could be a nightmare. The game's fire simulation is unforgiving, quickly spreading between buildings and reducing them to rubble. That orchard Vulcan hates so much is right next to the dang sea, but we never seem to extinguish the flames in time.
Divine conniptions aside, Nova Roma is a familiar breed of burg-assembler. You will need: larger, posher residences for a growing migrant population; quarries and other extraction hubs, situated far away from homes to avoid sabotaging civilian happiness; storage for crops and gold; shops, wells and other dispensaries with a radial catchment area; roads and bridges to speed up the commute. You will also need watchtowers and a militia, because old Rome doesn't take kindly to your existence, and may send raider fleets if you grow too prosperous.
It's all pleasingly presented with a clean HUD and controls, though it's a bit opaque and unwieldy in places: clipping together bridges and aqueducts can be faffy when the terrain is more convoluted, and it can be hard to distinguish deposits of stone, iron and marble. It also feels zippier than your standard city-builder – I seldom hit fast-forward in my first couple of hours. Still, it would be routine to the point of ennervating without the sophistication of the water simulation, which lets you preview the effects of a dam before you commit the stone and labour. Slopping the H2O around in preview mode, seeing how this coursing, dynamic entity affects your grid of brittle structures and human needs, is immediately delightful. It reminds me a little of From Dust.
I am looking forward to the spectacle of my waterways, cascading their riches into the veins of my city. And now that I've seen how annoying it is to keep up with the Jovians, I'm having second thoughts about that closing apocalyptic flood. Perhaps I will be a nice deity. The kind that doesn't have a massive, inexplicable grudge against apples. Ah, if only I could build an aqueduct big enough to wash the gods into the sea.
English (US) ·