The History Channel: Great Battles of Rome
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Publisher: Black Bean Games Genre(s): Strategy Home Page: http://www.greatbattlesofrome.com/
Two armies square off at dusk.
As the Total War series proved, there is always room for a good historical wargame and it looks like Slitherine Software has been working on numerous not-so-well known historical strategy titles along the years. I must admit upfront that I have not tried out any of their previous titles, so I must evaluate The History Channel: Great Battles of Rome mostly on its own merits - with the obvious yardstick being the current "king" of real time Rome-themed games - Rome: Total War. Great Battles of Rome puts the player at the command of a Roman or a barbarian army and presents a campaign of battles to fight through. Units gain experience and additional skills and abilities, so while more advanced units become available later, even the lowly light infantry you start with stays valuable as the the game progresses due to its combat experience. Combat is greatly simplified; initially you are presented with the rather small map of the battlefield and before the combat starts, you can position your units and give them generic initial commands - "charge", "advance", "encircle" among others. These orders save between battles, so same unit will be initially set to perform same tasks at the next battle, unless you change it's orders prior to start of the fighting. When the battle actually starts, units will try to carry out these commands - you can also give further instructions in real time but each of these cost "command points" based on the unit type, its experience and its combat stance. Command points do regenerate over time, but they are limited and mean that while you can redirect your forces and try keep some troops in reserve, your initial plan is fairly important. Battles themselves play out pretty much as you'd expect - armies of crudely animated little soldiers mash up in the battlefield in real time until one side breaks and flees.
Such conflicts are very short and the battle area greatly limits the ability to perform any fancy manoeuvres, so it's mostly down to checking out the terrain and sorting the units to match it - for example, light infantry works best in rough terrain, while cavalry charges work much better out in the open. While you obviously should also match unit types against enemy unit types, in my experience it didn't matter much which unit fought which unit as long as you had numerical superiority or more experienced troops. Sure, cavalry does work better against skirmishers than a wall of spearmen, but the differences felt much more minor than in the Total War series.
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