Europa Universalis: Rome Gold

This game is great because of Vae Victis, the expansion pack. The $[...] you will pay for it are indubitably worth it. There was a time when I would have given this game a 3/5, but Vae Victis makes this an almost perfect game.
A perfect game, that is, if you come to it with the right type of expectations. I was a newcomer to the EU series, having purchased EU 3 but never really taking time to play past the tutorial before lending it to a friend who proceeded to lose it. O, misfortune!
Anyhow, back to this game, there are things that are a bit different from other strategy games:

* You are the commander in chief, not every general in the land:
This is very important. You assign general to armies and give them marching orders. You get to decide where they will attack and even to manage the composition of your armies, but you do not have the luxury of invading the mind of your generals, taking over, and dictating battle tactics. In the same way, you are not the governor of every province. You appoint people with different attributes to your various regions and the result of the governance will depend on their attributes. Will you appoint the superb administrator who has questionable loyalty or a very loyal but corrupt and inept family member?

* It's not a clickfest type of RTS game!!! I stopped playing RTS games a while ago, because I hate trying to play "Any way You Can Click I Can Click Faster." I thought I had permanently switched to turned-based strategy, but I must admit that I like this system very much. You can alter the speed. I think there are five speed levels and depending on what you're doing you can slow down or speed up. If you're at peace and nothing is happening, speed up. If you're at war, you'd better slow and and pause before giving your orders or you'll, well, you'll see why you should have slowed down.

* Governments: there are a lot of government types: different types of tribes, republics, monarchies, empire, et cetera. Different types of governments give you different bonuses on research, military organization, ruler popularity, et cetera. With republics, there is generally a rotating consulate, with two censors and a senate. Most government types come with 5 ministerial/secretarial positions whose primary job is research in the following five areas: land/army organization, naval organization, construction, civic improvements, and religious advances. Again, in your appointments, you must decided whether you want to gain loyalty and play politics or appoint the best qualified person. It's rarely feasible to do both. The senate consists of members from for factions/parties: military, mercantilist, civic, populist (whom you will learn to hate with religious fervor) and religious. Having a consul from different factions gives you different bonuses, of course. The problem with not playing politics is that you run the risk of having the Populists take over your senate and block everything. They are anti everything and are basically isolationists, so that you run the risk of being in a situation where you cannot declare war on a weaker enemy because of lack of senatorial support. Sometimes, they become so strong that your only way out of this is to become a tyrant and proclaim a dictatorship. That, of course, decreases loyalty and makes civil wars more likely.

* Research: it's pretty straightforward, you appoint magistrates to different offices (again you have to decide whether you want competence or political advantages) and depending on their finesse level your research will be faster or slower. You can also speed up research with the right policies: making citizenship easier, making slave emancipation faster, adopting a republic confederacy...

Research gives you new types of buildings and new bonuses, but not new types of troops, unfortunately.

* Trade: also very straightforward. Each province has a resource that it exports and provinces that have different resources can export goods with one another. Trade generates benefits (for instance the ability to recruit certain types of troops or to generate more money from taxes, etc.) and of course, pecuniary remuneration. Trade routes that have been stable for years without disruption yield more bonuses.

* Diplomacy. You can try to take over the world or to build a network of alliances. Of course, it will be easier to trade with friendly nations and they are less likely to attack you while you're at war with another enemy. Allies will also usually come to war with you if you attack an enemy. When going to war with allies, the largest or most powerful nation will be the senior partner and negotiating peace with them means a cessation of hostilities with all members of the alliance. Negotiating with one of the minor members of the alliance puts you at peace with them and them only. Now, in order to attack another nation, you need to have a casus belli, literally, a case of/for war. It is not obligatory to have a casus belli, but it is better for your stability. A casus belli exists in case of poor relations, refusal of war-time assistance on the part of an ally, assassination of one of your emissaries, et cetera.

*Stability. Stability goes from -3 to 3, with 3 being the best, of course. You increase stability by sacrificing to the gods and by having a superb leader. You decrease it by passing new laws and declaring war without a casus belli. You should not attack nations who pay you tribute (the idea being that they're bribing you to keep you from attacking them) or nations with whom you gave good relations. A low stability level will make it more likely for revolts and rebellions to occur. You will need to keep armies in every corner of your territory to quell revolts when they arise, thereby limiting the number of troops you can deploy abroad.

*Barbarians: they are very annoying. Sometimes, a swarm of them come from hell or Barbaria or from wherever they come from and invade. They pillage and you can either send an army to crush them or negotiate with them and create a client state or give them land on which to settle. If you crush a barbarian army, you enslave a number of them. Slaves generate wealth and so one way of increasing your income, especially when you play as a small nation is to go barbarian hunting - make sure you don't bite more than you can chew - and capturing a lot of slaves. But watch out when the bearded men go nation hunting.

Okay, this list is in no way exhaustive, but it's probably more than too long and should give an adequate picture of what the game is like. It's very addictive and I think it's a better game than M2TW.

Try it out and enjoy.

I made the mistake of not reading all the reviews for this product and did not realize how many problems I would have with it. I think that the idea behind the game is a good one as I like history-based games like this, but the constant problem I've experienced while playing Europa Universalis Rome Gold is that the game crashes often. It's quite frustrating: I went online and downloaded the patches I was supposed to, but the problem persists. Also, this can't be a result of my system being too slow as I just purchased a new computer recently and this is the only program or game that causes my computer any problems.

This is just my opinion, but I think that the makers of this game rushed it out to market without properly testing it and haven't done a good job with the patches they've completed so far.

Please do yourself a favor and buy another/ better game.

This game was really fun. As far as gameplay I think it is on par with Rome: Total War. It is more in depth in the politics of the Ancient world and more historically accurate. The main problem with the game is that it crashes all the time. It is extremely frustrating. It also would be nice if the game didn't automatically end in 754 A.V.C. (1 A.D.). The game is worth the $6 but it has a lot of bugs.

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