Pausable Real-Time Strategy on a seamlessly zoomable, historically accurate map? Yes please! It's kind of like a combination of the Paradox titles and Total War, which, in my book, makes a winner. What we see here, are the very beginnings of the future of strategy games. This is a must have for all strategy fans and history buffs. Innovative and truly unique, Hegemony is developed by a small developer with limited funding, and sometimes it shows, but really, I cannot recommend this enough.

An interesting real time strategy game. You are Phillip conquering the city states of Greece to create your Hegemony. It is certainly a game that shows the trouble of directly maintaining a large empire. In the beginning, you only control a few cities which means it is easy to micromanage your troops. The map is very large, consisting of hundreds of cities, that you most likely need to capture to win.

The big issue in this game is logistics. Troops need food, cities need supply lines with other cities and farms for food. You need supply lines to mines to secure income. There is no way to conquer the map with just one army. Troops need to resupply and replenish. Philip starts out surrounded by enemies around him. Expanding too fast in one direction will leave you overstretched.

Some cities are very bothersome to invade. No farmland to sustain your armies means you need to either bring workers or sheep to resupply food. When you get there, they seem to have an army far too large for their food to accomodate, and you better hope that you win otherwise you have to assemble the troops again and march all the way across the map to try again.

You also need to watch that cities don't starve. If you conquered a city and they have no food, they will start to rebel. Ignore it too long, and you have to march troops to reconquer the city. Repeat that a couple dozen times and include a couple Greek powerhouses like Thebes and Athens that will constantly raid your cities.

And then there is the whole land of Persia which seems to take up half the map. I haven't reached there yet, so I can't see how hard it will be. It will be a huge pain to muster troops from halfway across Greece to invade though.

Buy this game if you like real time strategy games that start simple and become logistical nightmares as you progress.

Good

This game is soooo much better than what i had expected. These guys really need some sort of marketing team because this game is legitamite but not known at aall. deffinetly buy this game if you love athens and sparta, ancient greece, RTS's and fun, 10/10

It's as promising as it tells it is, except for diplomacy which is kindof limited but more than enough (heck, it's greek city-states: Why ally with neighbours while you have your own hegemony/league?).

Also, the game allows you to play differend kinds of factions with differend kinds of gameplay (for example, the Paeonians are mainly a cavalry faction with no hoplites, the Illyrians got no cavalry while having a huge empire so they have to focus on intelligent defending, and Crete has to rely on naval raiding-conquering tactics).

I've played this game over 200 hours (not on steam i've also got a non drm version). This is one of the best strategy games i have ever played. It has is problems :AI only raides and not really attack you, AI armies builds are kinda strange and AI does some stupid things like not changing the home of a unit without one. But the scale, the managing of food/units/reserves etc. is extremly fun and satisfying. Zooming in and out feeling like a real commander, caputering slaves and let them carry food, fighting over flocks of sheep (to be honest that is cool :P) and the biggest plus is the campaign witch you can play on your own pace, you can follow the missions you wanted and in your own order. I just an all out great strategy game like I never seen before. It is a bit dated and part II is coming (Rome still in early acces). Just buy this game, have fun and wait for Rome to go out of early acces and have even more fun. The developpers are also great guys, listining to the community via there own forum and the steamhub, support indie devs and buy this hidden gem! I give this game a 9 out of 10.

A deeply clever little game. Not for everyone, and a few (modest) historical liberties have been taken, but it models ancient warfare in a way that feels authentic -- much more so than the Total War series, which it superficially resembles. In fact, the Hegemony series' zoomable realtime map is what CA should have been doing years ago.

This is a game about operational planning as much as tactics and strategy -- army composition, march order, recon, logistics and timing are essential to victory -- and each region is almost a sort of puzzle to be solved. Approach it as a new kind of challenge, rather than a conventional 4x, and you might be pleasantly surprised.

I bought this during the summer sale but it well worth the standard price. Its a simple concept (raise troops, pay them, feed them, attack your neighbors) but finding the right balence makes it much more complex than you might think. Definitely a different spin than any of the other strategy games you might also be playing, EUIV, Total War, CKII.

• Supply Lines/Logistics- Your cities each have a predetermined number of trade routes based on the economic power of that city. Some have 2, some have 16. These can connect to farms (which produce food, with varying amounts for each season), mines (which produce gold when worked by workers or slaves captured in battle), and they connect to other cities. Food moves along these routes with different capacities based on how long it is. Some routes that are very close (like a city to the farm next to it) can carry up to 100 a week and longer routes usually start at a base level of 15 per week, but can be upgraded by paying gold. Your units replentish their losses only if they are on one of these supply lines.
  
  
• Finances- You don't have a treasury like in other games, only an income. Your finances are viewed as a weekly income/cost. Mines produce up to 80 gold a week whereas upgraded roads can cost up to 90 as well as your troops having a weekly upkeep. So at any point your spending overtakes your income, units don't get paid and their moral starts to drop. The same will happen with food, but you don't have a kingdom production/expenditure because food can only get to your troops and cities if you have sufficient supply lines.
  
  
• Battles- Your troops fight in real time on the campaign map like Paradox games but you can deploy and position them like in Total War with bonuses if your cavalry charges a unit or if you flank an enemy. A unit's moral drops a little for each soldier that dies and it will rout if the moral drops to 0. Cities act in a similar way but with a number assigned to its seige strength. When you are sieging a city, its constatly dropping, with larger hits if you use catapaults, and when it gets to 0, it becomes yours. If a city or fort has a garrison, it will shoot back at you. When a unit routes, it will regroup at its home city and replentish its losses. This will always happen, unit don't get destroyed, even if every troop dies.
  
  
• Cities- When you retake a city that is part of your culture or basiaclly within your historical territory, it becomes part of your empire. You can recruit native units, the same you can recruit at your capital, and they can change their home city to any with the same culture. If you have every unit with its home set as your capital, they will only replentish its number from that city so it's best to try to spead them out. For example, if your capital is in the middle of your empire and your troops take losses on the edge, manpower will be taken from its home and move along supply lines to that unit. Cities recouperate manpower slowly and when it's at 0, your troops won't fill their ranks unless you change their home city and they recruit from there.
  
  
• Culture- When you expand and take a neighboring city that is not native, they will remain hostile to your occupation. This manifests as needing a garrison to prevent it from rebelling and joining its original nation. You can station your own troops from native cities, hire allied troops if that city is friendly/allied to you, or hire mercinaries from that city at an increased cost. They will have a specific culture and can have their home city assigned to any city with a shared culture.
  
  
• Final thoughts- There are still other aspects, generals, naval combat, objectives/rewards, population and migrants, stockpiling food, etc. but the tutorial covers these aspects. The tutorial is only educational for the first hour or so, like I said, simple concept. The difficulty comes with taking these basic rules and balencing the food and gold across your empire, your troops to attack enemies and your garrisons to counter raids and supress uprisings. The introductory capmaign starts you as Phillip of Macedon as it guides your expansion. After a bit though, you have learned the game enough that you don't need a tutorial and just need some practice. I easily sunk 40 hours into that capmaign just taking my time, finding the most efficient way to set up supply lines and cheapest ways to maintain garrison without depleating my manpower reserves.
  
  That being said, I highly reccomend this game. The intro campaign lasts long enough to justify the price and it has plenty of replayability because you can go a different direction because the map is enormous. There are also other campaigns with the Peloponnesian War being very complex as well as a sandbox mode- play as any faction with no rules or time limits.

Has something a lot of strategy games are missing: supply lines. Every war campaign feels much more authentic now. You can also organize troops in cool looking battle lines with historical commanders in charge. Sometimes you don't have enough space for them though.
What I think is very awesome about the game is the quest system through which the scenario is being developed. It is like when you zoom out you see a pillar in every region which tells you about the respective history based quest line. Looks very nice and fitting. And the story is not strictly linear! RECOMMEND.

This is one for the masochists.

This game has the X factor no doubt. It keeps you coming back. It is atmospheric. But by the God's it has issues. The pathfinding is atrocious. The controls are clunky as hell. The logistics is simplistic, and vital, and yet pretty poorly implemented. Often flows of supplies are low for no obvious reason - particularly in far flung empires (no doubt that is 'realistic' in that projecting powers far beyond your borders over the ocean is no doubt hard as heck, however in this case I reckon supply flows are just poorly implemented and by luck that emulates such a problem).

Towards the end I had to resort to a mad blitzkrieg of city hopping across Eastern Odrysia just to keep my large army fed. I had to sack a city, steal all it supplies and charge on. I couldn't stop because I would starve to death. I couldn't establish a base and proect my supply lines, because the enemy had a seemingly endless horde of zerg javeliners coming at me, and I couldn't keep supply lines open. I would have brought a smaller army but I needed a huge one to deal with all the zerg. Are the enemy even affected by supplies if they aren't in your line of sight or what? How did they feed all those javeliners? Do the Eastern Odrysians have nothing to do but breed more javeliners? Do they have long winters or something? Sheesh!

AI in the game also seems to be rubbish. It seems to amount to - 'CHARGE!' with difficulty coming from saturation of attention. i.e. if you are fighting one big battle you can be sure the AI will randomly raid you in three or more different spots while your attention is elsewhere. And it can be hard to get a moments peace - you are always leaping from one fight to another, saving your braindead troops because they WILL stand there and get slaughtered if you don't give them orders.

The AI also cheats rampantly since it always turns up in a spot where you are weak, at just the right moment. How the heck do they ALWAYS know where I am thin, when they haven't even sent a scout and have no watchtowers? Thismeans you kind of have to conquer huge swathes of ground away from your core targets, just so you don't get have your empire (and sanity) destroyed by death of a thousand cuts - you have to cover your flanks and shut down any spot they can stage any kind of attack from (again 'realistic' I suppose, but quite tedious, and I;d kill for their spies!).

Then there is the 'diplomacy'. Ugh. Everyone is at war with you, unless you make a truce by shelling out big $$$, and then you can never break it. THEY can ask for more money, THEY can come into your land and occasionally burn and destroy things (but only a little), THEY can pinch your sheep. But all YOU can do is cross land if you do it quick, before a timer expires and they decide you are at ware again. Even when you have destroyed 75% of an empire and can easily wreck the rest they still usually expect big $$$ for these 'truces'. But you will still make the truce, just so you don't have to hunt down every last remaining enemy, and so they can't raid you as soon as you try to look elsewhere.

And you better not make a truce before you are sure there are no 'campaign' objectives to do in their turf, because if you do you may have gimped yourself since breaking it is effectively forever. This means you may have to put up with incessant raiding for longer than you might wish, just to be sure it is safe to make peace.

Plus the map doesn't tell you who owns what very clearly either which means you sometime aren't sure if the turf of one lot you want to make peace with is between you and somewhere you need to be ('cause you can't cross it unless you are faster than that timer). And movement speed is glacial, so you spend a lot of time hurrying up to wait for someone to get somewhere.

Oh, and the sheep. Dear god, the sheep. In a slow game, they... move... even... more... slowly...! I actually have sheep in real life. I live on a little farm. My sheep are way faster than the sheep in this game! Holy Jeebus! If I was in ancient Greece, I could revolutionise the food supply chain with fast sheep. I would have ancient fast food chains.

There were cool moments - getting caught between two huge armies, making peace with ones, and then hiding behind their army as they attacked the other one (which I didn't know would happen).

Or wincing as a huge Athenian army approached my battered forces, only for it to be attacked in the rear by a huge Persian one (mainly everything goes for you first, but I guess the Athenians were in the way so they ended up attacking them trying to get to me, LOL).

And my favourite - seeing a ginormous Spartan army coming, fighting a delaying action with a handful of troops against them while I raised an even more ginormous army to stop the Spartans. Then after the big fight (I won) came the the aftermath where remnant Spartans and my remnant troops hunted each other through the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Southern Greece... for FOOD!. Because all the stupidly big armies ate everything in sight and it took years to rebuild the food supplies down there (no, they weren't literally eating each other in a cannibalistic frenzy, but I like to imagine they were!). This went on until finally came the saviours - a ginormous flock of sheep I sent from EVERYWHERE ELSE to feed Southern Greece. They took years to arrive, but man there was a big BBQ when they did.

In no other game have I saved myself by depopulating an entire country of mutton.

Yeah. So, it is addictive, and it is epic, and it has its moments, and it probably catches the feeling of managing a giant early empire quite well. So I have to recommend it.

But now, if you don't mind, I need to go and delete this nightmare from my computer.