nice game, but 16 GB RAM + 18 GB swap for a 700 people town are heavy

I have to start by saying I want to love this game, I really do. I've been waiting for a decent Roman city builder for a while, and this seemed really interesting. I am having some fun with the game, but unfortunately, there are some game elements that feel broken and others that feel buggy. I realise that Pax Augusta is the passion project of a single developer and that things take time, and what was created is really admirable, so I am hoping that things will improve and hopefully I can revisit both this title and review in the future with far more praise.

So let's start from the beginning:

1. Tutorial - doesn't really do much to explain things or prepare you for the constant battle of balancing your city's expansion. A typical problem is dropping in the negative or struggling to keep a positive cashflow, because the economy is extremely volatile - which leads me to:

2. The economy - build a tollhouse so you can import basic goods? Tanks your economy. Build a production chain? Tanks your economy. I am not saying that it is impossible to have a positive cash-flow, no. But what I am saying is that you will be spending most of your time inching forward, building a house, then waiting for people to move in so you'd break even and start earning money, spending swaths of your play-time staring at either your income or a resource until it fills up so you can proceed.

3. Production - I do like the production chains; they are not overly complex, but have somewhat unique ways of working. But while we're on the topic of production - here, too, your economy or rather your city can tank. Seasonal changes often means food production drops to 0, so it is paramount that you overproduce and store food. Again, the game does little to nothing to prepare you for this, until you experience it first-hand, by which point it might be too late.

4. The save game mechanic - cities are saved automatically, per game mode. You cannot restart a city or a mission - if you fail or have no way forward, too bad - you have to restart the whole thing. This is my 4th attempt to complete the story. The first couple of times, I didn't mind restarting until I got the hang of things better. However, at this point, I've had to restart the story at city 4 I believe, because 1) I didn't initially plan out the city layout properly, which resulted in me being unable to produce wood; importing wood bankrupted me, considering the map in question is very small with little space to expand the city and trying to use the landing spot (from which point you sort of start your city) to request aid from Rome for some reason wouldn't work. So what do you do, stuck like this? Start from the beginning. You want to trade, ie sell surplus goods? No such luck. Your city needs to be very developed to do this, or so I think - I haven't actually managed to get that far. 2) I've had to restart another story mode today as well. I've previously completed this mission without much issues. The game also comes with some gimmicks, and I'm not really sure what purpose they serve. These include:

5. Events - let's call them that. I've passed a particular event for this mission before - count the number of houses per type. Yay. Then input them when prompted. I've counted four times just to be sure, I have a paper next to me to write this down. Apparently, my number wasn't correct this time around, which landed me in court, which meant I had to bribe the officials (something you will do for everything, apparently), the bribe wasn't big enough, and the game was over. Bribes are something that needs to be done left and right; the right answer to how much should I bribe is always as much as possible - it's not fun, it's just annoying. But I guess all bribes are :p Which leads me to random events I've gotten in career mode - a mode that, at least for me, limits me to a small buildable city area because, for some reason, applying to offices in Rome through which you can increase your city radius essentially, doesn't work for me in career mode. But I did get events such as - build 60 tiles of forum. I felt I did, but sadly, there's no way to count that I know of (perhaps I'm wrong) other than manually, and here too, I seemed to have been off by one or two tiles. All in all, another game ruined or ended prematurely because of these mechanics.

6. Some of the bugs can be game breaking :/ A lot of the above limitations are lifted if you're going to play sandbox mode, but sandbox takes away a lot of the fun that the game can provide. I've had a city fail to load, and then not load properly at all.

I want to be very clear that I think this game has huge potential. It could be amazing, with a few loose ends tied and a bit more polish. But as it is, my experience has mainly been frustrating - rinse, repeat, try again - to the point where I feel I'm still playing out of pure determination, and not because it's fun. I cannot in good faith recommended it in its current state :(

I can’t help but feel optimistic about this game, simply because I’m desperate to find a worthy successor to Caesar III (the most beautiful Roman city-building game of all time in my opinion).

The gamplay is lovely. The idea of moving around the map, founding multiple cities, and progressing through ranks within Rome is fantastic. The level of detail is amazing, the building designs are excellent, and the residential placement system is creative and allows for some artistic neighborhood layouts.

However, the game has its issues.
It’s extremely heavy on performance and consumes system resources like crazy, even though I have a powrful PC. The production chains are a disaster. Although a patch was released yesterday that slightly improved things, many bugs remain: marble quarries don’t function, wood continues to be consumed in furnaces even when there’s no production. The game needs a clearer Ui to display resource flow and consumption more effectively.

Also, the music cuts off when zooming in on the city, probably because it overlaps with the ambient city sounds. The clouds on the overworld map are just annoying, they don’t add any visual beauty and instead obstruct the view.

Considering it’s a solo developer project, it’s honestly impressive.
And the fact that the dev is actively working on the issues makes me believe this could become one of the best Roman city-builders out there, if development continues and the dev keeps responding positively to feedback.