Imperium Romanum is a city-builder set in the ancient Roman Empire. If you're thinking, "Hey that sounds just like the old Caesar series" then you're not far off. Much like the old Sierra series, Imperium Romanum places you in a series of towns and settlements and asks you to build housing, establish farming and resource production, and set up industries. You'll also build defenses and armies to protect yourself from barbarian hordes and conquer nearby villages.

I think Imperium Romanum takes a slightly more casual and less complex approach to the genre. First, at least in the missions I played, each level seemed to be completely contained and it didn't seem as though your city carried over throughout multiple stages of the campaign. Rather, each mission starts in a different settlement and gives you goals to accomplish there and then you move on to the next. There is a sandbox gameplay option so if you want to build a super-city, you can do that, but the campaign missions don't seem to be cumulative.

Combat is rather simplistic and basically your troops are limited to a couple of formations, neither of which can actually be changed on the fly once battle has begun.

One thing I did notice here is that unlike a lot of the "historical" city management titles, the game doesn't skirt around the issue that slavery was a common practice. Slaves will do all the building and hauling here, and they get separate "housing" and will not be able to fill the "free" jobs that your settlers will take. If you overwork your slaves (i.e. don't build enough slave shelters) then they are likely to revolt until you get their workload under control.

The graphics are pretty detailed and there is a nice variety of industries and buildings you can introduce in your town.

Overall, it's a nice little city builder for the history buffs, and it offers a more forgiving approach to planning than some of the other similar games I've played. (read this as: I never had to break out a spreadsheet to lay out perfect housing and industrial blocks in Imperium Romanum in order to beat a level. Then again, I might have been an overly compulsive Caesar player. ymmv)

It's hard to look at a Roman city-building game and not think of the venerable Caesar series, but I encourage you to put it out of your mind. There are no wandering agents and maze-like roadways to be found here, but there is some solid construction and management. Having more in common with titles like Children of the Nile or Tropico, Imperium Romanum takes a simple system and spreads it across a bewildering array of scenarios and challenges.

Each scenario sets you as the praetor of a city somewhere in the empire, anywhere from Alexandria to Pompeii to Rome itself. Most of the time you'll be starting from just a forum and stockpile, but some scenarios give you a whole city right from the get-go. From there you have to build houses, mines, farms, woodcutters, and other basics to get the town running. Once your settlement is established you can start looking into trade routes, fortifications, temples, schools, and other advanced constructions. There's a fair number of buildings to build, and you'll be building most of them in each scenario.

What keeps things fresh as you bounce from province to province are the scenario conditions. Many will limit you in some way, like not having any wood or stone on the map. Instead you'll get supplied by Rome while you get established, and then have to fulfill some goal or start trading to make up the difference. These goals and events are conveyed through the tablet system, which you can trigger whenever you want. You can accept up to three tablets at once, and they can give new objectives, bonuses, or serious curveballs. It's an interesting system to direct the scenarios but some of the tablets can be unexpectedly brutal. One map tasks you with establishing a port, and one of the tablets about halfway through is a tidal wave that wipes out anything you've built up to that point.

I know that sounds absolutely terrible, but Imperium Romanum is so relaxed and simple that it's hard to get mad at it. Buildings are usually constructed swiftly and your resource production is very generous in its quantities. There is warfare as well, but it's as simple as building barracks and sending your regiments out to conquer barbarians. About the only real frustration I've found is that our citizens have needs that must be fulfilled to keep them happy and out of trouble, and after six hours and as many scenarios I still can't keep them from turning irate and rebellious. Even if you build them everything you can think of, some of them always seem to get mad about something.

Part of the problem is a lack of information available. You have almost no charts or graphs for your citizens or your resources, and clicking on buildings only gives general information about their contents. This means there's a rough learning curve while you figure out how many wheat farms and bakeries it takes to supply your citizens with bread, but like I mentioned, the game is too relaxed to ever really punish you for it. There's no fail state that I can see, and citizens never move out, instead opting to complain endlessly and maybe riot.

The presentation does a lot to endear Imperium Romanum in spite of its shortcomings as well. The clean, detailed graphics make for picturesque settlements and countryside in every scenario. You can follow your citizens around and watch them gesticulate wildly as they chat or pray. Construction is a bit unpolished, going from a pile of materials to a whole building in the blink of an eye, but the buildings themselves are magnificent. The sound design is fine with its understated bustle and alerts, and it includes some oddly jazzy tunes as well.

While not one of the best city builders I've played, Imperium Romanum still manages to be one of the most enjoyable. The charming look and feel of the game, coupled with the simple building and tablet guidance, make this a great title to relax with. You're bound to run into some small faults and frustrations, but odds are it will win you back across its wealth of scenarios. It might be a bit barebones, but there's a good heart in there that makes it worth a look.



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Really quite fun. Probably the best city-building game I've played. I like it better than CivCity: Rome. This is a lot like Sim City Societies, but with some actual goals. Societies suffered from the problem of "well, now my city has enough X to make more Y. And now I have enough Y to build Z. Great. So?" There was no reason to do anything.

Imperium Romanum is a city builder with very definite goals. "Grow your town to X population. But in this scenario you can only farm wheat." So to keep you upper crust happy, you'll need to export a lot of grain and import things like meat and cloth. There's also a military aspect, but it's somewhat downplayed. This isn't an RTS; it's a city builder. You definitely need a militia, but you don't need to be a tactical genius to make them effective.

You need to keep your economy going by producing... something, keep production running by growing your population, keep your population happy by importing luxuries.

This literally was my Rome fix while I waited for Total War Rome II to be developed. But its a gem on its own. Looking to kill some time at a coffee shop or blow some steam - get out of the real world for a minute - good one. Especially if you're a rome history buff like me.

Tedious game. Mediocre at best. Old games like Zeus and Pharoah still surpass this game by miles. I'd say skip this one and get Caesar instead.


You can't build too far from your Forum and will require Marketplaces to expand to other portions of the map. The problem is that each building will require a house nearby to employ it.

You won't be able to design a city that has different zones (residential, industrial, agriculture and so on) everything becomes mashed up.

This in turn creates a snowball effect. For example: You want to build a mining camp for a marble deposit that is on the outskirts of your city. So you create a marketplace, the mine, then houses.

Here's the fun part: The houses will require supporting structures e.g. bakery, altar, butcher. Now each building will require a certain material upkeep which leeches into your economy as well.

So your little expansion becomes a city of it's own. I tried ignoring their need for clothes and sausages but then that little town became rebellious. So for one little mine on the outskirts, I had to create a new town and the supporting structures to it.

The people in the houses seem to randomly choose their jobs. So you might have some unemployment in one sector and a lack of employees in the other. This game just becomes very grating after a while.

Why do they want so many sausages anyways? Every game it's always about sausages.

Look, I enjoyed the game but I dreaded having to start a new sandbox or campaigns. This is coming from someone who enjoys punishing City games like Banished.

I have maybe 100 games in my Steam list. This is one of the few I return to every few months to play again. Addictive city builder with just enough combat to keep it interesting. Should be part of everyone's game inventory.

It shouldn't be much of a surprise that the developer of the last three Tropico games was involved here. This is a solid city builder in the spirit of classics like the Caesar series. Playing through all of the various scenarios could take you hundreds of hours, yet so far they don't feel like simple crapware bloat. While there is a system for military forces, it's not strongly emphasized and feels more like a police force against foreign invaders. But then again, you're playing a city builder. If you want to go on conquests, go get Rome Total War.

I have played this game for about four hours now and my opinon is that it is very mediocre. It has some good aesthetics, it seems that whoever made this actually wanted to make a good game about Roman cities, but there is simply no climax to building a city. Nor is there really any challenge beyond basic city building, except for the tacked on difficulty accomplished by extremely whiny citizens who don't always quite realize that they do in fact have access to the resources which they are complaining about.

YOU LIVE RIGHT NEXT TO THE TEMPLE! Be quiet! Oh, heck with it, I didn't really even care in the first place.

I orginally bought this game thinking it was that really old game about Roman city building I used to play (EDIT: Caesar III apparently), with legions and whatnot, and since I would love to go back and play it as a decent gamer I was happy to snatch this up. Well, not only is it not the game, but the lack of depth is such that after three hours of playing I felt I had seen all there was to see so after another hour and with no amount of pride I bid my perfect city adieu.

Now, I assume somewhere this is a scenario where you are under constant attack to up the ante but frankly I don't see this as potentially engaging, mostly due to overly simple combat system; combined with an overly simple set of building mechanics I honestly don't care enough to probe any further.

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Childhood memory.