Any of you ladies tried Pax Romana?

[Pie4Foo]

URL: http://www.dreamcatchergames.com/dci/paxromana/official_site/index.html

It's a strategy title with a strong political element set during the rise of the Roman Republic. The PR is marketing it as "from the creators behind Europa Univeralis" (paraphrasing here), but it also has a twinge of Medieval: Total War's strategic + tactical battles.

I can find neither a preview nor a review of the game, but Dreamcatcher says it shipped two weeks ago. I think we've sent it off to our reviewer, but has anyone else had some seat time with it?

[spacerat]

Im curious as well, the only info I have managed to find is a thread on Google groups:

"Has anybody gotten their hands on pax romana?"

The consensus seems to be thats its wicked complicated in the Europa Universalis vein, fairly stable, and no grand-campaign out of the box, only smaller scenarios.

Im trying to decide if I should be spending my hard earned strategy dollars on this or Victoria...

[SpoofyChop]

http://www.paradoxplaza.com/victoria.asp

Interesting...

The EU engine seems to be giving the Ascaron Patrician engine(s) a run for its money in the "most number of extremely similar games produced with the same engine" crown.

Far be it from me to jump on the entitlement band wagon, but the "same game new box" trend is starting to piss me off.


In order to buy the entire EU "series" you would have paid

$30 for EU
$30 for EUII
$20 for Crown of the North
$30 for Hearts of Iron
$30 for Victoria

That's $140 dollars worth of extremely similar games over the last 2 years.

Other offenders in this category:

Sierra/Valve with all of its full price expansions etc (until recently with the release of lots of stuff with Steam)

EA/Maxis with the Sims expansions

Ascaron with the Patrician/Port Royale stuff

Oh well...

Anyway, I guess since this is the wave of the future I might as well pick one of these up.

[Pie4Foo]

http://www.paradoxplaza.com/victoria.asp

In order to buy the entire EU "series" you would have paid

$30 for EU
$30 for EUII
$20 for Crown of the North
$30 for Hearts of Iron
$30 for Victoria

That's $140 dollars worth of extremely similar games over the last 2 years.
Yes, but for this niche strategy and wargaming genre it's a more common occurrence because these developers cannot support huge investments into new engines, new games, etc.

Examples: John Tiller's games, Battlefront's Combat Mission series, Paradox's EU-engine games, etc., etc.

For many folks who enjoy these games, that's fine by them because they tend to appreciate the various changes associated with changing the scenario, campaign, or period. Still, I recognize these games have only limited popular appeal.

[Troy S Goodfellow]

I'm in the beta group for Pax Romana, and bound by NDA for a lot of ongoing stuff.

But, if anyone is interested, I'd advise waiting for the first patch since the initial release was a little rushed and a lot of known AI issues haven't been fixed yet.

The political game is fairly interesting, and would make for a nice cutthroat MP game, especially if the foreign military AI can be persuaded to be a little more aggressive v. Rome.

Troy

[spacerat]

The EU engine seems to be giving the Ascaron Patrician engine(s) a run for its money in the "most number of extremely similar games produced with the same engine" crown.


I'm sorry Spoofy I cant understand your argument. Could you illustrate it in a tabular format please? :)

[SpoofyChop]

No

[Lum]

In order to buy the entire EU "series" you would have paid

$30 for EU
$30 for EUII
$20 for Crown of the North
$30 for Hearts of Iron
$30 for Victoria

That's $140 dollars worth of extremely similar games over the last 2 years.

To be fair, only Crown of the North was an egregious offender here (it was a package of Svea Rike, which was a Swedish EU 0.5, and the latest version of EUII). EUII was vastly vastly improved from EUI (expanded the original to include the Hundred Years War AND the Napoleonic Wars). Hearts of Iron and Victoria are both completely different games entirely - Hearts of Iron really showed that the game engine just didn't work well for 20th century era games, hopefully Victoria does better.

[Troy S Goodfellow]

Oh, and despite the marketing copy, the only real connection between Pax Romana and the EU series is that lead developer Phillipe Thibaut was responsible for the conversion of th EU board game to the first Europa Universalis PC game. Pax Romana is similar to EU in many ways, but the teams behind the games are very different.

There are also no tactical battles per se. Some old screen shots that imply that are still making the rounds.

Troy