As a person who has listened to at least one third of Mike Duncan’s History of Rome podcast and seen James Purefoy completely tear it up as Mark Antony in HBO’s Rome, I’m one thing of an skilled in Roman historical past. So, naturally, when Alessandro Roberti’s new RPG Never Second In Rome got here out in early entry a few days in the past, I leapt proper on it.
The premise is you are a centurion within the military of 1 proconsul Julius Caesar, just lately minted governor of Gallia Cisalpina, and your aim is claw your manner up within the large man’s esteem, maintain your males (and your self) disciplined and educated up and, oh, do not die. This is difficult, as a result of bossman Caesar completely loves doing wars in Gaul. He’s ape for it, and as considered one of his males—considered one of his prime males, when you play your playing cards proper—you are a part of the gang who does that for him.
So off you go, navigating the sport’s largely text-based interface to get all of it performed. Think Long Live the Queen if it had much more die rolls. The entire factor is split into phases. Once you have designed your centurion—was he immediately commissioned or promoted from the ranks, what are his stats like, what positions did he serve in his first three years—you begin out largely relaxed in camp.
Over the course of this temporary respite, you need to resolve what to do together with your valuable time, and your males’s. Administration wants doing, the boys want coaching in a number of various things, self-discipline wants sustaining, the latrines want cleansing, and alongside the best way narrative occasions pop up that allow you to make selections about who you’re your relationship to the boys. Do you let a legionary slack off for 50 sestertii or give him a flogging? That form of factor. Focusing on any set of abilities and obligations means letting one thing else go slack, and making an attempt to do all of it will both do it poorly or grind your males all the way down to exhausted mud.
It is crunchy and stat-heavy in a fancy, board-gamey manner. Sweat beads in your brow as you hit ‘subsequent flip’ and your males’s abilities in sword, defend, and self-discipline inch up, decimal by decimal. But what if they should huck some javelins? What in the event that they’re known as on for engineering? It’s all one large recreation of alternative value, and earlier than lengthy you are on the march anyway. That’s the place you get into the opposite little bit of the sport: fight, each particular person and between your males and different items.
That’s a messy numbers recreation too—a query of choosing your males’s preventing type and rolling the cube towards your enemies, desperately making an attempt to interrupt their cohesion and ship ’em scattering. I believed I used to be doing fairly properly at this—my males had spent just about all 10 turns at camp drilling self-discipline and sword and defend, which made them onerous to interrupt and a monstrous melee presence.
But then the enemy—a bunch of Helvetii barbarians—flung a load of javelins at us, which I actually wasn’t ready for, and I discovered myself pulled into single fight with a lightweight infantryman. The display switched from an outline of my century as an entire to the moment-to-moment scrabble of my avatar towards this bolshy barbarian. Fat lot of fine my elite Roman coaching did me then. I’d put all my stat factors into issues like smarts and charisma—management abilities—not anticipating I’d ever have to really do something as uncivilised as combat somebody. The beardy foreigner left me in a pool of blood, presumably with a number of javelins protruding from between the slats in my lorica segmentata*. Better luck subsequent time. Sorry, Caesar.
I believe Never Second In Rome is likely to be an ideal, if advanced Roman life sim. If you need to test it out, yow will discover its demo on Steam.
*Yes, I do know they weren’t utilizing lorica segmentata on this time interval. Stand down.
