Centurion was released way back in 1990 by Electronic Arts and was developed by Bits of Magic. It is a turn-based strategy game where you take control of a lowly centurion in the Roman Army and your task is to progress to Proconsul and conquer Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa. You begin in Italia with a single legion, and through strategy, battles, and even some diplomacy and political manoeuvring, you can eventually become Caesar and control the Roman Empire.
The gameplay is simple: you basically begin on a map of the region, and point and click your legion into a neighbouring province. You are then taken to the ‘diplomacy’ screen, where you select some dialog options (basically, you can be nice, or just be a total dick) and the leader of the province decides whether to accept your diplomacy, or Go to War! It’s here you get a quick snapshot of whether the province’s army is large and brave, or small and weak, but there’s not much in the way of tactics, since the dialog options rarely end well regardless of what you choose. Most of the time you’ll be expanding the empire in much the same way the real Romans did – through conflict.
This brings me to my favourite part of the game, the combat. You get an isometric view of a battlefield. Here, you select your formation and tactic, and then unleash the legion. Once unleashed, you can pause the game to make minor (and sometimes crucial) changes, ie stopping a cohort moving forward, ordering a retreat, and the like, but the fun is watching it play out. There’s little touches like whether your General is liked or disliked, and this will affect whether he can order troops in the field or not. It makes you look after your starting Generals, as their replacements are often useless, meaning you’re stuck with whatever strategy you first selected, and sometimes this results in complete annihilation.
The simplicity of the gameplay is what drew me to it originally, but what kept me coming back was the ability to customise the difficulty settings. Even that was simple (it basically only affected whether your soldiers were Fierce, Good, Weak, or Panicky), but it made the victories hard-fought and made you strategize a little more (on the hardest setting if you did not have back-up legions ready to follow your initial push into a new province, your empire would be pretty short-lived).
There’s also a system of taxation which much be carefully managed (in addition to staging games in the various conquered provinces, thankfully these ones are off-screen) in order to keep the people of your empire happy. Tax them too hard in order to build your legions too quickly, and they will not hesitate to throw off the yoke and take up arms against you. This was also great on harder difficulties as you simply cannot afford to be putting down rebellions all over the place while trying to expand the empire. At one point my little Roman Paradise was on the verge of complete collapse, and I had to spend turn after turn on ‘Bread and Circuses’ instead of my actual duties, just to ensure my new empire did not completely fall apart. Something the real Roman Empire knew all too well!
Centurion was obviously a predecessor of more widely known war strategy games like Age of Empires, and in them you can see clear influences that began here.
It loses some points for replay value only because of the dreaded gladiatorial fights. This was a gameplay feature I hated, even as a kid. It was designed to offer some variety to the gameplay, but soon becomes nothing more than a giant pain in the ass. Basically, you get on-screen prompts that the people of Rome are bored, so you need to build the Coliseum and stage gladiator fights. These are little more than key-spamming a single sword animation until your opponent’s health bar depletes. It’s maddeningly repetitive and happens far too often, and there’s no way to avoid it – if you ignore the prompts, the people in your home province rebel and you’re forced to put down the rebellion.
It earns points because it does what all great games should do – it stimulates the imagination. Granted, as a kid I took this too far and used the game as a basis to write an 80-page ‘alternative history of the Roman Empire’ based on my conquests. Yes, I really am that geeky.
All in all, it was a great game and I found myself enjoying it just as much again recently as I did when I first played it all those years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion:_Defender_of_Rome
No comments:
Post a Comment