We're here at New York Comic Con and we're excited to announce our next game: Hegemony Rome: The Rise of Caesar. The new game is all about Caesar's conquest of Gaul, where Rome's most famous citizen first made a real name for himself. Check out the webpage, the teaser trailer, and don't forget to sign up for our newsletter, follow our Tweets, and like us on Facebook.

And for anybody in the New York area, come visit New York Comic Con and visit our booth in the centre hall, booth #1847. We've got a great deal on Hegemony Gold, we're giving away buttons, and we're selling Hegemony Rome shirts.

Here's a few features from the new game to whet your apettite:

* New Larger Map that covers a million square miles from the shores of Britain to the beaches of the Mediterranean. The new graphics engine renders this territory in amazing detail, using SpeedTree technology to capture the wild lands of Gaul, with foreboding forests and mighty rivers.
* Build Your Empire with new buildings including the famous Roman camps, forts and bridges – the feats of engineering that made Roman ingenuity as powerful a tool of conquest as Roman steel. Wood is added as a crucial resource in your economy; without it, your invasion will come to a speedy conclusion.
* Promote Your Legions as they gain experience and valuable skills, upgrading each unit with the talents they need to perform the tasks that the proconsul demands of them. Appoint governors from your followers to watch over cities and introduce Roman rule to a new province.
* Starve Your Enemies with new improvements to Hegemony's already celebrated logistics model. Protect your supply lines and plan sieges in a way that weakens any enemy foolish enough to depend only on city walls for victory.

Will we be able to play as other nations as well, or would that only be through an expansion(like Hegemony: Gold)? I only ask because I would rather fight against rome than play as them, but that's just me.

Hegemony Rome will have a sandbox mode right out of the box like Hegemony Gold, so you'll be able to play as any of the Gallic, German or Briton factions on the map. There are also plans for a few new sandbox features but we're not quite ready to get into that stuff yet.

I must admit while I am excited to see Hegemony moving to Rome I was really looking forward to"Hegemony Asia: The Rise of Alexander" being the next in line but i shall enjoy Rome instead. But i am wondering if you might be able to hint at the possibility that an Alexander Sequel to Philip is on the drawing board. After all, everyone wants to march on Babylon now!

Alexander and Rome were probably the two most common requests we had for a sequel but we decided to go for Rome because we wanted to do something that was a little more different than what we'd done already and, although Alexander's map is quite large, the bigger problem is the density - his major battles were spread very far a part which would lead to a *lot* of marching.

The map would probably be too big but if this map is larger then they might be able to upgrade the engine enough to support a map that big.

Geographically the map in Rome isn't that much larger than in Philip/Gold, however, the resolution of the terrain is significantly higher (10x) and the units will be a little smaller (2/3rds) which makes the map feel bigger and, more importantly, this allows extra room for battlefield maneuvers. This also allowed us to adjust the city scale somewhat so units are now roughly to scale with the buildings in the city and so you'll actually see the garrison on the city walls which will hopefully give a more intuitive sense of the city's strength.

I'd also love to see the rise of Rome! It's definitely a possibility for a future expansion, but right now we're focused on the current project, so it'll be a while before we can decide where we're going after this.

It'll also be a while before we do an alpha/beta, but be sure to sign up for the newsletter to get updates, so you'll be the first to know when it happens.

this was one of my suggestions during gold beta testing. i'm looking forwards to that and obviously looking forwards to the new release in general, and am eagre to get in on the beta testing when the time comes. i wish u evey success with it and hope it gets Longbow the recognition it deserves.

The beta process with gold was extremely helpful and this was one of a number of ideas that were too big to fit into gold but that we've carried over to Rome. We'll definitely be doing another beta but it probably won't start until the new year. If you haven't already, you can signup to our new newsletter to get info on playtesting as soon as it's available.