For those of you who aren't on Kalypso's mailing list, they released a handful of new screenshots for Rome today that we wanted to pass around to the community. And we know a lot of people are really busy this time of year, but check back next week because we've got another announcement coming before the holidays that I know at least a few of you have been waiting for :)

A german settlement on site of the modern city of Koblenz


The new city upgrade system


Romans battle outside the Nervii capital Bagacum


Romans lay siege to the Gallic town Matisco

We really appreciate the enthusiasm :)

Only four upgrades per city?

The number of upgrade slots depends on the size of the city and currently ranges from 1 to 6 with one slot reserved for a wall upgrade. This could change during playtesting, but our hope is to encourage players to specialize their cities rather than building the same upgrades everywhere e.g. in a hostile captured city you may use the spots to boost morale and defense, whereas in a friendlier city you could use them to train new unit types or boost income. Some upgrades also have multiple stages so you can build a better version on top of the previous one.

I guess I didn't get into it in the brief post on rebellions, but hostility in Rome does automatically decrease over time when there's no active combat between factions. This means the need to boost morale in captured cities will also decrease over time, allowing you to free up any resources (generals, garrisons, upgrades, etc) that you were using to control the city.

But even while they are hostile, captured cities will still be a significant source of resources for your war effort. Constructing an upgrade is only one way of boosting morale to maintain control of a city. You can also use a garrison, appoint a general or take hostages - all of which would allow you to use the upgrade slot for something else like training a new unit type, boosting defenses or expanding your resupply range. If we balance things right, and I'll admit that's easier said than done, the idea is that you'll need multiple cities to compliment each other rather than having every city being able to do everything e.g. one city might be where you train your cavalry and another city may be where you train your archers.

Hopefully that clarifies things, but I'm happy to get into more details if you have more questions.

My biggest concern was that I was going to be stuck only being able to recruit from friendly starting cities or be forced to choose between defending a city or having access to gallic horse and losing it constantly.

I see your concern and it's definitely not that clear cut. As I said, walls by far make the biggest difference on defense and those use their own slot so they don't take away any upgrade potential.

Having to recruit/retrain defeated Phalangites from Macedonian cities and march them all the way back across Greece was one of my biggest gripes with Gold

We've discussed this issue a fair but in the office. As you pointed out, on one hand it is realistic (Caesar spent most of the war fighting with undermanned legions who were far from reinforcements) and we like the incentive not to use your legions recklessly. However, the penalty of marching back across the whole map if you do lose is pretty high.

While we've had a few ideas to address this, for the moment we've decided not to make any significant changes to the mechanics and see how it plays out during testing. In the campaign at least, it should be less of an issue since each chapter starts in a different region and your legions will return to the initial staging point rather than returning to Italy if they rout. And, we also have the Forced March option that allows units to move quite quickly (about 50% faster than a full run in Gold) which is very useful when moving through safe territory.

Though I do wonder, are the later formed Gallic Legions going to be represented somehow?

We don't really differentiate the legions by their origins since they were all trained to roughly the same standard. In the campaigns, we give the player the specific legions that Caesar used and some of these would have originated outside our map. But anything you build yourself comes from Cisalpine Gaul and would technically be gallic legions.

Another question. Generals, how will they work in Rome?

You're right about the promotion tree. One way to get new generals is to use the brigade's experience to promote an officer through the ranks to where you can eventually detach them as their own general. However, generals are also awarded for completing objectives in both the campaign and sandbox. In the sandbox, the objective types and rewards are all configurable so you can choose if or how often you want generals to be a reward (and also how many you start with).

Will we or can we choose an option to start with Rome alone?

The plan is to have multiple sandbox configurations but on the default 'All Gaul' map there are two Roman factions in the south that represent Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul (they were well established Roman provinces by Caesar's time).

It will also be easy to add your own sandboxes if there's a particular configuration you want to try, so you can play with a single Rome faction or a united Briton, etc.

So, in a few of the screen shots you can see three red circle-ish things with what appears to be some sort of yellow x in the middle of each.

That's the 'In Formation' indicator (it's supposed to be 3 roman shields). When units are in a battleline stance they only get the blocking and morale bonuses when they are lined up in formation. So if they're in tight terrain or their formation has been broken during combat then they lose the buff.

It's nice to hear you guys are taking your time to think about the small details of problems players were having on Gold ...

It's taken a little longer than we first thought, but we're really excited that we've managed to squeeze in pretty much everything we had on our wish list for Rome.

Im wondering if hostages or slaves will have the same problem in Gold where they march alone and will convert outside a certain range.

Slave rebellions have been dropped in Rome. I posted a question to twitter about this a couple months back, and the response confirmed what we'd been feeling ourselves. Dropping the feature is a little ironic given the whole Spartacus thing, but when analyzing the pros/cons we found it really didn't add anything strategic and so we decided it wasn't worth the complication.

I wonder if Roman cities will be less rebellious over time due to a greater number of people becoming citizens as opposed to Gold where you constantly had to police conquered cities.

Hegemony represents a relatively short period of history compared to games like Total War or Civ, so we don't expect major demographic shifts over the course of the game. However, Caesar's relations with the gallic tribes went back and forth over the course of the campaign, and so hostility in Rome will drop over time if you stop attacking a faction which will make it easier to hold their cities.

*Fidgits* It's next week!

Tomorrow :)

When a general was attached in Hegemony Gold, if he got too far forward and was trapped by enemy troops, he'd be cut at repeatedly (costing the lives of men in his unit, who weren't even near the enemy) until the entire unit was dead and he routed.

I haven't actually heard this reported before. My guess is that it's a problem of the combat lock conflicting with the mechanism that keeps generals from dying off early. While we haven't addressed this specifically in Rome, we have completely rewritten the unit movement code so it may be less of an issue now. However, I'll keep it in mind as we move forward with testing and I've got some ideas for fixing it if it's still a problem. Thanks for the report.

It's an issue.

Sorry about that. I guess I lost track of it amongst other issues at the time. I've added it to our bug database for Rome to make sure we keep it in mind.