I'm going to put Hegemony Rome on the top shelf, probably never to be played again. I'm sorry that it has come to this, but the game is unplayable for me, and the issues are purely technical.
The - game - stutters - and - lags - halfway - into - sandbox - mode - to - the - point - where - it's - completely - unplayable - and - that - is - not - acceptable - in - a - game - of - today. Irritating to read like that isn't it? But not nearly as irritating as what Hegemony Rome does.
I have a quad-core 3.4 GHz computer and a GTX 760 graphics-card with 4 Gb memory, so I must ask myself what kind of computers this game was designed for? I never get more than halfway into the sandbox-mode before the game begins to lag and stutter for me, and now it has gotten to the point where it crashes directly after loading while calculating my money balance, apparently doing so item by item. By the way, why does it have to spend several minutes each time after loading to calculate my avaliable money? Why isn't this part of the save?
And another thing, why can't the saves remember the changes in formation for units that I have made? Cavalry is still marked as being in the changed formation, but it's actually not so on the map.
Since Hegemony Rome now crashes for me each time I load, it's not merely a question of extreme irritation over lag and stutter, the game is not even playable.