Expeditions: Rome - the final Expeditions game from Logic Artists

[Sensuki]

the problem isn't even the combat goals but how overused they are as if they were required to implement them by a manager or something

That's funny because I was actually thinking the same thing. It's very 'process-oriented' from a production point of view. This is the design document these are the parameters, follow these exactly please.

 

[The_Mask]

Average Joe just put up a video for this title. Not saying his opinion is valid. It's probably equal to 0 for everyone here. Just saying it'll add to the sales the game will have because of the exposure. And because he likes the game.

 

[Iluvcheezcake]

So played for about 60ish hours now.
Its good, better thsn previous installments imo.

 

[HoboForEternity]

I am im rome, i am disappointed they dont show the communal latrine with shared butt sponge

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylospongium

This is a civilization advanced enough to get running water in toilet, yet share their butt wipes with strangers lol

 

[Rieser]

I am im rome, i am disappointed they dont show the communal latrine with shared butt sponge

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylospongium

This is a civilization advanced enough to get running water in toilet, yet share their butt wipes with strangers lol

In the middle of the first century Seneca reported that a Germanic gladiator had committed suicide with a sponge on a stick. The Germanic gladiator hid himself in the latrine of an amphitheater and pushed the wooden stick into his gullet and choked to death.

Even then the fucking Germans were into scat so much they literally choked on it.

 

[Starwars]

I do wish the Rome parts of the game had been a bit more... urban-feeling I suppose. That's one thing I missed from Viking. Despite the areas in that game being kinda... to be honest, shitty to explore in a way, due to the engine and overabundance of loot, it was nice that Ribe, York and other places were pretty big places and gave a nice feeling of scale. Rome is too divided into different areas and with too little content, you don't really get a good sense of it as a city. I also wish the time progression of the game had changed stuff in Rome as you come back.

 

[Infinitron]

Oh hey, the dev diaries continue: https://community.expeditionsseries...s/devdiary-17-first-update-after-release-r24/

DevDiary 17 - First Update After Release

Ave, and welcome to another DevDiary – the first one since the glorious release of Expeditions: Rome in fact. We skipped last week due to being rather busy with the launch, but this week we are back to talk about the reception and our support plans.

It’s been hugely exciting for us to finally let you all play the game we’ve been making for the past 3 years. We’re loving the discussions on Steam and Discord, and it’s been particularly fun to see you guys compare notes and gradually realise how far-reaching the effects of your decisions throughout the game can be, and how many things change depending on your choices and even your gender. We’ve spent a little more time than we perhaps should over the weekends watching Cringer, Bikeman, BurkeBlack, CohhCarnage, and others play Expeditions: Rome on Twitch, and chatting to their communities about the game.

All of us at Logic Artists and at THQ Nordic have been very pleased with the game’s reception – the critical reception and the player reactions have both been overwhelmingly positive. There’s no doubt this is the best and most successful game in the Expeditions franchise so far, as we always felt it would be. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for playing our game!





Since the release, our main priority has been to keep an eye on the reception of the game and what you’re all saying about it, fix the bugs that have surfaced, and make whatever tweaks or improvements we could quickly do to improve the play experience. We’ve worked hard to ensure that we would be releasing a stable and polished game, and it’s very gratifying to see that we haven’t received all that many bug reports. As you may have noticed though, two hotfixes did go out last week to address the few major issues that popped up early on, and a more significant update is currently being tested that will fix many smaller issues and add some quality-of-life improvements overall. That update will be released as soon as we feel certain that it doesn’t introduce any new problems.

One of the major things this update will do is to loosen up the structure of Act 3 a bit. Many players have expressed that the campaign feels too linear and drags on for a bit too long, and we agree. The upcoming update will reduce the amount of mandatory regions you need to capture to complete that campaign, and it will also make it possible to do some of the main missions in a different order, so it isn’t as linear. That way if you just want to get to the finale as fast as possible, you can skip some of the pacification content. If you do decide to stick around and complete your conquest, there’ll be a nice new colour theme available for your legion as a reward for your efforts.



The other major piece of feedback we’ve received is that the legion battles are just super difficult to figure out. A lot of you really want to understand what’s going on under the hood, and the game doesn’t do much to explain. Addressing these issues will take a little longer, so this next update will not have anything for that yet, but we are discussing what to do with the legion battle system in general – how to better communicate what’s going on and what your choices are doing, and how to make it feel less random.

Now that the initial reactionary bug fixing and improvements are done and being tested, we are able to set our sights on the next thing – which leads us to the answer to a question that has been burning on many players’ minds. Expeditions: Rome will have DLC, and we are working on that as we speak. We can’t yet talk about what the DLC is going to be, nor when it will be released, but it’s going to be very cool. For this new piece of content, we have chosen to add something more to the existing game rather than making anything self-contained. It will add something new for you to do as you replay the game’s story to see where other choices would lead you, and it will add new ways for you to engage with the combat system that we are so very proud of.



That’s it for this one! Despite the lack of DevDiary last week we had a great time hanging out with you on Twitch in our usual DevStream timeslot, playing a bit more of Rome, and answer all the questions you guys had for us. Let’s repeat the success this Wednesday, February 2nd at 1:00 PM Eastern / 6:00 PM GMT at http://twitch.tv/thqnordic. If you have any particularly pressing questions, please remember that you can post them as comments on this article and we will prioritise getting you some answers during the stream.

Valete!

 

[S.H.O.D.A.N.]

They should probably look into balancing the classes better before they add anything to the combat system, because Reaper and Barrage (especially in combination) completely invalidate everything else in the game, while Princeps isn't even a class.

 

[Spectacle]

Whoever the voice actress for Raia is, she does a great job putting on an Annoying Catgirl perfomance.

 

[Infinitron]

https://community.expeditionsseries...s/devdiary-18-legion-battle-improvements-r25/

DevDiary 18 - Legion Battle Improvements

Ave, and welcome to our 18th dev diary – the second after the release of Expeditions: Rome. As we mentioned last week, the first major update is currently undergoing testing. We were hoping to release it last week, but QA did their jobs well and found a new issue that had slipped into the game due to one of our stability fixes, so we had to push the patch until this week so we could get that fixed first and give QA time to re-test the build.

In the meantime, those of us not already working on the first piece of DLC have set our sights on a much-requested set of improvements to a certain system in the game, namely the legion battles.

The legion battle system has been a challenge right from the start. We knew we wanted to represent the large-scale battles of a Roman legion somehow, and give the player a feeling of being a grand strategy commander handing out orders from on high, but at the same time we didn’t want to cram a whole wargame into our tactical RPG. During the prototyping phase we intended battles to simply be resolved by a die roll based on the strength of each army – but it seemed too simple. Later we briefly considered representing it by a re-interpretation of a Roman dice game called Tali – but we decided that would be far too abstract. We knew we needed to do something that would sell the fantasy without ballooning out of scope to take over the whole project.

What we settled on was a resource management system where you balance your losses against the risk to your centurions, a desire to scatter the enemy troops, the likelihood of getting some loot out of it, the morale and experience of your legion, and so on. Success is still essentially a dice roll based on your legion’s strength compared to the enemy army, and you would always be able to win as long as you paid just a little bit of attention. However, you would have some control over how well you come out of it in the end: how great your losses, how good your loot, and whether the enemy survivors would retreat to fight another day.



Now that the game has been out for a few weeks, it's clear that the system was not received well. Although Expeditions: Rome is a premium single player game, we’re committed to giving it the post-release support it needs to remain an excellent and beloved game for years to come, and the big thing we need to address is how to make this legion battle system more interesting.

There are limits to what we can do. We are still not planning to turn this into a real-time grand strategy game. It must remain a relatively minor part of the game loop that doesn’t overstay its welcome and get too much in the way of the core gameplay of Rome.

We have perused all your feedback and identified the following two major criticisms: First, it’s too difficult to understand what’s going on and how it works; second, it feels random, not giving you enough agency over the outcome of battles especially in the beginning before you have a chance to unlock new stratagems and level up your centurions.



With that in mind, we’ve decided to make the following changes. First, we will remove the “challenges” that pop up during each phase of a battle. These are the “attacks” and “defences” you see getting either succeeded or failed by your chosen commander, based on his character class and his command specialisations. This will also have the benefit of making each phase shorter, for those who don’t wish to skip them entirely.

To replace this system, we plan to add new trackers that compare how many points your centurions have in each specialisation compared to the enemy commander. To refresh your memory, the specialisations are Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery, and Logistics. Each specialisation your centurions have will be added to your count, and your chosen commander will get their specialisations doubled for this purpose. The enemy’s specialisations are deducted from your count, and each tracker can go into the negative this way. To help you visualise it, here is an early mock-up of what two of these trackers may look like in the UI. Each line marks a point where a new effect will be unlocked:

Spoiler

In each subsequent phase, every stratagem you play will add points to or remove points from these trackers. This will simplify the stratagem cards as well, reducing the plethora of largely unexplained effects to a combination of specialisation points. The enemy will also play stratagems that affect these trackers, and you will be able to see at least some of what the enemy is going to do before you make your own choice.

At certain tiers, each tracker unlocks a new effect: a bonus to your defence or aggression, a new loot crate, a morale bonus, ultimately even forcing the enemy army to scatter rather than retreating. This means the new system allows you to aim for tangible goals: rather than a card just making you lose slightly less manpower, you might be trying to build up to reach a certain tier of Artillery in order to unlock a particular effect, and which cards you draw in the following phase will determine whether you succeed or fail. Inspecting these effects and deciding what to aim for based on what the enemy seems to be focusing on, and what stratagems are at your disposal, will give you a better sense that you’re formulating and following an overall strategy, and that you’re going up against another commander with their own strategy.

To give you some idea of what these effects could look like, here’s a screenshot directly from the design document. Please note that this is extremely work in progress, subject to all sorts of pending iterations, and reproduced here over the dead body of the technical designer (he will be missed):



Since we’re removing the challenges that were formerly based in part on the chosen commander’s class, each class will instead apply a specific overall bonus to the outcome of the battle, similar to how certain perks (namely Cautious, Reckless, and Medicus) already add specific bonuses or penalties to a battle when a character with those perks is selected. These bonuses will not only be more significant and tangible than the previous effect of the commander’s class, but will also be completely orthogonal to the specialisations, creating more variation in possible outcomes based on who you choose to command the battle.

In addition to these core changes, we have a few minor tweaks planned. First of all, losing battles will now affect the legion’s Morale directly: before, the morale effect was tied to the specific set of stratagems you would have to choose from if you lost a battle, but this just seems like the game is forcing you to make a bad choice. Simpler to just deduct the Morale directly if you lose. Second, winning a battle will always give the legion Experience. In the current system, Legion Experience is based on relative losses during a fight: if you loose 100 more manpower than you kill, you lose 10 Experience, and vice versa. However, losing Experience feels bad, so we’ll remove that.



And finally, this is not a simplification but rather an effort to bring the system in line with expectations and with the core fantasy: attrition during each phase (how many men you lose or enemies you kill) will be based on the relative active manpower of each side, rather than now where it is essentially a predefined random range that increases in each phase.

Once we have these changes in place, we need to test it and iterate on it, paying special attention to how well we explain how the system works and what you as the player should be thinking about during a battle. Though we are removing some of the more confusing aspects of the system, we are adding new elements to it as well, and we want to make it clear this time what’s going on during each phase and how your decisions have affected the outcome.



We’d love to hear what you think of these changes. Please leave your comments and questions below and we will be guaranteed to read them. We will as always have a Dev Stream on Twitch this Wednesday, February 9th at 1:00 PM Eastern / 6:00 PM GMT at http://twitch.tv/thqnordic, where Senior Producer Brad Logston will host Creative Director Jonas Wæver to talk about our plans for this system and what other things we’re working on for future updates. We will answer any questions left on this diary, and we’ll of course try to answer any other questions you throw at us during the stream.

Until then, Valete!

 

[Larianshill]

Legion mechanics were an afterthought I didn't bother with in the release version, and I don't think it will change much when I replay the final one.

 

[The_Mask]

That lil spreadsheet makes things a LOT clearer.

 

[The Wall]

At least we got bunch of artwork from this game and Cleopatra's tiddies. Both are beautiful and historical

 

[Shrimp]

Legion battles definitely felt like one of those "we just put it in because it's cool and more importantly easy to implement" kind of game mechanic.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Sadly, E:R followed in Shitmaker's footsteps with a lot of terrible design decisions. Most RPGs can't even get the base RPG gameplay right? Ok, let's add gameplay from another genre for kicks!

 

[Sensuki]

Yeah seems like RPGs that have tried to do a minigame battle system in the past decade have not been able to pull it off. Minigames in RPGs in general tend to be ehhh at best I'd say.

There was one moment I liked and that Lucullus teaches you a specific one-time use tactic that allows you to win one battle and it's a battle that you pretty much can't win otherwise. That made sense from a story point of view (but no C&C there really).

It would have probably made more sense to make the RPG part of the game directly relate to winning the battles rather than them being pretty much disconnected eg you do some questing or missions with your praetorians to get the army into good shape and get some local info / advantage with some C&C involved about how it goes etc

 

[Larianshill]

There was one moment I liked and that Lucullus teaches you a specific one-time use tactic that allows you to win one battle and it's a battle that you pretty much can't win otherwise. That made sense from a story point of view (but no C&C there really).

I don't remember that.

 

[Sensuki]

I think you get that 'reward' from a sidequest where you buy him some nice wine. I'm playing on Insane difficulty so I assume that the minigame battles are a bit harder numbers wise on that. I think my chance to win the battle without use of that tactic was 6% or something.

 

[Shrimp]

In this old forum post from the Expeditions: Vikings Steam discussion boards Jonas says they plan on leaning more towards systems-driven gameplay in their next game as a way of reducing the production cost.
I think legion battles might be one of these features. They appear somewhat frequently throughout the entire game but the gameplay part of it mainly consists of navigating a series of different interfaces, so it probably didn't cost too much to develop.

 

[Infinitron]

This game has good music.

GameBanshee review: https://www.gamebanshee.com/reviews/125994-expeditions-rome-review/all-pages.html

Introduction

Expeditions: Rome is the latest entry in the Expeditions series of historical RPGs that started with Expeditions: Conquistador back in 2013 and was then followed by Expeditions: Viking in 2017. It also looks to be the last Expeditions game developed by Logic Artists, the series creators, as the team has now been disbanded, with the rights to the IP going to THQ Nordic, who may decide to do something with it in the future.

For now, though, we can take Rome out for a spin and decide whether or not it can be considered a worthy conclusion to the original trilogy.

When in Rome

If you're not familiar with the Expeditions series, it's fairly unique in that it combines historical settings with stories of adventure tailored to fit into an RPG where you lead a squad of conquistadors, a Viking raiding party, and now a Roman army, through some hostile and usually unexplored land.

In general, I loved Conquistador and liked Viking. Coincidentally, this mirrors my general feelings towards those two settings. But when it comes to Rome the country, I'm really not the biggest fan of it, and as a result, right from the start, I knew that a game set in and around those parts would have to live or die based on its own merits without any influence from anything even remotely resembling rose-tinted glasses.

And let me tell you, while initially, the game's insistence on interspersing its dialogues with Latin words was really grating, after a while, it kind of grew on me. In the end, I found Rome's story quite intriguing, its characters fun to be around, and its setting not that bad, actually. And now that I've beaten the game, I consider it to be my favorite Expeditions title to date.

Plus, even though you'll be playing as a Roman general, your journey of conquest and exploration will take you to all sorts of cool places. You'll fight rebellious pirates with Caesar, the man not the salad, conquer Egypt for Cleopatra, and be perpetually confused by the crazy Gauls and their even crazier druids. And between these three military campaigns, you'll be able to visit Rome as a citizen or maybe even a conqueror.

Taking place around the 1st century BC, the game starts with a couple of scheming brothers making a play for the Roman senate. To achieve their goals, they need to get rid of your father who can ruin their whole operation. This sets in action a chain of events where you get sent away to spend some time with an old family friend currently leading a military campaign against some Greek pirates, who aren't really pirates and more like rebels with a huge army, but that's politics for you.

When things predictably go wrong, through a combination of luck and nepotism, you're put in charge of a legion of your own, with the idea that a decorated general would have considerably more pull back home.

The plot only thickens from there. In fact, during the home stretch, it becomes so thick, you'll be hard-pressed to figure out what's going on, why certain characters act the way they do, and why, with the main villain constantly within your grasp, you can't just end him and tell everyone the Gauls did it, and instead have to invade Rome to finally get your revenge. But hey, at least once everything is said and done, you get an option to marry Cleopatra and retire as the king of Egypt in anticipation of being reincarnated as a cat. And how many games let you do something like that.

Now, seeing how my knowledge of Roman society mostly comes from Life of Brian and those old Asterix cartoons, I can't tell you just how historically accurate the game is. I mean the setting itself, not the cat reincarnation part. You do meet a bunch of historical figures. And some of the events are clearly inspired by things that actually happened. Still, I don't think the developers were very meticulous with their research here, seeing how on several occasions you refer to a decisive victory as decimating your foes, and even I know that this is a beginner-level mistake when it comes to the way Romans did things.

Spoiler

Do as the Romans Do

In practical terms, once the intro is over, you'll be left with a party of story companions and a legion of soldiers under your command. You'll be placed on an expansive overworld map separated into a number of regions where you initially own nothing, but will eventually own everything.

Wherever your legion goes, it's going to erect a camp that will act as your main base of operations. It will be your duty to upgrade this camp by using the resources your legion claims after conquering regions, and in return, you'll get access to various facilities you'll use to upgrade your gear, research new stratagems for your legion, heal your wounded soldiers, and hire new officers.

You'll need the latter to lead your soldiers into battle represented by this kind-of-sort-of card game, with the abovementioned stratagems acting as the cards you'll have at your disposal. You will also be able to equip and level up your officers and later use them as companions for the special pacification missions, or just in general. This will result in a party roster of around 20 characters, with regular encounters limiting your party to 6 members.

Now, if the above sounds more like a strategy game than an RPG, don't worry, this whole legion business mostly exists to provide your adventure with a sense of scale and an opportunity to navigate yourself into random encounters and events that will usually make your life harder in some way, but occasionally allow you to unlock some new perk for your character or discover a new crafting recipe.

In fact, this is one of my bigger gripes with the game. Back in Conquistador, you had to carefully manage your resources, and overall, it felt like you were exploring a wild and untamed land where at any point you were a reckless detour away from starvation.

Viking moved away from this system in favor of a Baldur's Gate-style overworld map where you just clicked on locations to go there. And now Rome sits somewhere in the middle where you have theoretically dwindling supplies, but it's all been simplified to the point where you would have to actively try to lose if for some reason you want to run out of resources or get defeated in a legion battle.

The real meat of the game then is you and your party following your army and personally dealing with various high-priority problems that range from bloody power struggles to some recreational tomb raiding. Those parts play as a more traditional RPG where you interact with NPCs, complete quests, and make oftentimes far-reaching choices. Most quests, even the optional ones, will have multiple, sometimes not obvious, solutions and mutually-exclusive rewards, suggesting a certain degree of replayability. Just going by some recent patch notes mentioning things I didn't even know were possible, there's way more branching in this game than what my single playthrough suggested.

It also helps that the game's writing is pretty good. It's atmospheric without being too wordy, the big overall story is intriguing and makes sense up until the final acts, side-quests tend to be fairly robust. It's good, basically.

Your story companions are both useful in combat and aren't excessively annoying, which is a fairly rare thing these days. They all come with their own personal stories that gradually unfold as the game progresses. And while you can regularly check back with them while making camp, they tend not to overburden you with their life stories all at once, and instead save their big story developments for when you return to Rome.

In fact, the bulk of the game's dialogues and companion interactions come in the form of these ambient conversations, Mass Effect-style. Basically, you'll be running around your camp or some town and you'll overhear various civilians, legionaries, or your companions gossiping or discussing some recent developments. Those conversations tend to be fairly amusing and provide the game with a lived-in feeling.

Which is a good thing, because outside of those, the game's locations tend to really lack interactivity. It seems like three games in, Logic Artists still haven't been able to figure out how to craft good social hubs, or what makes looting fun.

You see, Conquistador was one big map and most of the stuff you picked up were resources you really needed to survive. Viking then, with its new area-based structure, turned the game into a looting simulator by packing an ungodly number of boxes into each of its areas. Rome tries to fix this by replacing countless boxes with around 1-3 lootable objects per area, but it doesn't address the fact that at the end of the day, you're just scanning the map for highlighted objects and then waiting for your guys to get there, which can take a while, especially when ladders are involved. It's a waste of time that could just as easily have been replaced with a loot screen you got upon exiting an area.

On rare occasions, some box will be guarded and trying to loot it will lead to a battle. But those are the exceptions to the usual rule. The same can be said about NPCs. Outside of those ambient dialogues, you usually can only talk to a couple of NPCs per area, which makes those areas feel quite barren. And it's a great shame because they tend to look quite nice from an architectural and aesthetic standpoint. It would've been fun to actually explore them instead of just waiting while your characters jog between points of interest.

With this being the case, it's then a mystery why the game insists on throwing you into the thick of inaction so often, especially when it has a perfectly good overworld map to work with. Right now, in order to manage your camp, you need to click on it, sit through a, thankfully brief, loading screen, assign your new orders, resupply, pick up your new stratagems, then leave the camp and sit through another loading screen. You really should've been able to do all of this through some menu.

And, one final thing to mention here, just like in the previous Expeditions game, while overall this is a very much historical affair with no magic or monsters, there are some minor supernatural elements here. But they always leave plenty of room for a scientific interpretation if that's your thing.

Divide and Conquer

So, while the previous sections describe a pretty good game that could still use some work, now we're getting to the main reason why I enjoyed Rome as much as I did. The game's combat.

At its core, it's still a squad and turn-based affair with roots firmly planted in both Conquistador and Viking where during your turn you can move your characters in whichever order you see fit, but with the benefit of experience, Rome iterates on those ideas to create something truly spectacular.

First of all, very few battles simply task you with eliminating your enemies. Most of the time, you'll have some specific objective to win an encounter, like defeating an enemy leader, saving some hostages, burning enemy supplies, surviving an ambush, or even stealing some artifact.

These objectives result in very dynamic battles where you have to actually do things and utilize strategic thinking, as opposed to just hiding behind a piece of cover and waiting for the enemy to come to you. Paired with a great level design where maps tend to have multiple approach paths, varying levels of elevation, and numerous interactable items like destructible barricades and javelin stockpiles (that the AI doesn't hesitate to use against you), this creates some very enjoyable encounters.

And then, every once in a while, you get to participate in a siege that's like this grand set-piece battle where you'll be commanding your entire party, frequently joined by AI allies, in a multi-stage endurance battle where conserving health and resources is an added concern. You'll have to split your team into several squads, each with its own set of objectives, and once those are done, you'll usually get a chance to regroup and keep pressing your advantage in a battle with dozens of participants aided by some catapult fire.

Now, you might be wondering how such massive battles don't turn into an absolute slog. Rome solves this issue by giving us an animation speed slider that makes everything move at a brisk pace, but without turning the whole thing into some clown fiesta where character models are just zooming all over the place. It also makes it so the AI moves in batches whenever possible, and even you don't have to wait for your characters to finish moving before issuing new commands.

In recent years, I've been using Blackguards as the gold standard when assessing how good a game's encounter design is, and I have to say that Rome is definitely on that level. And while not an expansive RPG with countless side-quests, Rome does have plenty of interesting quests, some limited exploration, and the whole legion system, which all come together to offer a well-rounded experience that will take you in the vicinity of 50-60 hours to complete.

As a Roman, you'll have access to four classes of soldiers - a man with a shield, a scout, an archer, and a support/pikeman hybrid. And while most of the enemies you'll be facing will follow the same pattern, the later chapters will have you cross swords with shamans, berserkers, and other barbarian classes that shake things up. Though unless I missed something, unlike Conquistador, you won't be able to recruit any of those for your squad.

Each class will have access to three unique skill trees. These aren't particularly extensive, but still offer enough build variety to have at least two members of each class in your party specializing in completely different things. And while initially, some classes seem significantly stronger than others, after some skill point investment, both archers and scouts find their own niche and become absolute beasts if you use them right.

Apart from character skills, weapons in this game don't have auto attacks and instead come with a selection of active skills. As a result, you can have weapons with identical stats but different skills available to them, leaving a lot of room for experimentation when it comes to your loadout.

Now, the unfortunate part here is that you can't just say you want a sword with skills A, B, and C, and just get it. These are rolled randomly whenever you loot a weapon, or when you craft it. So if you really want a particular selection of skills, you'll need to craft a lot of swords.

As someone who doesn't like crafting in games, I wasn't particularly thrilled by this prospect, but at least the crafting system in this game is intuitive and not too annoying. And once you have the gear you like, you can keep upgrading it instead of crafting new stuff every few missions.

On top of your class skills and weapon skills, you'll also be able to pack two tactical items per character, with an extra tactical slot for the stuff you pick up during a mission. These items range from javelins and throwing knives to inspiring banners and stat-raising booze. Tactical items tend to have limited charges that you can only restore by visiting your camp, but in return, they don't cost any action points and can turn the tide of many a battle.

And just in general, the game's combat, while seemingly straightforward, has plenty of complexity under the hood with multiple skills synergizing with each other, flanking, attacks of opportunity, shields completely deflecting arrows but not when they're on fire or shot from this particular unique bow, and so on.

None of it feels overwhelming, but once you figure it all out, results in some very satisfying moments where you go on a rampage completely obliterating the enemy squad in a single turn.

That is not to say that the game is easy. It has four difficulty presets with optional permadeath and ironman modes. I was playing on Hard, which is the second to last difficulty, and the game didn't feel too challenging, but wasn't a complete cakewalk, especially early on. Still, if you know what you're doing and are looking for a challenge, you should probably go for the hardest difficulty straight away.

Technical Information

Unlike the previous Expeditions games, Rome uses the Unreal Engine, which results in a greater visual fidelity paired with overall better performance. And the best part is, once the game is running at a satisfying level, it will do so regardless of whether you're in some desert oasis with two shacks and three NPCs, or in a massive city block with a lot of stuff going on all at once.

On top of that, while Viking launched in a fairly poor state and was plagued with various issues, apart from a couple of minor visual glitches and scripting errors, I've not encountered a single game-breaking bug or crash during my playthrough.

The game is fairly quick to save and load, and while it has multiple rotating quick and autosave slots, there's currently no way to adjust their amount, which can result in way too many save files after a while. It's a minor annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless.

In general, the game has a few of those, like the fact you can't resize the UI, the camera's insistence on resetting to some default position after you were able to tilt it just right, or some fairly obscure mechanics like legion experience that tends to go up and down seemingly for no reason whatsoever.

The game is fully voice-acted. And while usually I don't really like this feature, here, a certain feline priestess aside, all the voices fit their characters really well. Plus, seeing how lately games with limited voice acting have been confusing bloated writing with good writing, having every word cost money may be a good thing.

Finally, while overall Rome looks much better than its predecessors, the one area where this isn't the case are the game's character portraits. It's honestly baffling how we could go from Conquistador, which had fantastic character art, to Rome, where the portraits are so bland and mechanical, it feels like an AI drew them. Beyond just that, those portraits are presented to you as these flat cardboard cutouts usually indicative of visual novels, which makes the whole thing look way cheaper than it actually is.

And beyond even that, the artists here seem to have given up halfway through, and as a result, some characters don't even have portraits, and instead glare at you as some ominous dark silhouette. And those portraits that do exist oftentimes don't exactly correspond with the game. Like there's this smith character who you can praise for his big bushy beard. Only the character's portrait doesn't have a beard and instead presents us with a guy sporting at best a 5 o'clock shadow.

Conclusion

Some minor gripes aside, if you liked both Conquistador and Viking, you should get Expeditions: Rome right this very moment. If you liked Conquistador but not Viking, you should probably still get it, as there's way more Conquistador DNA in Rome than there is in Viking. If you liked Viking but not Conquistador, you'll be pleased to hear that Rome continues to advance the big picture formula of the series, while proving that streamlining doesn't need to be a four-letter word.

And if you've not played any of them, you really should remedy that, because as far as I'm concerned, Expeditions is the single best original RPG series of recent years, and it's a great shame that we won't be getting any more of it, at least not from the same people.

 

[HoboForEternity]

I thought i liked viking hand tailored, more crpg approach more too, but as i play rome, it just grew on me. I am in act 3 now, but i enjoyed act 2 the most. It's the balance between the game finally giving you cool stuff and while not being too powerful, but the last tail of act 2 the game became a cakewalk.

I like the story and lurco is a great villain and i like the characters and atmosphere. My real complaint really is the pointless legion battle

 

[ERYFKRAD]

How long into this game until I find an axe?

 

[Aarwolf]

Until you end Deianeira's quest in Rome after act 2 - she'll find it in a chest.

 

[HoboForEternity]

Where can you find material to craft pillum in act 3

 

[Spectacle]

I think you get that 'reward' from a sidequest where you buy him some nice wine. I'm playing on Insane difficulty so I assume that the minigame battles are a bit harder numbers wise on that. I think my chance to win the battle without use of that tactic was 6% or something.

The whole card system is pretty random. I had the "Lucullus Gambit" card you're talking about but never used it since it was only selectable in two trivial battles I was going to win easly anyway.