Europa Universalis: Rome – 1. Out of the Box
It has arrived, our copy this highly anticipated game. Over the next week or more we’ll share our experiences with it in our trademark multi-post fashion. As the main review fades posting may trail off but if the game is worth playing then from time to time you may see more posts on into the infinite future. It all depends on the greatness of the game.
The Box
It’s a handsome package; tight, simple side-open outer box, with a 97-page full color manual on slick paper, and a high quality plastic disk folio. The cover is a striking illustration of Augustus Caesar, judging from images of his busts out there on the Web. A map of the game provinces is included, which is a nice-to-have but not destined to be an indispensable tool during actual game play. In this case it’s the thought that counts (and it makes for a nice background for do-it-yourself product photos.) Overall the game is well worth having on your shelf. And in our view if you’re going to pay $50 for a game you deserve more than a PDF on the disk. Paradox has always been good for this, but it looks like they’ve taken the next step graphically.
The Patch
Starting the game brings up a screen connecting directly to news from Paradox interactive, the game developer, and version 1.1 update is available now. First things first then. Patch it up. Be sure to Download rather than Runand don’t forget to close the game launcher before running the download exe file.
Getting Started
One down note: We were interested in the “windowed mode” mentioned in the manual but could not get it to work. The “windowed=no” line in the settings.txt file was not present, and adding “windowed=yes” didn’t help. We also tried removing the “fullscreen=yes” setting altogether but to no avail. It always plays in full screen mode. We’ll keep our eyes peeled for a solution in the Paradox Roman forum and elsewhere and relay our findings. We like to have multiple windows open and though it is still possible to ALT-TAB away from and back to the game, it’s a bit slow, and we were hoping for somewhat more agile switching.
Otherwise the game holds all the promise of its predecessors. Like most in the Europa series, you can play as any of the available countries that start your chosen scenario, or, of course, take charge of Rome itself. The game is named after that empire because, according to the manual’s introduction, the earliest start date coincides with the 3rd century BC ascendancy of Rome over Greece as the Mediterranean superpower.
We’re looking forward to digging into this title, as the Europa series has always delivered on its promise of informative game play. As we’ve stated in a review long ago of the very first release, the games are like interactive scholarly documents, impeccably researched, with involving simulation of the economic and military decision-making.
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Europa Universalis Rome, games, history, strategy | bshears April 22, 2008
