Hegemony III: Clash of Ancients – Review (PC)
Apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, public health, and Total War Rome II what have the Romans ever done for us?
Well, Rome has given us a setting for video games as far back as the 1980s. The legendary city and its domination of early Europe have inspired works since the fall of Constantinople itself. The Hegemony series continue to mine this time period with Hegemony III: Clash of the Ancients. Set in the pre-Rome period of early Italian city states, the third instalment of the series follows the fight to gain control of the riches of the ancient Mediterranean.
Hegemony Gold: Wars of Ancient Greece was a modestly successful RTS exploring the history of ancient Greece. While not visually stunning, it was praised for the depth of its historical accuracy and exploration of ancient tactics. The sequel, Rise of Caesar followed the campaigns of the great leader and took a critical pounding for lowering the complexity and not offering anything new. Perhaps the third time’s the charm for Longbow Games?
Hegemony III: Clash of the Ancients, currently still in beta, offers more bells and whistles than its predecessor with the addition of factions, cities and trade resources. You choose a city-state and head out into Italy conquering cities and capturing territory to grow your nascent empire. Each faction has unique skills to leverage that have considerable impact on your strategy. You have to manage your city’s food and wealth by capturing local resources such as farms and mines and setting up trade links. You defend your land by deploying troops to defeat your enemies.
Straight away the stylish, but complex GUI caused me trouble. It took me a good twenty minutes to figure out how to build units and send them into the world, even with the aid of the tutorial. The GUI is like looking at a decorated Roman pot, all terracotta and weird symbols. A nice visual touch, but not very intuitive. When you zoom out to view the world at large, you see the map changes from a ‘real’ view to a huge map with figures like chess pieces. This really makes you feel like you are a commander in a tent, directing the action with a decisive wave of a stick.
When I had worked through the visuals, I was ready to conquer Italy! I captured a few resource points to keep my home city in the black and sent my soldiers out to scout the area. One nice touch to Hegemony III is that defeated squads of enemies will rout and flee. If you capture them, you can convert them into slaves, a similar unit to a worker, which you can then use to farm resources in your territory. Soon enough I found an enemy city and instead of a climactic ancient city siege, the city took one look at my four measly units and immediately capitulated. Huh. Not the battle to the last man I had expected, but I’ll take a win. It turns out, however, that while the city had folded, I had to defend and manage it successfully to prevent it from breaking free of my hegemony over it.
By the time you get a few cities under your belt, things start to get tricky. Managing your armies and your city resources gets harder and harder. Not in the combat, mind you. Like in Hegemony II, I was unable to arrange the marching arrangement of units under a General and had to resort to having lots of little groups that were hard to organise. Thankfully, I found the simple combat strategy of Having More Dudes than the Enemy worked every time. The terrain offers no noticeable combat element to the game but the weather sure does. In ancient times war just didn’t happen in winter; foraging was far too difficult. Hegemony III reflects this by increasing your army’s food consumption in the winter months. I didn’t realise this in my game until my starving troops were almost wiped out by one band of Axemen. In winter, it’s best to look after your cities and throw your army into winter quarters by building camps. These realist touches are what really make this game stand out from the pack.
As I conquered my way through the world, by Objectives tab would pop up with a task for me to complete. Rather than a mission-based structure like Rome: Total War, Hegemony III favours a more natural progression within a single campaign. There were plenty of moments when I would find new Objectives randomly and was pleased to see that I could complete them in the order I chose. This design choice enhances the feeling of a single, dynamic world that is constantly changing. If you don’t hit pause, time will march on, regardless of how long you take to decide of which upgrade to pick next. Taken as a whole, this promises a rich and engrossing campaign experience.
Outside of the main campaign, the game hosts a wide variety of modding tools that allow you to make your own maps and worlds and share them with the Steam Community. The Hegemony series has a large modding community and it is good to see them continuing to support it.
Hegemony III is head and shoulders better than Rise of Caesar and brings a much more refined and complex addition to the series. While the visuals took some time for me to get over, the immersion of this game is undeniable. If you like your history and your RTS games, I urge you to give it a shot.