well, I have to come back and say that it's not quite as bad as I first thought. Mind you, it is very, very rare for me to have such an immediate dislike to any game, particularly to one from a dev I respect so much.
I've been assured that the campaign season thing is in there....I'm really not so sure about that but I'm willing to wait and see.
It is a fun enough little grand strategy-lite game. I've upped my score to 5.5 out of ten but there is going to have to be one king hell of an expansion pack. The points I raised to begin with are still valid. I cannot for the life of me understand why they would do what they did to the Roman political system. it's like buying Hearts of Iron and discovering that Germany has a Social Democratic gov instead of National Socialist. If they did that people would laugh them out of town.
I'm hoping the women thing is a bug, but it was brought up on their forum and one of the mods responded with a link to a wiki entry about Cleopatra....:rotfl:..Yeah and that would be what, the exception that proves the rule I think? Nice of them to tell me who Cleopatra was though. I really didn't have a clue!
One major thing that would help the game is the introduction of at least semi historical events. It would help at least foster a feeling of uniqueness for the different nations. at the moment it really does feel like a couple of generic templates that are differentiated solely by size and civ level.
Really, if it earns them a few quid to invest in doing decent games then I guess thats ok. The thing is, i seem to be making that excuse for a lot of devs nowadays. If they are no longer interested in making the sorts of games I want to play, fine, but I'm not so sure I'm going to remain interested either..
Mods will help. no doubt about it. What remains to be seen is how moddable it actually is. I have as nasty suspicion a lot of the worst stuff is hard coded.