Nemesis of the Roman Empire

In 218 BC, Hannibal of Carthage crossed the Alps into Italy, bringing a sizeable number of elephants with him. They slowed him down and consumed a lot of food, and after the crossing, he settled in for a fierce winter that killed all but one of the noble beasts.
In the spirit of well-meant but fruitless endeavors like this one, we have Nemesis of the Roman Empire, the follow-up to Celtic Kings: Rage of War. Like its predecessor, Nemesis is a real-time strategy game accompanied by an adventure/role-playing campaign. In fact, it has two of them, plus three other standalone scenarios. This unusual mix of elements is what made Celtic Kings a hit with many critics.
The truly shocking thing about Nemesis is that it is, for all intents and purposes, identical to Celtic Kings, with the only noticeable improvement being the name. The graphics are the same, the animations are the same, and the strategy is the same. In two years they came up with two new nations with new units and some new spells.
The skirmish games are the exposed flank of Nemesis. The maps all look the same, and the starting locations of your opponents are predictable. Since you can’t zoom out, many tactical adjustments are impossible. Not that it would matter much; battles quickly devolve into a morass of fighting bodies.
The economy is largely beyond your control, so you spend a lot of time waiting to have enough gold to make the army you need to finish off your opponent. Instead of wars of maneuver and assault, you end up with wars of attrition. Most of the fighting is over the no man’s land of villages and outposts that dot the landscape between strongholds. The villages produce supplies to support the war effort, so the back-and-forth over these huts becomes the strategic focus of the maps. Once you control the villages, starving a stronghold into submission becomes a more viable strategy than brute force. Historically apt, perhaps, but not exactly fun.
Still, it’s the little things you miss. There is no mini-map per se—you have to hit the space bar to get an aerial view of the map. This can cost you precious seconds when you are told that units are under attack but you have no idea where. The tendency of units to stand idle while their neighbors are being beaten only makes things worse. You can exploit this tendency by building a catapult just out of the enemy’s line of sight and pounding him into oblivion. Add in dubious and predictable pathfinding and you have an RTS engine that would fit right in five years ago.
The RTS mechanics largely carry over into the adventure campaigns. Nemesis puts you in the third century BC leading the forces of Carthage or Rome in a struggle for dominance in the Western Mediterranean. In the course of each adventure campaign, you lead the forces of the big players, with supporting roles played by the Gauls and Iberians. The campaigns are enough to justify a purchase, but are much more entertaining than the skirmish games.
The place of hero units in the game’s structure is emphasized in these adventures. They are more powerful units and can pass on some of their experience to units directly under their command. This encourages the use of armies instead of mobs. Unless the scenario specifically calls for a pitched battle, though, you spend a lot of time forcing villages to switch sides to cut off your opponent’s supplies.
The chance to relive the march over the Alps and to rewrite history with some of the world’s great generals is appealing. The adventures are better written this time around. The historic heroes are a nice touch, and the cut-scene narrative of the wars is fairly educational. Expect anachronisms in the game, and keep in mind that the campaigns are more Asterix than Appian. The brevity of the adventures means that you never get attached to your heroes and their cause never becomes your cause.
So, like Hannibal in Italy, Nemesis has limited resources and barely enough to get the job done. But unlike Hannibal, it doesn’t have the genius to make things work.

This article originally appeared in Computer Games Magazine #164