What makes the Roman world an attractive setting for a strategy game like this?

The Roman Era depicts some of the greatest cultural and military civilizations' that have ever existed. The era was filled with intrigues, warfare, cunning politics, trade and other elements that all lend themselves in an excellent way to the type of strategy games that we develop. Our games are rich in historical content and places the player in control of a nation and their success will depend on their strategic skills in all these areas and many others.

What is the geographic scale?

The game map covers England in the North West to Persia in the South East. Basically it includes anything the Romans reached and fought for until 27 BC…and then some.

Besides the obvious problem of Rome running everything, why focus on the mid to late Republican period and not carry on into the Empire?

This game is completely focused around building your empire rather than managing your empire. The first player to successfully create his monolithic empire is the sole winner. We believe players are more interested in striving for victory, rather than sit back and wait for the Barbarians to invade.

Each of Paradox's grand historical games have had something to distinguish them from the Europa Universalis series. Crusader Kings has character development, Victoria has economics, Hearts of Iron has a military focus. What will set the Roman game apart?

Our team has chosen to excel in what we do best, and that is Grand Strategy. All of our games belong to that genre but each one has had a specific focus. For Rome specifically, the most obvious difference is of course the time period and everything time period specific that comes with that, however in addition I would say that players will notice the new concepts in politics and character development and influence the most.

The period in the game is really the history of how Rome came to rule the Mediterranean world; once Carthage was done, that was pretty much it for serious rivals. Will the game be playable from the non-Roman side?

Yes and the focus of the game is to allow other potential empires to form in the hands of the players or the AI. I’d argue that the Parthians for instance were a pretty serious contender and it will be interesting to see how far players can take this in gameplay.

How will you distinguish between the Republican systems of Rome/Carthage, monarchies of the East and tribal federations of the north?

There are plenty of differences between them, a few examples are the different technological discoveries and the different religions who all bring different gameplay features to play, like the Carthaginian who sacrificed their children to their gods (Bhaal) etc.

People who don't know a lot about ancient history still recognize the names Hannibal and Julius Caesar. Will the Punic and Roman Civil Wars be something we can experience?

Yes, you will get the concepts and historical feelings of these periods.

Your games tend to attract an audience that likes to live the history they read about, but also create a history that never was. What challenges does this pose for the strategy game developer?

In our latest games we’ve managed to strike a balance between the two that we feel works well. Our database of information and facts is always extremely extensive and as such the base of our games is full of historical data. However, once the game is placed in the hands of the player, the players themselves decide what the outcome will be and how closely they would like to follow history. By making our games open ended and flexible with a strong historical base we allow for a greater scope than if we followed history very strictly and we can still cater to the strict historians as they generally find a way of modifying our games to suit them.