Success gives you a chance to upgrade your character, giving him more estates or greater bonuses when you start a new scenario. (Grab the “effective slave” one as soon as you can.) You can choose from a number of families, each with specific strengths, but I doubt many will bother playing through more than once. Still, collecting character attributes gives importance to the moments between scenarios. Seeing a mission that gives you chance of free slaves or a lot of gold for an easy objective may give you that little boost that keeps the monotony of the setting at bay.

Grand Ages: Rome will win no prizes for cleverness or originality, though the military subgame is better than we are used to in this genre. It is mostly a surprising refinement in a series that has been mostly bland and pointless. Let’s see them try it with Babylon or Samarkand next.

Questions or comments? We'd love to hear from you .