Since the surprise success of Europa Universalis and EU2, Paradox has become synonymous with ‘complex historical sim’. This has won them accolades from the hardcore strategy gamer market, but even the most ardent fanboi would concede that EU1 & EU2 were on the steep side of the learning curve.
Legion, being developed by Slitherine Strategies for Paradox’s next release, will continue to carry the banner of historicity but will also be much more approachable for a wider audience. You can get a lot of the details at
Slitherine’s website but we had the opportunity to have a candid chat with Iain McNeil of Slitherine Software about the game at length:
SGO: The general sense of the information we have about Legion would suggest it’s faintly like Imperialism II but set in ancient Rome – static cities (that is, you don’t create them ala Civ), areas of control and resource production, and combat resolution in a tactical battle screen. Is that a fair comparison, as far as it goes?
Slitherine: There are some similarities between Imperialism and Legion, but there are also large differences. In Imperialism you have a centralized economy model. All resources are collected and processed at a central point where the population is also stored. In Legion we are far more city based. Each cities production is based on its surrounding natural resources. Each city has a population, civic buildings, can recruit troops etc. Imperialism also allowed you to move your armies from one place to another far too easily in my opinion. In Legion, if you are caught with an army out of position, you will pay the price. We really sit somewhere between the Civ and Imperialism models, but its hard to categorize Legion in this way as there is nothing else quite like it.
SGO: What would you say makes Legion ‘stand out’ from Imperialism?
Slitherine: Apart from the above, there are far more nations involved so diplomacy becomes a much more important part of the game. In Imperialism you either directly control how each unit moves in a turn based battle or let the AI resolve it without seeing the battle at all. In Legion you do not have direct control but plan out the battles in advance choosing formations, orders, making use of terrain and the different troops abilities much like a football management game. Once the battle starts it is fought out in real time, but you do not directly control the troops, you just get to watch the spectacle and see which of your plans worked and which didn’t and revise them for next time. There is also far more differentiation between nations in Legion, so the Celts have very different buildings and units to the Romans and Greeks.
SGO: Is there are specific era you’re aiming to represent?
Slitherine: In Legion we’re not trying to recreate a specific era of Rome. Instead we’re taking things from a more general and higher level. E.g. you can play a campaign before the formation of Rome where 21 different nations are competing for dominance of the Italian peninsula with Rome being just one of those factions. Other campaigns allow you to play through Gaul and Britain, but they are very free form. We set up the start conditions and then let the AI and the player steer the game in whichever way they wish. We don’t have specific people or policies in the game. We’re focusing on the military campaigns rather than the social development of the period. Legion is an Empire building game.
SGO: Will there be random events (like the Gracchi brothers, famines, etc.)?
Slitherine: Its something we’d like to do, but it depends on whether we get the time. This is most likely something we will try and get into a sequel.
SGO: Looking through the Slitherine website and reading through the forums, I see maps of Italy, Gaul, and Britannia. This is interesting, but a lot seems to be missing. There was a lot to Rome besides the core provinces and Britannia of course, and a lot of Roman history involved external enemies such as the German tribes, Carthage, or especially Asian kingdoms. How would you respond to purists who would see the glass as half-empty rather than half-full?
Slitherine: We never intended Legion to be a complete history of the Roman Empire as we don’t think we could have covered it in the detail it deserved. What we’re aiming to do is create interesting campaigns based around historical data. We could have included all these nations, but if we had, the uniqueness of each nation would be compromised and almost all units and buildings would have had to be shared between sides. We’ve got as many different types of nations as we could in the game whilst maintaining enough differentiation between those nations. We’d love to expand the game to encompass all these regions, but we felt it best to cover a part of the Roman Empire well, rather than the whole thing badly. Note that the Gallic scenario does cover the eastern fringes of Germania, so there are German tribes involved.
SGO: I see that you’ve chosen to focus the gameplay into scenarios, and that your target for each scenario seems to be more regional (Italy, Britannia, etc and not all of them together), instead of overall Roman. Is there going to be any ‘grand campaign’ tying these all together?
Slitherine: Each of these scenarios is a grand campaign in itself, but there is no carryover between them. One of the things we found while playing other strategy games was that we always wanted to play the grand campaign and were not interested in the smaller scenarios. I never even look at them normally, so we think by offering a number of equal scenarios players will get more replay value out of them than if they had one grand campaign.
SGO: Is the strategic part of the game turn-based?
Slitherine Yes the strategic control of your empire – diplomacy, construction, recruitment, army movement etc is turn based. Only the battles are real time.
SGO: With a turn-based system, there’s always a danger of the IGO/UGO allowing players and enemies to do things that would be impossible in a simultaneous ‘real time’ setting. Do armies have a zone of control or a reaction distance, preventing the “he just moved right past them during his turn and they didn’t DO anything!” situation?
Slitherine: Some games allow armies to fly past each other, but in Legion we wanted to avoid this. Zones of Control (ZOC’s) is something we looked at. We’re still considering whether to include ZOC’s, but our current thinking is they are not really necessary. Armies have relatively low movement points and move between 1-5 tiles based on the terrain and the type of unit. Because of the relatively slow speeds, you don’t normally get armies running past each other, and if you do its because one side has
outmaneuvered the other, and we think that adds to the gameplay rather than detracts from it.
SGO: Your site and the forums briefly touch on your decision to change from your original premise of four raw materials (cloth, iron, wood, and food) to three (eliminating cloth). Could you discuss this a little more for us?
Slitherine: We found with 4 resource types that if you made all 4 resource essential then any country which did not have access to all 4 was at a serious disadvantage. It just unbalanced the game and we found it works much better with 3 as it’s also exponentially harder to manage 4 resources, especially for the AI.
SGO: Up to 20 different AI sides – so that means actually 21 factions (player plus 20) in the game?
Slitherine: Yes that’s right. Because of the number of nations its not easy to just ignore the other countries and use conquest alone -- diplomacy is an important part of the game. No matter how good you are, if 20 AI sides come at you, you don’t really stand much chance. The AI sides are playing the game to win, and they don’t even know which side the player is, so they treat everyone the same way, making alliances, declaring wars, exchanging tributes etc.
SGO: Are these always going to be different states, or can they be civil factions (ala late Roman civil wars)?
Slitherine: The different nations can be anything from a single city to a large empire. We don’t currently have a civil war in any campaigns, but it is something that could be done - he said while making a note on his pad J.
SGO: Are these sides fixed in the scenario setup, or is it dynamically possible that as the game goes along, a strong General on a remote frontier revolts and ‘becomes’ a new AI player?
Slitherine: To be honest this doesn’t really fit in with how we think the game should work. We’re not keen on taking things away from the player that they have fought hard to gain. It’s something that would be interesting to try, but it would require good feedback to the player warning them that it was likely to happen, and they would need to have options to counter it. It’s not going to make it into Legion, but may be something else for a sequel. New nations do not spring up during the game. Once a nation is conquered, that’s it, it’s out of the game.
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