Building Blocks - Glory of the Roman Empire Demo
Use the Interface
As I mentioned, the interface is very sparse. However, there are two very useful screens that make growing the town much easier.
The Economy Overview screen offers details on the number of foodstuffs, construction materials and general goods recently produced, recently consumed, stores on hand, number of buildings for each type of good, and more. There is also a small icon to the right of each good that gives a basic idea of how plentiful the supply is, from a green icon showing oversupply down to a nasty red icon showing poor supply. It’s a very useful screen to help balance a town’s economy, and can quickly tune the player in to any weakness.
The other screen, the Settlement Overview panel, is broken down into six tabs: basic, food, production, public, support and map locations. The first five tabs offer details on the number of each type of building, the number under construction, and the number of workers/inhabitants in each. For instance, under the production tab the woodcutter’s lodge might show one completed woodcutter’s lodge, one under construction, and three workers. There is also a button next to each building type that, when clicked, selects the building and centers the map upon it.
The last tab, map locations, proved very useful to me once I discovered it. Resources like stone and marble are littered about the map, and are also shown as small blue dots on the mini-map, but they can be hard to locate. Using the map locations tab, it’s easy to click on the resource and have the map centered on the resource than fiddling with the camera trying to locate the stone amidst a bunch of trees.
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Keeping up with city growth and production. |
Listen to your People!
Although it is interesting just to watch the people in town run around, going about their business—especially at the accelerated speed—the people are more than just window dressing. Clicking on them as they go about their work can yield hints and clues about what is wrong, or maybe even what is right, about the town. Citizens may decry the lack of cloth or bread, or a slave may tell you just how happy he is to be working. While clicking on every citizen is just silly, since the overview windows and building information panels help to clue you in to most everything, it can still be a helpful tool.
Take it Slow
Rome wasn’t built in a day! Well, it can be in Glory of the Roman Empire, but the statement still rings true. Making changes is a slow process. Slapping down 15 buildings without a plan might throw the village into unbalanced chaos. If there’s a shortage of bread, try and figure out why. Are there citizens out of range of the bakery? Is the tavern not receiving supplies? Are there houses too far away from the commercial hub? Is there anyone to work at the wheat farm in order to produce flour? Using the buildings and the interface to answer these questions is integral to making a growing, balanced town. Find the problem, and fix it, but don’t go overboard. Every building needs workers, and the more buildings you make to fix a problem also creates a need for more citizens and slaves to build and work. Make a change or two at a time, and let the town absorb the change, see if the new bakery shop is going to supply enough bread on the east side of town, and if not, make further plans to fix the problem.
