Warrior of Rome

Warrior of Rome was developed and released by the Japanese studio Micronet for the Sega Genesis in 1991; in Japan it appeared as Caesar no Yabou, roughly Caesar's Ambition. It is one of the very first attempts at real-time strategy on a console, arriving before Dune II defined the genre on computers.

You play Julius Caesar in 48 BCE, and four campaign maps take you to Egypt. Orders are issued to each unit individually: you set marching speed, send troops into an attack, pull a battered unit back to recover its strength, or have it lay traps. When one of your units meets an enemy force, the game cuts to a side-on battle screen where the soldiers hack away at each other while you watch the numbers drain. Progress can be saved, or continued via a password after a completed map.

It sounds promising; the execution is ponderous. The pace is punishingly slow — units crawl across the map, every order goes through several layers of menus, and real time mostly means waiting long minutes for anything to happen at all. The interface was clumsy even by 1991 standards, and the battles themselves offer little genuine decision-making. Neither contemporary nor retrospective reviews are kind to the game, and they have their reasons.

Even so, Warrior of Rome has its place. It shows what the genre looked like before it had any rules, and a patient player will find a strange, slow-moving war chessboard of a kind nobody makes any more. It is a historical document rather than an evening's entertainment — but as a document it is an honest one.

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