Hegemony Gold: Wars of Ancient Greece

Total War fans? Don't bother. Warcraft 3 fans? Don't bother. Civ/4x fans? Don't bother. It's just too old and too demanding to be fun. Want to move your units across water? You need 1 ship per 1 unit. By the time your unit disembarks, it's dead. Want to move your units across land? Make sure you assign a worker to follow them with food or else they'll starve. Want to attack your neighbor? Good luck, they start the game with 6 settlements. You also start with 8. Have fun managing half a kingdom from the get-go. It seems to me the developers got too lost in their own sauce when they made this. Rather than making a fun squad-based RTS where you upgrade your units and generals, they made a resource allocator where all your units are on a time limit to get things done. As a result, the whole game feels like a drag. You are not the General of Sparta marching hoplites across the Greek world. You are the dude who's in charge of handing out the bread.

I realized I had this in my steam log for almost 10 years so finally got around to playing it. Fun and unique way to do grand strategy. It was relatively similar to Knights of Honor 1 (haven't played sequel) but easier to visualize the logistics than that game. Athens and Sparta's campaign took me 20 hours, and the Macedonian campaign took me 60 hours (I didn't use diplomacy). There were some down falls, when your fleet is 30 ships or so it becomes difficult to move and horrible but the ground pathfinding was fine. I liked how the campaigns were structured and felt like I was reliving the ancient wars. I do wish there was siege equipment in the Athens and Sparta campaign but I beat them without it. If I had a smaller backlog of Steam games I bet the sandbox mode would have been really fun. And I bet the sequels are even better.