Hegemony III: Clash of the Ancients

Hegemony III is a game I have over 300 hours in and can highly recommend. I haven’t played those hours in one go. The game is a game I have played through several times, and yet still come back to from time to time to scratch an itch, as this game does many things very well and some things that no other game I know of does. [b]Pros:[/b] [list][*]Logistics: Units need food and gold, so you have to think about that and not just roflstomp forever. [*]Seamless zoom in and out from a 2D grand strategy map to commanding your units in 3D map battles. [*]Historical depth and ambience are real nice. [*]Stability: Very few bugs if any. [*]Huge aspects of the game actually look great, like the 2D map or the faction symbols.[/list] [b]Cons:[/b] [list][*]Dated graphics: It looks its age in static screenshots, though when you actually play you don’t actually notice it, or at least I don’t. [*]Clunky UI: You have to basically either click on everything or use a menu when you’ve grown big enough, you can’t toggle from one city or one resource to the next with a single button press. But again it’s not a new game. [*]On the big map once you've gotten like a quarter of the map nothing will defeat you.[/list] The game has logistics in that your units need gold and food, and whenever they leave your territory they can take a little bit of food with them. However, this is enough to attack nearby targets, but not for campaigns. In that case you need to figure out a way to bring more food with them, e.g. by building camps as supply bases. The game has gold, food and wood as resources, with all three having different uses and allowing for interesting interplay. The game is old and you can tell, for example when you look at the graphics. The graphics look old when I look at static images of the map, but when I play, I don’t notice it. Moreover, UI and controls have obviously aged as well, but not as much as I know from many other games. There are some inconveniences here and there, but nothing that’d stop me from playing. You can seamlessly scroll in and out from the grand map that looks like a map with figures on it and a 3D version of the entire world. You can micro your armies to have the formations you want them to have to do flanking maneuvers and to do better slavery, or you can just select your units on the 2D version of the map, right click on the enemy unit or army and not scroll in to micro. It’s your call and if you choose to micro it works seamlessly and without issue. Settlements have cultures and if you don’t convert them, you can recruit faction specific units but will have to garrison it or send hostages from it to elsewhere to stop rebellions. However, if you do convert them, you won’t have to garrison them anymore and can recruit the units of your culture. The map is full of historical settlements, all of which have some very nice infotexts that are interesting to read, and the factions are interesting as well. Each culture has their own specific units and some units that they don’t get access to. In my 300 hours, I haven’t ever so far touched a mod, but I can see the game has a small but passionate community and mods are still being made and updated. Some of them look interesting to me and I might try them out in the future. I have seen some negative reviews complaining about an AI that is too difficult and attacking them from several sides simultaneously, but that isn’t something I have seen so far and I have never had that problem. I have also seen complaints that the wars never stop and you never get to have peaceful periods, but again, that’s not something I have seen. I have a long peaceful period in the game I’m playing right now where I’m not at war with anyone. CA’s Rome 2 Total War has a DLC that is almost exactly the same era and setting and the same target audience, so a few comparisons are in order: Hegemony III wasn’t created by a huge dev studio and it shows, especially graphics wise, but not exactly all that much. Hegemony III was created by a studio with a few devs who cared and that shows as well. Everything is well rounded and better. If I had to choose between Hegemony III and the Rise of the Republic DLC, I will always choose Hegemony III. The game has one DLC that is done and one DLC that will never come, because the studio that made the game has been abandoned. While that is sad, you will never actually notice any features missing. There are very few bugs.