Europa Universalis: Rome (PC)

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Resources add a strategic dimension to warfare. If you cut off an enemy's supply of horses you will weaken its forces in the short term -- and maybe even the long term if you can hold that province once the war comes to an end. Resources give you another reason to expand in a particular direction or grab a territory for colonization before someone else does.

Colonization is also handled well. Much of the initial map is made up of gray, uncivilized provinces that belong to nobody and that can spawn barbarian hordes that will pillage whatever they conquer. Defeating barbarians is a source of gold, slaves and glory for the general, not to mention the fact it keeps large blobs of smelly foreigners from descending on the Capitol. As your border provinces get more civilized and the barbarian threat dissipates, these gray territories become open for expansion. You can only settle provinces that are contiguous to your land and the artificial intelligence does a good job pushing its borders into the hinterlands of Europe.

One problem with all this gray space is that, beyond the occasional roaming army of Germans, there is no real danger in exploring this area. You can send a large force marching all the way to the Baltic from Athens and not suffer excessive attrition or manpower problems. Even in an age where living off the land was standard operating procedure, 20,000 Carthaginians shouldn't be able to march through the fields of Britain with minimal issues.

Throughout the game, there are hints that some design ideas weren't fully thought through. If you declare war without having a casus belli, you lose national stability. But there are too few casus belli available for what was a very warlike period. Not that it matters, since money is so easy to come by that you can raise the money to bump up your stability with little effort, so the entire stability mechanic becomes something you'll watch very occasionally.

You can invoke omens to bring benefits to your nation, though you risk a penalty if the entrails aren't favorable. One omen increases your trade wealth by 25 percent, making money even less of an issue. But omen success is tied to how widespread your religion is, giving the Greek states a huge advantage -- 100 percent success rate only 100 years into the game.

The big question is how a game with so many characters can have so little personality. Events happen to your characters but there are no shortcuts to identify who a specific person is or what happened to him/her, making it very difficult to track the life of your governor of Judaea even with the very unhelpful character history files. There is an ahistorical division between governor and general that makes little sense for the time period and reduces the characters to little more than numbers.

This mathematical approach to character building is best seen in the Roman competition to be elected consul. Republican governments have to have elections every couple of years and the most popular character usually gets elected. Because popularity doesn't degrade quickly, you can have the same character elected consul five or six times in a row. Historically speaking, consecutive consulships were reserved for crisis situations and the only man to be elected to five in a row provoked rivalries that eventually led to Rome's first civil war.