In his Life of Aemilius Paulus, Plutarch tells the story of a Roman nobleman who astonishes his friends by announcing his intentions to divorce his wife. His friends protest that his wife is beautiful, well-born, honest and chaste. What possible reason could he have for a divorce? The noble replies that his shoes also seem attractive and well-made, but only he knows where they pinch.

Europa Universalis: Rome pinches. Like that abandoned Roman matron, it has a distinguished legacy, an attractive design, and an unpretentious facade -- it is up-front about what it is. It also has many flaws that become readily apparent as you spend more time with it. Rome is the most accessible and comprehensible game Paradox has made, but it also has the same issues that have plagued earlier titles in the series.

For those of you unfamiliar with the EU games, you are put in charge of a nation throughout its history. You raise armies, upgrade cities, and build alliances. The games are deeper and less colorful than the Total War games, but if you appreciate the idea of expanding your borders and increasing your national prestige, then this series is something you should look at.

Rome brings in many of the same ideas that we've seen in earlier Paradox titles. From 2006's Europa Universalis III, it imports a "National Ideas" feature that confers different bonuses on your country depending on your priorities, your government and your tech level. From 2004's Crusader Kings, it imports characters that develop personalities and traits that affect how they behave. If you know these games well, you will be immediately comfortable with what is going on.

It's what Rome adds to the mix that makes it interesting. The differences between government types are more than cosmetic -- the various types of republics and monarchies can draw on different sorts of National Ideas. Each regime has a benefit attached to it as well; cheaper buildings, more loyal characters, and so on. Your government type can't be changed on a whim, but occasionally you'll be prompted with the opportunity to make a switch.

Governments change most often through civil wars. With different characters controlling armies and provinces, a few of them will occasionally lose loyalty to the state and make a play for power, often to institute a new form of government. A prolonged civil war means more provinces will defect. No negotiation is possible. Balancing a character's ability with his popularity and loyalty is one of the core new ideas in Rome, and it works reasonably well.

The big problem with civil wars is that computer-controlled nations are military morons. They will reduce a rebelling general to a single tiny province and still lose the war, crippling their country for decades. The military mismanagement is everywhere, mostly because the computer opponents are perfectly willing to trickle in 1,000 troops here and there instead of building a proper-sized strike force to eliminate the opposition. The computer-controlled forces have too many small armies, a side effect of army costs being too low, reinforcement too easy and money much too easy to make.

Each territory has a resource that confers a bonus on that location. Provinces with iron can build heavy infantry; places with wine are less likely to revolt, etc. With trade routes, you can extend these bonuses to other territories, whether they are your own or your neighbor's. The better your infrastructure, the more trade routes you can have in a territory; forums, roads and harbors are great for sharing the wealth. You earn money on each route, too, with extra cash coming in for long distance international trades.

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.

History is a poor guide to game design, but the entire point of the oligarchic republic was to share power and promote competition. For many years in Rome, the republic might as well be a monarchy, with people in the same positions perpetually and no sense that elections bring change. There are friendship and rivalry traits; why not use them as more than civil war countdown clocks?

For most people, this might be a minor issue, but there are so many provinces and so many characters that the game becomes less about managing a living world (as in Crusader Kings) than about balancing a cosmic ledger of pluses and minuses. The realization that the computer elections are so rigid in their considerations doesn't make the world feel any more real.

In spite of all these issues, Rome is the most approachable EU game yet. Explanations are everywhere and the designers have made excellent use of alert tabs, tool tips and descriptive color. Dabblers will be drawn to it because it is very easy to build an unstoppable empire and to plan what your next step will be. You can start your game at any date between 278 and 25 BCE, so you get a tiny (if imperfect) history lesson while you're at it.

If you are an experienced EU player, though, you might wonder if Paradox has learned much from its own games. Diplomacy is a weak cousin to war and the AI is too weak to provide much of a threat (and too stupid to fight wars well). These aren't new problems for Paradox games, but the low number of actors and constant warfare make these failings more obvious. The depth and variety make the game appealing, but a little more testing could have made the classical theme another classic in its own right.



This review was based on a gold master version of the game provided by the publisher.