While I much prefer the challenge of reviewing console-based strategy games, the dedicated Romanophile in me does occasionally surface in order to pick up the occasional, exceptional PC based strategy game. The last of these was 2019’s Imperator, which was a grand strategy game to rival any other. Today’s review is Pax Augusta; a game with a much narrower scope, but the same lofty ambitions.
Pax Augusta is the brainchild of a single developer — Roger Gassman. As such, it has quite a few quirks that give it a very old-school feel. It’s a polished and detailed game, but some of the bugs and oddities start to show through over a prolonged period of play. Nonetheless, I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy my time with it, and it certainly reminded me of the times when strategy games were both simpler and more complex at the same time, thanks mainly to the way in which they trust the player to work out complex systems through trial and error.
There are several modes you can choose to play — including a tutorial which does teach you some basics (whilst also leaving a lot of key concepts completely unmentioned). I chose to spend most of my time with Pax Augusta in the career mode, where you’re free to explore a map of Gaul (and the southern parts of Britain) as you found settlements and advance your career in the Roman capital.
Upon choosing a location for your first city (or any that follow) the game will shift from the overworld map and zoom in on a single region. There are numerous maps in Pax Augusta and whilst I don’t believe that they are procedurally generated, there’s no doubt that some are considerably more suitable for city building than others. My first city — set in Belgica — was ideally placed on a completely flat grass plain with wood, iron and clay all readily available. My second, close to where London sits today, was a maze of swamps and hills that was much less suitable.
Wherever you choose to settle, Pax Augusta will demand considerable attention. You’ll need to earn money, establish a food supply and complete complex production chains to ensure access to wood and brick in particular, but also iron and marble as you introduce more complex and elaborate buildings.
Pax Augusta is claimed to be a more realistic representation of Roman city building than some of the prior games we’ve seen. That may or may not be true, but what I think it does do is offer an authentic-feeling experience. Each city must feature a main crossroads and an altar that form the centre of the city, and the people that live there will value proximity to these things above almost anything else. Different classes are represented too, with each bringing more demands over the last, and the need to keep everyone satisfied a constant theme.
As with so many games of this kind, and especially those that offer limited tutorials, there can be quite a steep learning curve. Pax Augusta is one such game. It’s quite easy to learn that your basic food source will come from the back gardens of the simpler houses, or that trade agreements can be signed with nearby farms. Initially, money only really comes from taxation of the lowest classes, and this seemed an oddity to me that didn’t quite feel right. Later, I’d established housing for all classes and had healthy production of all resources, but I couldn’t easily find a way to profitably trade with other settlements to increase revenue further.
In the main, the city-building parts of Pax Augusta work well and will entertain you. This is very much a game about placing buildings in optimal places and then ensuring that the underlying systems line up. People will wander around your city, but those people aren’t “real” as such. This isn’t like Tropico where you can click on a person and understand their hopes and dreams, and nor do the city streets “seem” to suffer from visible traffic issues or similar. It feels more as if Pax Augusta has a series of interlinked spreadsheets running beneath the visuals, and it’s the numbers sat within them that the player is seeking to optimise.
On that note, I’ve already talked about ensuring that your different classes of citizens are satisfied, and this is absolutely what makes Pax Augusta tick — almost to its detriment. Initially, only Liberti will even contemplate entering your city, to the extent that you can’t even build the houses that unlock the next class up. To achieve that unlock, you’ll need a couple of hundred satisfied Liberti, this process is then repeated as you move up the classes, with the demands becoming greater and greater.
To even build the houses of the elite classes, you’ll need to have all of the classes below operating in your city at high levels of satisfaction. I found this a bit arbitrary to be honest, and I thought it might be a feature that went away after my first city. A more natural system where higher classes could come but might get unhappy could have felt more realistic, but I was surprised to find myself going through this same loop in my second and third cities.
Adding to this is the concept of personal wealth in Pax Augusta, which is accumulated mainly by drawing a wage from the city you are currently running. In my first city, I’d established significant weekly revenue and prestige, meaning that I could apply for (and obtain) ranks like Quaestor, Aedile and eventually, Consul. With each of these ranks, options to increase my wage were introduced, and my own wealth was vast as a result.
With this in mind, when you settle a new city, you must choose to invest your personal wealth — but the revenue and wealth of the city you’ve just left remains with that city. In this way, you can establish as many cities as you want, travelling between them (by cart) on the overland map, and diving into the different challenges that each one offers. I quite liked this as an idea, but in truth having reached the highest career rank with just my first city somewhat neutered the challenge posed elsewhere, even on maps as grim as the one I spawned when settling on the banks of the Thames.
Despite what might sound like a fair bit of criticism, I do enjoy Pax Augusta quite a lot. I find that it feels a little bit more like a game than I had hoped — with its systems laid quite bare — rather than the “super realistic” experience that it had been touted as. Nonetheless, I also recognise how it uses those systems to build up a sense of how Roman life was. How the classes operated and the kinds of demands and desires they might have had. I also like how its roads operate and improve when upgraded, but without me having to micromanage every intersection because it was getting too busy (or whatever.)
In an age where most city-building games are either very highly abstract or focus more on the needs of individual citizen, Pax Augusta takes us back 2,000 years and has us focus on good city planning, optimal supply chains and the unashamed accumulation of personal wealth. It’s a very solid game for any studio, but to think it’s the work of just one man is quite remarkable, and despite the rough edges, management simulator and history fans alike will find a lot to enjoy here.
Pax Augusta is available on Windows PCs
