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The mechanics are mostly the same as EU3, but they make somewhat more sense in this historical context--being able to conquer the world as Rome sorta makes sense, since Rome really did conquer the world...whereas in EU3 anyone who plays as France can overrun all of Europe if they really want to, mostly because the game doesn't really understand how European diplomacy worked during that period. (They do their best with "belligerence" points and "casus belli" and the rest of it, but it's a system designed to be exploited.) With EU: Rome, this is slightly less insane, and I'll admit that the colonization system was pretty interesting and fun. Although it ended up being very easy to colonize all of Gaul and the rest of it (competent resistence from the "barbarians" notwithstanding) while completely ignoring the big, organized empires, like, oh I don't know, Carthage. In the real world, it would have been completely impossible for Rome to just forget about the empires of the Mediterranean and the *trade routes*. (The game has trade routes, but mostly its just a local thing--it's mostly just your provinces trading with each other, which means it's essentially just another reward for conquests, at the bottom of it.) In reality Rome became the prime power of the Mediterranean by ruining Carthage in a long series of brutal struggle-to-the-death type wars, and even in any plausible embellishment or deviation from reality, Rome would still have to gain control of the Mediterranean--the Grecian empires of the East and Egypt & Africa and their grain fields-- to be the empire it was. In the game, you're not really challenged to do anything hard if you don't want to, and the game makes you feel good as long as you slowly increases your number of provinces, and the size of your treasury and army, and all you have to do to do that is plant a bunch of random colonies in a bunch of random places in the wilderness...or conquer some tiny "barbarian" duchy (really, deep down, they're just 17th or 18th century dutchies, given ancient names--its mechanics are based on the age of European discovery and colonization) and then wait for its "culture" to magically and spontaneously change from "Celtic" to "Roman", like, poof.
It did pass the time though.
(7/10)
