Nova Roma looks to bring to life the Pax Romana period (the peaceful bit where they did a load of, y’know, city building) of the Roman Empire, complete with the culture, politics, and, importantly, the architecture of the era.
The Nova Roma trailer revealed at the PC Gaming Show touts the colorful forums and colosseums we’ll be building, as well as a few interesting mechanics that should spice up gameplay. For example, water looks to play an integral role in the development of your cities, as we see flood waters from a burst dam devastating a built-up settlement, followed by an aqueduct being built to ferry water into a small district to feed into a fountain.
The new city builder is from Lion Shield, the team behind the "damn charming" Kingdoms and Castles, and we can see that same delight on show. Watching the city change color with the turn of the seasons is a treat that hopefully ties in with Nova Roma’s intricate weather simulation system. And it looks as though you’ll have to be careful to appease a pantheon of gods as you expand, too, with the trailer showing the god of thunder, Jupiter, casting lightning down upon buildings and carefully constructed dams after being spurned for too long, in a very "Caesar III" turn of events.
- Nested Lands is a 'brutal' survival city-builder about guiding villagers through a plague-infested world, and you can play its open alpha right now
- This ancient city sim constantly simulates 1000 NPCs in a clockwork murder sandbox where you can poison someone's drink and leave 'confident that you've pulled off the perfect crime'
Promising a complex supply chain system, it’ll be interesting to see how Nova Roma will handle interaction with your citizens. How will we please the plebs while navigating the political whims of patricians?
Nova Roma will be available on Steam and the Epic Games store, and you can wishlist the game now.
Fans of city builders are spoiled for choice at the minute. From the beaver-core aesthetic of Timberborn to the gentle feudalism of Farthest Frontier, and even the hotly anticipated impressive realism of the upcoming City Skylines II, we’ve been playing to some of the best the genre has to offer recently. So the pressure is on Lion Shield to make something that can draw us away, but this announcement trailer is certainly promising.
