Alea Jacta Est

I am really enjoying this game as a whole, and the DLCs add so much additional content for such a low price. The AGEOD team has really done an amazing job with the details of this game. The character portraits are very accurate caricatures of their real-life counterparts who they are meant to represent. The game is expansive in its scope, and boasts quite a large map as well. When one plays this game, moving the armies about, organizing supply lines, and determining whether or not to engage in a pitch battle–one gets the same feeling as reading Livy. Overall I highly recommend this game for all lovers of Roman history, and the wars of the early Republic and Roman Empire.

Bland and boring. It's a board game for sure. Not really a good video game.

Alea Jacta Est is an older game from 2014. It's a venerable 10 years old at the time of this review. And it's bad, real bad. This is basically a ripoff of Total War: Rome, but without [i]the actual realtime combat[/i]. So basically the Total War Rome map view. Thsi is Total War from Wish. Which is fully appropriate because Slytherine is basically Paragon from Wish. Except Wish is kinda cheap and Slytherine gouges like a cornered animal on pricing. I'll go into pricing later but make sure you're sitting down when you read how much they actually want for this. It's not even a good ripoff of Total War's map mode. It's clunky, terrible UI, misbalanced gameplay... a lot of effort went into trying to make a ripoff here, and it was a wasted effort... at least I hope so. I'd feel bad if a lot of people thought this was a Total War game or something and bought this. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The game doesn't correctly account for modern PC displays, UI scaling isn't handled correctly. As a result of this unfortunate decision, text and UI elements don't display at a reasonable size, it's too small to be legible on most modern gaming PCs, and there's no in-game controls or options to correct this. This can render the game unplayable for many. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The game never really caught on with the millions of gamers on Steam, with a very low peak player count close to launch, and then just a handful of players launching this game every couple of days. This is undoubtedly caused by factors such as those raised in this review. It's always helpful with buying decisions to consider how popular and successful the product is, and unfortunately while this did accumulate a few participation trophy reviews, overall, people just aren't using it. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? Alea Jacta Est has the ridiculous, laughable price of $25 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. But wait, there's more... they're an INSANE $70 DLC tacked onto this. NINETY FIVE UNITED STATES DOLLARS for a garbage ripoff of Total War: Rome (but without the combat). Is this some kind of joke???

Pretty much all AGEOD games have the exact same problem of having alot of depth to their gameplay, but no way to learn how to play the game that is actually fun. The only way to get an understanding of these games is to jump right into the game managing a huge amount of territory and dozens of different screens while looking at a manual. This game in particular is difficult to pick up as this is a digital copy and the game crashes when alt-tabbed (despite being turn based).

A superb but very difficult game. Only if you like refined strategy games. It has not fancy graphics or ui and it's very complex to understand and master game mechanics, but it' profound and very challengimg, besides its historical accuracy. If you like the period (also the DLCs are very good) you should buy it.

,,The die is cast". One of the true great strategy games in which lets you play in the roman time period. This game is all about the careful planning of the operations on a beautiful map, managing supplie lines, anticipating your opponents moves whike syncronizing your own. It was so much fun dueling the romans with the parthians in the carrhare campaign and catching the romans offguard. You have to make sure that your army is well supplied and rested, otherwise they might fall appart. It has some unecessary micro management which is partly caused by the limitations old engine of the game and soemtimes crashes, so make sure you saven often, but it also autosaves every round. The games has lots of dlc with smaller and bigger scenarios. The AI does a decent job, even if you know what you are doing it is by no means a cakewalk. The massive manual of the game provied a sense of scope you havent seen before, but i can ensure you that you dont need to read and understand everything from the start to have success. I would also watch a few lets plays on YT, where someone points out the most important details.

Simply the best. An utterly immersive wargame bringing to life the glory and agony of ancient Rome in incredible historical detail and gripping gameplay. No one does it better than AGEOD.

just....amazing

Best simulation of Roman wars I played. Too bad new DLCs aren't made.

Too simplistic and too esoteric. By simplistic I mean, there aren't that many interesting moves to make - some recruiting, loyalty buffs, a tiny amount of economy. Most of it boils down to moving an army to fight a battle. That would be fine, this is a war game after all. However... Battles give no useful indication as to why they occurred the way they did. Even if you read the manual, all you get are vague notions as to what does what. I can infer some things based on terrain, but I'm guessing at what the devs put inside a black box. This is what I mean by too esoteric. Everything is super vague, the UI is awful at both relaying information and minimizing clicks. I played ~3 hours including a tutorial that barely explains anything, and I don't feel I made an actually interesting, strategic move during that time. Performance, etc isn't great either for its age but the above was the real problem.