Praetorians

Remember watching Gladiator for the first time? Remember how the jaw-dropping opening scenes of the movie exploded onto the screen, and how your popcorn (or fattening cinema food of choice) sat abandoned as Maximus' army unleashed hell on the hapless barbarian tribes? Remember how you stood up in the cinema and embarrassed yourself by revealing your online gaming roots and screaming "0wned!" as a particularly large and bearded barbarian was felled by the Roman onslaught No? Damn. Maybe that was just us, then.

Either way, Gladiator made the concept of marching around a bunch of men in pleated skirts with feathery helmets downright cool. Praetorians creator Pyro Studios, best known for the seminal Commandos games, has taken on the might of the Roman Empire in a game that spans the expansion of Pax Romana throughout Europe, North Africa and the near East.

Strategy games generally fall into one of two camps; there are those which feature resource management, and those which don't. You pays your money, you makes your choice. Either you want to get involved in setting up supply chains, building supply depots, harvesting resources and building bases, or you prefer to play a tactical game with a set number of units at your beck and call.

Praetorians takes a unique new approach to this aspect of RTS gaming by removing the micro-management of resource gathering from your control without actually removing resource management from the game entirely. Most levels of the game will see you capturing villages and claiming them by building garrisons next to them; this allows you to train new units at those villages, as long as sufficient population remains in the village to support the creation of a new unit.

That's it - that's the entire extent of the resource management in the game - but despite the simplicity of the system, it works remarkably well. Control of the villages on a map often means the difference between victory and defeat in the long run - it's often possible to rush a strong army through a combat area, clearing out enemy troops but not taking the time to secure the villages properly, only to find that soon enough you're completely outnumbered as the villages pump out resistance fighters and your once-proud legions dwindle in a damaging war of attrition.