Praetorians (video game)
Praetorians is a 3D real-time tactics[1] game developed by Pyro Studios, based on Julius Caesar's campaigns.
Gameplay
Players are given two options of gameplay. Players may participate as Julius Caesar commanding forces of varying sizes against various barbarian tribes. Alternately, a skirmish can be chosen in which the player first chooses a difficulty level (easy, medium, hard or expert) then chooses up to 1 character and up to 7 AI players, commanded by the computer. These can be Roman, Egyptian or an anonymous barbarian tribe. Once this is completed, alliances may be created by joining two forces on the same team.Gameplay is simple and very easy to get the hang of, but addictive non stop action makes this game a must for computer gamers.
Members of an alliance may not attack one another. In times of crisis team members can call upon each other via the message line: "We need help." Allies will normally offer spare troops in assistance. 'Praetorians' differs from other games of its genre in that resources do not play a part in it. In most real time strategy games, items such as wood, food, gold, stone and glory must be collected, to be spent during the creation of troops. The only resource you need to recruit stronger soldiers are honour points. Honour points are earned by fighting and killing enemy troops.
GameSpot cites the difficulty of the zoom function and limits of the camera (For example, the camera is unable to turn 360 degrees.) as negative aspects of the game. However, GameSpot does praise 'Praetorians' for its gameplay and tactical depth, as well as its beautiful graphics. You also do not need resources, this is purely military. Unfortunately, the latest computer you can play this video game on is Windows XP.
Marketing
The game continued to sell well even into 2008, maintaining a place in the top 20 Budget PC titles on ChartTrack.
Development
An unofficial patch was released in October 2004, after the Pyro Studios producer of the title Javier Arévalo and Eidos' Jason Walker talked about sorting out a flaw in the Multiplayer game that was being exploited by gamers. This helped catapult the game back up the GameSpy Arena charts.
Mods : The actual unofficial Extension is called MoD 4.1 from the year 2004, it adds three new races and many, many new maps. MoD 4.1 contains the unofficial Patch to fix the multiplayer game.
Maps : 2008 a unofficial map editor for the PC game Praetorians comes up. The map editor is programmed in the C++ programming language and uses the OpenGL computer graphics API.
Reception
| Publication | Score | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| IGN | 8.9/10 | "Great" |
| GameSpot | 8.4/10 | great |
| Game Rankings | 77.97% (average of 30 reviews)[2] | [None] |
Reception of Praetorians was positive. GamePro noted that the game is "a healthy mixture of Medieval: Total War and WarCraft".