Are you a fan of turn-based strategy games such as Civilization, For the King, Gears Tactics, XCom, Age of Empires, or Stronghold? Have you ever thought, man I’d love to play as a nation and try to conquer the Roman world?
Well if you answered yes, then you are in luck because Billionworlds and Daedalic Entertainment have just the game for you. At PAX East 2024, Daedalic Entertainment and Billionworlds showed off the upcoming game Yield: Fall of Rome.
When you first load into Yield: Fall of Rome, the map is covered by clouds. As you explore the map, the clouds roll away. Once you have found a suitable location you can build your town; with your first town established, you are able to start building units to send out into the world and gather resources or slaughter enemies.
For the demo, we were tasked with capturing three relic locations. In order to capture a location, we had to move a unit to the shrine and keep it there for a turn. The best way to unlock the map was by using a scout to move around; scouts can move a good distance but are fairly weak.
As we moved through the map, we quickly found enemies and frenemies. After sending an emissary to a Roman-controlled city, the Romans left us alone as long as we didn’t attack them. Foolishly, we sent our scout there, so we had to build a new one. Building units requires resources that can be found throughout the land.
When building the town, you will need to be mindful of what resources you need or else you can end up as a town without a civilization. When we first started building, we quickly ran out of resources because we built blindly. This made taking the shrines a challenge because the enemy could quickly dispatch the limited units we had.
Because of playing blindly and burning through resources, we had to wait a few turns before expanding in order to regain supplies. After scouting the map, we could see where the enemy’s units and fortresses were. Now, all we needed was a strategy.
With foot Soldiers having a low movement speed, we decided to focus on using the leader, rangers, and calvary. Although they were more costly, they were more durable and efficient. In order to build the units, we needed to build the proper building to train them.
In order to build roads and buildings, we needed to spend coins. Each round, a certain amount of coins are given to the player based on objective and city bonuses. As players unlock experience points, they can be spent to upgrade the skill tree.
It will be interesting to see how Billionworlds handles the skill tree within the game. Will the skill tree follow the player through each mission or will it reset? We will ultimately find out when the game releases or a demo expands on the overall gameplay.
When playing turn-based games, I like to have all my commands readily available and easy to see, sometimes I like hotkeys. Yield: Fall of Rome‘s current interface feels overly complicated with a ton of menus that you have to search through in order to find what you are looking for.
Now, this could be a getting used to the game element or it could be the developer being overly ambitious. Even a dumbed-down version may help general consumers especially if Billionworlds has any plans of releasing the game beyond PC.
Yield: Fall of Rome’s combat was fairly straightforward and easy to understand once you saw how the mechanic worked. Destroying a town and stopping it from spawning enemies was more efficient than taking down the enemies one by one.
This is something we learned because we got our units killed by focusing on the enemies around the town rather than the town itself. The one thing that felt odd was the map was rounded so once you got to the edge one way, it just circled back.
After playing through the PAX East demo, I would be willing to give the full game a chance or at least play another demo for the game. Yield: Fall of Rome is launching sometime later in 2024 for PS (via Steam).
