I am entering on the history of a period rich in disasters, frightful in its wars, torn by civil strife, and even in peace full of horrors.
Publius Cornelis Tacitus, The Histories I.2
The year is 300 BCE. All of Italy will soon be trampled under the sandals of the Roman legions and an empire that will last more than a thousand years is about to rise from a small city on the Tiber. It is up to you to muster the legion, conquor the known world, and defend the empire from the hordes of the barbarians.
Imperium Mini: A Brief History of Rome is a quick-play turn-based strategy game that simulates the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. The aim of the game is to expand from the confines of Italy, civilize the known world, and withstand the tides of the barbarians pouring east from the forests of Germania and the steppes of Scythia.
Check the minimal manual for a description of how to play on the desktop version.
The game is Java based, so should be playable on both Windows, Linux, and Mac. The download package only contains native executables for Windows; to run on Mac or Linux, you will need to start the game from the jar file.
The game should be playable on most hardware, though it uses a fair amount of memory. The windows native is set to allow allocation of 1GB, which is way more than is really needed. If you have a machine with less memory (and get the game to run on it), I would be interested to know.
An Android (phone) version of the game now also exists.
Imperium Mini is a game that got constructed while I was working on the GUI for Imperium. I needed to test that the stuff I was building would be reusable. As I continued working out the kinks in the GUI and expanded on the game engine to have something to test on, I started fleshing out the test framework with some gameplay until it eventually started be a playable game.
Thus the current product, which should still be considered a game in the testing phase, rather than a finished concept. The graphics are odds and ends - stuff that has been donated to the Imperium project over the years and/or public domain images (if you should be aware of stuff in the game that isn't, please let me know).
The basic game concept is an old one - an homage to the old classic Annals of Rome. The gameplay here is simpler and streamlined, though, with nods to the genre in the boardgame world (among the most notable games of the genre, you may want to look to the old SPI piece "The Fall of Rome", Karsten Engelmann's "Rise and Fall", David Kershaw's "Solitaire Caesar", and Phil Sabin's "Empire". The latter two are relatively recent and can still be acquired).
The game itself is simple and fairly minimal, and is intended to be such. I have a number of ideas for extending the game play (improving the behavior of the barbarians / enemies, adding a simple "development" (research) system, and adding a few more scenarios, but my primary focus is and remains on getting Imperium completed.
That being said, I hope some of you will play Imperium Mini and enjoy it for what it is. As mentioned, this is an open alpha, so there will no doubt be bugs. You can find the list of known issues and the project roadmap (when there is any) in the Flyspray database for Imperium Mini.
If you find additional bugs, issues, etc., please let me know on the forums. Although I do not intend to spend a lot of time maintaining Imperium Mini specifically, most of the GUI code here is based on that in Imperium and fixing bugs those kind of bugs will obviously be a high priority. In addition, I will probably continue to use Imperium Mini for experimental code where appropriate (I'm thinking I should find a way to make the game multiplayer so that I can do some network code experiments).
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