Buy Hegemony Gold: Wars of Ancient Greece

This game was fun at first but once my empire grew beyond 10 cities, it started crashing every 15 minutes rendering it unplayable.

Very good game which has hundreds of hours to play if u like to play in sandbox, but the campaing in itself is too short and the missions seem a bit forced towards the end.

If you don't know if the game is for you. Just play the demo!

Excellent game with the most faithul recreation of post-Leuctra Greece I have seen, much better than the Total War effort (Wrath of Sparta). Very difficult to just pick up, be prepared to fail a few times. I played Hegemony 3 and this is much more fun, with my preferred setting.

I bought this during the summer sale but it well worth the standard price. Its a simple concept (raise troops, pay them, feed them, attack your neighbors) but finding the right balence makes it much more complex than you might think. Definitely a different spin than any of the other strategy games you might also be playing, EUIV, Total War, CKII.

• Supply Lines/Logistics- Your cities each have a predetermined number of trade routes based on the economic power of that city. Some have 2, some have 16. These can connect to farms (which produce food, with varying amounts for each season), mines (which produce gold when worked by workers or slaves captured in battle), and they connect to other cities. Food moves along these routes with different capacities based on how long it is. Some routes that are very close (like a city to the farm next to it) can carry up to 100 a week and longer routes usually start at a base level of 15 per week, but can be upgraded by paying gold. Your units replentish their losses only if they are on one of these supply lines.
  
  
• Finances- You don't have a treasury like in other games, only an income. Your finances are viewed as a weekly income/cost. Mines produce up to 80 gold a week whereas upgraded roads can cost up to 90 as well as your troops having a weekly upkeep. So at any point your spending overtakes your income, units don't get paid and their moral starts to drop. The same will happen with food, but you don't have a kingdom production/expenditure because food can only get to your troops and cities if you have sufficient supply lines.
  
  
• Battles- Your troops fight in real time on the campaign map like Paradox games but you can deploy and position them like in Total War with bonuses if your cavalry charges a unit or if you flank an enemy. A unit's moral drops a little for each soldier that dies and it will rout if the moral drops to 0. Cities act in a similar way but with a number assigned to its seige strength. When you are sieging a city, its constatly dropping, with larger hits if you use catapaults, and when it gets to 0, it becomes yours. If a city or fort has a garrison, it will shoot back at you. When a unit routes, it will regroup at its home city and replentish its losses. This will always happen, unit don't get destroyed, even if every troop dies.
  
  
• Cities- When you retake a city that is part of your culture or basiaclly within your historical territory, it becomes part of your empire. You can recruit native units, the same you can recruit at your capital, and they can change their home city to any with the same culture. If you have every unit with its home set as your capital, they will only replentish its number from that city so it's best to try to spead them out. For example, if your capital is in the middle of your empire and your troops take losses on the edge, manpower will be taken from its home and move along supply lines to that unit. Cities recouperate manpower slowly and when it's at 0, your troops won't fill their ranks unless you change their home city and they recruit from there.
  
  
• Culture- When you expand and take a neighboring city that is not native, they will remain hostile to your occupation. This manifests as needing a garrison to prevent it from rebelling and joining its original nation. You can station your own troops from native cities, hire allied troops if that city is friendly/allied to you, or hire mercinaries from that city at an increased cost. They will have a specific culture and can have their home city assigned to any city with a shared culture.
  
  
• Final thoughts- There are still other aspects, generals, naval combat, objectives/rewards, population and migrants, stockpiling food, etc. but the tutorial covers these aspects. The tutorial is only educational for the first hour or so, like I said, simple concept. The difficulty comes with taking these basic rules and balencing the food and gold across your empire, your troops to attack enemies and your garrisons to counter raids and supress uprisings. The introductory capmaign starts you as Phillip of Macedon as it guides your expansion. After a bit though, you have learned the game enough that you don't need a tutorial and just need some practice. I easily sunk 40 hours into that capmaign just taking my time, finding the most efficient way to set up supply lines and cheapest ways to maintain garrison without depleating my manpower reserves.
  
  That being said, I highly reccomend this game. The intro campaign lasts long enough to justify the price and it has plenty of replayability because you can go a different direction because the map is enormous. There are also other campaigns with the Peloponnesian War being very complex as well as a sandbox mode- play as any faction with no rules or time limits.

I love the logistics and deep strategy this game offers, you can tell the developers put a lot of effort into this hidden gem. Probably my favorite game in my library so far.

Hegemony Gold: Wars of Ancient Greece is a very intelligent game, both immediate and deep. I would define it as an "operational grand strategy game".

The emphasis is obviously on logistics: the real trick to success is keeping your troops well supplied and in good shape, and that can be hard, especially during sieges and winters. Sieges in particular are rather well represented in a fun way, as you'll need to block enemy supply routes, both on land and on sea, while keeping your own open.

Strategical maneuvering is also very important, and delaying the movement of an army might mean the collapse of your empire. Your state is almost like a house of cards: lose a key region for your supply network and your income, and you'll find yourself in big trouble. The AI itself is very skilled at exploiting those weaknesses in your grand strategy, and you'll find yourself often at war on multiple fronts. Unlike many strategy games, as you grow there won't be any kind of avalanche effect: you will have more resources and more troops but your borders will also be longer, and you'll find out that you can't deploy that many troops in a specific campaign anyway: small and mid-sized kingdom still pose a very tangible threat even when you're the biggest empire on the map.

The tactical part is simplistic: it's an RTS at that, but the mechanics are a bit lacking. Also, proper tactical maneuvering is still very important but most of the time you'll find that there isn't a lot of room for maneuvering.

Other than that, this game has a huge plus: the immersion value. It recreates the era pretty well, and to this day I've never seen a more detailed recreation of Ancient Greece in a videogame, with many historical kingdoms and city-states making their appearance in Hegemony and so many missions you have to complete to establish your dominion over Greece. You'll never get bored as you'll always have things to do, and the historical grand campaign lasts many, many hours.

In short, I highly recommend the game. It's a very original and innovative title, and if you like historical immersion and strategy go for it: you won't be disappointed.

Fantastic ! The best of the series.The perfect balancing between semplicity and innovation,better than hegemony rome and hegemony iii. We don't need a complex costruction of buildings or a lot of kinds of units but the possibility so survive the winter with a flock of sheeps or raiding mercant navy with other navies =D We need to secure zone rich of mine or farmlands with our hoplite or phalangite.Definitely a bad AI of enemies (longbow games hate developing AI in my opinion).So if will ever be an Hegemony iv don't waste time to implementing a lot of "stances" or building type but remeber the elements that are the heart of hegemony gold.And focus on AI. Very unique game.Buy it!

Very Very fun always good to come back to.

Innovative and epic game.