I got murdered by the ancient Swiss in this life sim about being Julius Caesar’s top guy

As a man who has listened to one third of Mike Duncan’s History of Rome podcast and seen James Purefoy absolutely tear it up as Mark Antony in HBO’s Rome, I’m something of an expert in Roman history. So, naturally, when Alessandro Roberti’s new RPG Never Second In Rome came out in early access a couple of days ago, I leapt right on it.

The premise is you’re a centurion in the army of one proconsul Julius Caesar, recently minted governor of Gallia Cisalpina, and your goal is claw your way up in the big guy’s esteem, keep your men (and yourself) disciplined and trained up and, oh, don’t die. This is hard, because bossman Caesar absolutely loves doing wars in Gaul. He’s ape for it, and as one of his men—one of his top men, if you play your cards right—you’re part of the gang who does that for him.

So off you go, navigating the game’s largely text-based interface to get it all done. Think Long Live the Queen if it had a lot more die rolls. The whole thing is divided into phases. Once you’ve designed your centurion—was he directly commissioned or promoted from the ranks, what are his stats like, what positions did he serve in his first three years—you start out mostly relaxed in camp.

Over the course of this brief respite, you have to decide what to do with your precious time, and your men’s. Administration needs doing, the men need training in multiple different things, discipline needs maintaining, the latrines need cleaning, and along the way narrative events pop up that let you make choices about who you are your relationship to the men. Do you let a legionary slack off for 50 sestertii or give him a flogging? That kind of thing. Focusing on any set of skills and responsibilities means letting something else go slack, and trying to do it all will either do it poorly or grind your men down to exhausted dust.

It is crunchy and stat-heavy in a complex, board-gamey way. Sweat beads on your forehead as you hit ‘next turn’ and your men’s talents in sword, shield, and discipline inch up, decimal by decimal. But what if they need to huck some javelins? What if they’re called on for engineering? It’s all one big game of opportunity cost, and before long you’re on the march anyway. That’s where you get into the other bit of the game: combat, both individual and between your men and other units.

That’s a messy numbers game too—a question of selecting your men’s fighting style and rolling the dice against your enemies, desperately trying to break their cohesion and send ’em scattering. I thought I was doing quite well at this—my men had spent pretty much all 10 turns at camp drilling discipline and sword and shield, which made them hard to break and a monstrous melee presence.

But then the enemy—a bunch of Helvetii barbarians—flung a load of javelins at us, which I really wasn’t prepared for, and I found myself pulled into single combat with a light infantryman. The screen switched from an overview of my century as a whole to the moment-to-moment scrabble of my avatar against this bolshy barbarian. Fat lot of good my elite Roman training did me then. I’d put all my stat points into things like smarts and charisma—leadership skills—not anticipating I’d ever have to actually do anything as uncivilised as fight someone. The beardy foreigner left me in a pool of blood, presumably with multiple javelins sticking out from between the slats in my lorica segmentata*. Better luck next time. Sorry, Caesar.

I think Never Second In Rome might be a great, if complex Roman life sim. If you want to check it out, you can find its demo on Steam.

*Yes, I know they weren’t using lorica segmentata in this time period. Stand down.