Ye Old Entertainment reviewed the strategy RPG Expeditions: Rome:

Expeditions Rome Review. XCOM in Ancient Rome! And you missed it while you were busy with Elden Ring

Logic Artists have released a major update for Expeditions: Rome:

The Controller Patch Version 1.5

Updates

• Updated our gamepad support to be game-wide and implemented various improvements for a better user experience when playing with gamepad.
• Updated our code to be compatible with Steam Deck.
• Updated the Loading Screen tips to remove some that are no longer valid
• When a Centurion dies during a Legion Battle, their equipment will be added to the player’s inventory.
• Tweaked the Accipe Hoc achievement to be a little easier to achieve.

[...]

Thanks Redglyph!

Mortismal Gaming checked out the Expeditions: Rome - Death or Glory DLC:

Expeditions: Rome - Death Or Glory DLC Review

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The Gladiator-DLC Death or Glory for Expeditions: Rome has been released:

Expeditions: Rome Gets Gladiator-DLC "Death or Glory"

Let Us Entertain You: Expeditions: Rome Gets Gladiator-DLC "Death or Glory"

Vindobona, Noricum / Hafnia, Daniae, Aprilis XII, MMXXII: "Ave Imperator, Morituri te salutant!" ("Hail, emperor, those who are about to die salute you!") - a sentence shouted by the warriors, who were about to risk their life not for their country or a greater cause but for glory itself: The Gladiators! In ancient Rome, it was all about "panem et circensis" (~ "bread and games") to entertain the masses and to keep them satisfied with the current rulership.

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With its brand new DLC "Death or Glory", the critically acclaimed CRPG Expeditions: Rome will bring the feeling of these ancient roman games to your PC by introducing a new class - the Gladiator - and adding arenas to the different regions, you've visited throughout the campaign. You can now prove the combat prowess of your praetorian guard in the sands of the arena and fight against various enemies, including ferocious lions and very talented champions - will you claim their titles for yourself?

The new DLC is out today and a legion of other additions are coming along with the Gladiator-class, and its unique set of 24 skills. There are the new arenas, new weapons, new armours, new crafting recipes, and new enemies as well as new customization options for your legion and your praetorians. The DLC content will be included into the campaign or can be accessed directly by starting the game in the new "Gladiator Mode". 

-> More details can be found in the dev-diary.

Thanks Redlyph!

Redglyph spotted patch 1.3 for Expeditions: Rome:

Patch 1.3

Bug Fixes:

• Added some additional checks to ensure the Legion Battle crowd music stops after the battle ends.
• Fixed an issue where un-assigning the Player Character from the Hospital assignment early could cause issues.
• Fixed an issue on the Rubicon involving letting the intro cutscene player and then loading the auto-save can get stuck on a black loading screen.
• Fixed an issue where it’s possible to get the briefing for Pacifications even though the quest is not active under certain circumstances.
• Fixed an issue where the Arcana Imperii achievement would not unlock with some dialog branches.

Updates:

• Made it possible to access the Outpost Manager features from the world map so long as you are "near" a controlled Outpost:
• Water will automatically be replenished when within range
• No food or water will be consumed when within range of the outpost
• Praetorians that are done with assignments will be set back to Ready State
• Can assign Praetorians to tasks
• Can pick up crafted items

Added a few new tutorials for the new features:

• Changed uncompleted Pacification Quests to fail after Sieges are completed instead of when the Siege quest is started.

Balance Changes:

• Adjusted the balance of multiple Legion Missions. Mostly reduced some of the reward ranges and reduced slaves cost on a Pacification Legion Mission variation. Notably reduced the Food rewards from Hunting Grounds.

Redglyph spotted a new dev diary for Expeditions: Rome:

DevDiary 19 - Legion Battle Update and Gamepad Support

Ave! After a small break, we have another DevDiary for you with an update on two of the major things we’ve been working on for Expeditions: Rome. Since our last update, we’ve made excellent progress on the new legion battle system, and we’re pleased to report that it’s shaping up to be a lot more interesting than the old minigame. At the same time, we’ve been working to improve our gamepad support to get rid of the cursor emulation in most parts of the game, to make it a better experience to play Rome from the comfort of your couch.

First, let’s take a look at the state of the legion battle system. If you didn’t read our last DevDiary where we talked about our plans, you may want to go and skim over it now so we’re all on the same page before you read on.

[...]

Logic Artists and THQ Nordic tweeted about an "advertisement feature" they made with History Extra. While the article is indeed just an ad, the two videos give an interesting historical background related to the game.

Together with @HistoryExtra, we took a look into the historical background of #ExpeditionsRome. Check out the videos and articles here: link

This content was made in cooperation with HistoryExtra!

Logic Artists released the much-awaited 1.2 patch for Expeditions: Rome. A few selected changes below, follow the link for the whole list.

The "little" Patch - V1.2.0

Bug Fixes

- Continued stabilization updates to address reported game crashes.
- Fixed an issue where a legion task would not be synced with a re-calculated navigation path, causing it to fail arbitrarily.

[...]

Updates

- Lowered the amount of conquered regions needed to complete the Gaul campaign from 13 to 9, and added a new legion colour theme ("Imperial Guard") as a reward for optionally conquering all 13 regions.

- Added new inventory filters so you can sort your items by tier and quality.

[...]

Balance Changes

- Reaper no longer restores movement points.
- Clear Path now restores 2 movement points instead of 3, but it now also restores movement points to self.
- Burned now reduces Health Max by 10% instead of 20%.

[...]

Twitch Functionality

- Added a failure message for refresh authentication in the Twitch menu. Also fixed a bug with refresh authentication when storing the refresh token.

[...]

Logic Artists posted a new dev diary entry revealing upcoming improvements for the legion battle system. As said in the last Twitch stream, this will not be included in the next patch but later.

DevDiary 18 - Legion Battle Improvements

Ave, and welcome to our 18^th dev diary – the second after the release of Expeditions: Rome. As we mentioned last week, the first major update is currently undergoing testing. We were hoping to release it last week, but QA did their jobs well and found a new issue that had slipped into the game due to one of our stability fixes, so we had to push the patch until this week so we could get that fixed first and give QA time to re-test the build.

In the meantime, those of us not already working on the first piece of DLC have set our sights on a much-requested set of improvements to a certain system in the game, namely the legion battles.

The legion battle system has been a challenge right from the start. We knew we wanted to represent the large-scale battles of a Roman legion somehow, and give the player a feeling of being a grand strategy commander handing out orders from on high, but at the same time we didn’t want to cram a whole wargame into our tactical RPG. During the prototyping phase we intended battles to simply be resolved by a die roll based on the strength of each army – but it seemed too simple. Later we briefly considered representing it by a re-interpretation of a Roman dice game called Tali – but we decided that would be far too abstract. We knew we needed to do something that would sell the fantasy without ballooning out of scope to take over the whole project.

[...]

We’d love to hear what you think of these changes. Please leave your comments and questions below and we will be guaranteed to read them. We will as always have a Dev Stream on Twitch this Wednesday, February 9th at 1:00 PM Eastern / 6:00 PM GMT at http://twitch.tv/thqnordic, where Senior Producer Brad Logston will host Creative Director Jonas Wæver to talk about our plans for this system and what other things we’re working on for future updates. We will answer any questions left on this diary, and we’ll of course try to answer any other questions you throw at us during the stream.

Until then, Valete!

Kormaktv interviewed Lead Narrative Designer Fasih Sayin. Fasih is also narrative director at Dynasty Studios.

4h4m26s - Presentation
4h5m39s - When does the game take place? 80-50 BC
4h6m18s - Why was Rome chosen?
4h8m12s - What was your favourite story line?
4h11m59s - Is the game realistic?
4h13m48s - Are all companions based on historical figures?
4h16m23s - How much historical expertise to build the game?
4h20m44s - What's the period of the DLC?
4h22m50s - Were parts rewritten because of historical research?
4h24m23s - How many years in production? 3-4
4h25m5s - Some comments about game engine Unity -> Unreal
4h27m18s - Have you ever worn an armour? Yes
4h29m8s - Is that your first project with LA team? Yes and no
4h34m8s - Some comments on story variations depending on choices
4h36m37s - Story pacing
4h42m53s - How many words in the story? Roughly 300k words
4h44m40s - What's your favourite colour? Red
4h46m6s - Information about the upcoming patch?
4h48m41s - What rank is the MC and legion size? General, 4800+ ... =6000
4h51m52s - Any backslash because of female characters?

RPG Site has reviewed the Strategy RPG Expeditions: Rome:

Expeditions: Rome Review

I was not originally planning on playing Expeditions: Rome. Nothing about the setting really captivated me, I thought the marketing ahead of the game was fairly dry and uninteresting, and the strategy and RPG hybrid didn't seem like a good fit -- though maybe that was just my penchant for more traditional CRPGs talking at the time. 

Against my hasty judgment, however, I (thankfully) decided to play through this fictional historical tale of a legatus during Rome's campaigns in Asia Minor, Egypt, and Gaul in the first century BC. The more that I played and allowed myself to engage with what Expeditions: Rome had to offer, the more I found myself wanting to share about my experience that had come so close to flying under my radar.

[...]

Expeditions: Rome is an easy recommendation for any fan of turn-based tactical RPGs. The variety of gameplay environments, the depth of the combat system, and a surprisingly compelling story with unexpectedly strong characters all carry the experience above the few shortcomings of clumsy UI and underwhelming strategy elements. Even if you have no attachment to the setting of ancient Rome (I sure didn't), the overall scope and level of ambition are worth experiencing first-hand.

Score: 8/10

Logic Artists posted a new update about the game reception and future plans, which include two interesting modifications to answer the most criticized points: the length and the linearity of Act 3. They confirmed the DLC too.

DevDiary 17 - First Update After Release

Ave, and welcome to another DevDiary – the first one since the glorious release of Expeditions: Rome in fact. We skipped last week due to being rather busy with the launch, but this week we are back to talk about the reception and our support plans.

It’s been hugely exciting for us to finally let you all play the game we’ve been making for the past 3 years. We’re loving the discussions on Steam and Discord, and it’s been particularly fun to see you guys compare notes and gradually realise how far-reaching the effects of your decisions throughout the game can be, and how many things change depending on your choices and even your gender. We’ve spent a little more time than we perhaps should over the weekends watching Cringer, Bikeman, BurkeBlack, CohhCarnage, and others play Expeditions: Rome on Twitch, and chatting to their communities about the game.

All of us at Logic Artists and at THQ Nordic have been very pleased with the game’s reception – the critical reception and the player reactions have both been overwhelmingly positive. There’s no doubt this is the best and most successful game in the Expeditions franchise so far, as we always felt it would be. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for playing our game!

Since the release, our main priority has been to keep an eye on the reception of the game and what you’re all saying about it, fix the bugs that have surfaced, and make whatever tweaks or improvements we could quickly do to improve the play experience. We’ve worked hard to ensure that we would be releasing a stable and polished game, and it’s very gratifying to see that we haven’t received all that many bug reports. As you may have noticed though, two hotfixes did go out last week to address the few major issues that popped up early on, and a more significant update is currently being tested that will fix many smaller issues and add some quality-of-life improvements overall. That update will be released as soon as we feel certain that it doesn’t introduce any new problems.

[...]

Here's Andy's Take on Expeditions Rome:

ROME RPG+STRATEGY GAME - WORTH IT? Expeditions: Rome Honest Review

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Mortismal Gaming applied his 100% recipe to Expeditions: Rome.

Expeditions: Rome - Review After 100%

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Logic Artists have posted the notes of the first patch for Expeditions: Rome. The patch should be released soon.

v1.1.3 - Patch Notes

Hey we have patched a large number of localisation issues / crashes

- A large update to the game's localisation for all languages. There are still a few translation updates that will be added in future patches
- A number of crash fixes for improved overall game stability.
- A fix for a progression issue involving the encounter with Cassius during the Whack the Mole quest.
- Fixed an issue with the Deianeira character appearing in sections of the game she is not supposed to be based on story decisions. There may still be one remaining scene she could show up in based on story decisions which we are investigating for an upcoming patch

PC Gamer has reviewed Expeditions: Rome:

Expeditions: Rome review

Rome wasn't built in a day, but did it really take this long?

It's taken me dozens of hours—and at least a dozen more than I'd have liked—but finally I've done it. I've built a digital legacy for Robertus Atellius Somethingus that's worthy of the glory (and twatty imperialistic entitlement) of Rome. I've assembled elite legions that have conquered Asia Minor, north Africa and Gaul, I've besieged cities, toppled corrupt Senators, assassinated enemies with my Wild Bunch of praetorians, and impressed a particularly horny and hubristic Cleopatra with my arrogance.

It's a solid CV for anyone applying for the role of Ancient Roman Consul. 

Expeditions: Rome is a historical RPG that streamlines elements from games like Total War, with its campaign maps, and Divinity: Original Sin, with its tactical turn-based combat and CRPG-style overworld traversal, into an adventure that spans vast swathes of the Classical world.

[...]

Score: 73/100

An uneven epic whose historical richness guides it through some awkward pacing. 

WolfheartFPS has reviewed Expeditions: Rome:

Expeditions: Rome - Review & Gameplay Overview âš” (New Roman RPG)

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Expeditions: Rome has just been released on Steam and GOG. For the occasion, the team is streaming on Twitch, and is of course on Discord too.

No Place Like Rome - CRPG Expeditions: Rome Is Out Today!

No Place Like Rome - CRPG Expeditions: Rome Is Out Today!

Vindobona, Noricum / Hafnia, Daniae, Januarii XX, MMXXII: The hero or heroine of Expeditions: Rome is not off to a good start: father murdered, sister married to an enemy and on their way to Asia Minor, to serve in the legion, far away from Rome. Meanwhile, on board your ship, there is another vessel getting closer - of course, pirates!

In Expeditions: Rome you will play a young male or female roman soldier, making your way through history. Take command of a small group of praetorians and eventually become the Legatus a Roman legion. You'll gather a group of loyal companions, engage in tactical turn-based combat, learn new skills, loot and craft new equipment for your soldiers, and shape the fate of Rome. Expeditions: Rome offers over 50 hours of cRPG-gameplay and multiple ways to end the story. [...]

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Farflame had a chance to interview Logic Artists' Jonas Waever about their upcoming game Expeditions: Rome.

RPGWatch We know that the game does not have attributes like Strength, Dexterity etc. It’s mainly about class skills and items (item skills). Can you tell us what happens when your hero levels up and how armour works? 

Jonas: Levelling up grants you more health, 1 skill point, more damage with Unarmed attacks, and on certain levels a new unarmed attack as well. Everything else comes from your equipment. 
Armour is indeed a stat, and is quite simply deducted from the damage of every attack against the character. Critical damage bypasses armour though, and two-handed weapons have the ability to "shred" armour on the target, permanently reducing their Armour until the end of combat. In addition to the Armour stat, outfits also provide damage resistance, which is a simple percentage chance that an attack with a certain type of damage will be reduced to a "Glancing Blow". Glancing Blows deal only 25% of the damage the attack would normally have dealt, and apply no further effects to the target. Any RPG fan should be familiar with the damage types: Bludgeoning, Slashing, and Piercing.
Finally, there is also Fire resistance and Poison resistance which determine how likely you are to avoid being poisoned or set on fire. 

The Escapist has reviewed Expeditions: Rome:

Expeditions: Rome | Review in 3 Minutes

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Embargo has been lifted and reviews on Expeditions: Rome are incoming.

RPGamer: 4.0

For those looking for an engaging historical RPG, Expeditions: Rome is an easy recommendation. The options for tailoring the difficulty allows players to focus on their preferred elements and make it challenging, welcoming, and rewarding depending on what players want. While the game’s interpretation of Rome may simplify the issues of the time, Expeditions: Rome successfully uses its setting to create a very enjoyable role-playing experience.

Pros: Entertaining gameplay loop with flexible challenge options. Interesting story and choices. Enjoyable historical references.
Cons: Strategic cleanup can get a bit dry. Waiting for enemy turns can get annoying on larger maps.

GameGrin: 10

Expeditions: Rome is astounding in every area I was presented with. Constantly I felt like there were tons of things for me to explore and pay attention to, and truly simulates how I picture leading an entire war campaign.

RockPaperShotgun: 

Despite a bit of a subdued opening hour, Expeditions: Rome is a gripping, ambitious historical CRPG that shines in its writing, its art direction, and most of all in the design of its turn-based combat encounters.

TechRaptor: 9.0

It's easy to poke holes in other aspects of Expeditions: Rome, but they make up minor issues in comparison to the overall package. Ultimately, Expeditions: Rome is a great tactical RPG that is well worth your time. It has plenty of intricate mechanics to satisfy the tactical fans out there along with tons of tactical variety in its missions. Throw in a story that really lets you feel like a Roman citizen, despite how predictable it may become, and you have a solid entry into the Expedition series. Expedition: Rome is deserving of a triumph of its own right. 

Pros: Strong Tactical Battles and Mission Variety. Great Mix of Historical Accuracy and Alternate History. Tons of Mechanics Without Being Overwhelming. Large Scale Warfare, Sieges, and Roleplay Choices.
Cons: Narrative is Secondary to the Mechanics. Lots of Downtime between Battles.

And for the video format (both have timestamps in the video description):

Fextralife: 8.1

Expeditions: Rome Review & Gameplay Impressions – An Enthralling Experience of Ancient Rome

PartyElite:

EXPEDITIONS: ROME | Historical Tactical RPG Gameplay & Details - New Strategy Game 2022

The demo of Expeditions: Rome received a new update. Note that the saved games can be used to continue the campaign in the full release without having to restart from scratch.

Expeditions: Rome Demo Update

Updates and Changes

• Several new character portraits have been added when creating a new character.
• The skin tones of the character portraits now change to more accurately match the skin of the character created.
• The recruitable centurions/praetorians now use a more varied set of portraits, and the skin and hair colours of their 3D models were adjusted accordingly.
• The game will now auto-save every time you enter the worldmap. Additionally, several auto-saves have been added to specific quests.
• A walk modifier key option has been added in the control settings.
• The camera pan controls can now be rebound in the control settings.
• User feedback has been added when an enemy target takes reduced damage due to the target’s Armor.
• A new game option has been added to allow for music to play/mute when the game does not have window focus (I.E. Alt-Tabbing out of the game)
• A new game option has been added to enable/disable controller input.
• [...]

Logic Artists posted a last diary entry about sieges.

DevDiary 16 - Sieges

Ave! It’s release week! In a mere four days (count them!), Expeditions: Rome will be released to the world in all its glory, and you will finally be able to continue your demo playthrough into the full game. Will you manage to save Cotta from the clutches of Mithridates? Will Archelaus prove to be a useful hostage if you left him alive? Will Julius Calidus ever drop the act and admit to very clearly being a woman? You’ll find out soon!

Today’s subject is one we’ve been deliberately saving for last, since it concerns our most impressive set-pieces. One of the main challenges we’ve always had in the Expeditions series has been how to represent the full scale of the war that you usually end up causing or escalating throughout the story. The squad-scale turn-based combat system that we’re so proud of is all about micromanaging individual people and isn’t designed for full-scale warfare.

[...]

To find out more about how sieges were designed and maybe even catch a preview of how it looks in action, please join us on the THQ Nordic Twitch channel this Wednesday, January 19 at 1:00 PM Eastern / 6:00 PM GMT at http://twitch.tv/thqnordic for our DevStream, where Senior Producer Brad Logston will host Creative Director Jonas Wæver and Combat Designer Hans Emil Hoppe Rauer. Any questions you post as comments on this diary will be answered on the stream.

We’ll also be streaming throughout launch day,  January 20^th, on the same channel, so feel free to drop by! Many of the development team will be jumping into the stream as Brad plays through different sections of the game.

Until then, Valete!

In today's dev diary, Logic Artists are presenting the companions.

DevDiary 15 - Companions

Ave! Welcome to DevDiary 15, and boy do we have a doozy for you this week. It’s companion week! Every day starting today, we’ll be releasing a new video about one of our five companion characters, introducing the role they play in the story as well as in combat, and hinting at the personal problems they’re saddled with, which you will hopefully help them deal with throughout your adventures together.

We have a lot to get through today, so let’s get started. Companions are a staple of the roleplaying genre. Originally an attempt to emulate the dynamics of a tabletop RPG group, they have become one of the most beloved and distinct aspects of the genre, and we daresay its greatest storytelling asset. With a sufficiently compelling set of main characters, a story can really tug on the player’s heartstrings – and one of the keys to making a group of characters appealing is to give them enough screen time for the player to get to know them. RPG-style companion characters are perfectly suited for this, as they typically follow the protagonist everywhere, participating in every scene and every crisis. [...]

The new dev diary of Expeditions: Rome continues the discussion on combat, this part focusing on AI.

DevDiary 14 - Combat AI

Ave and happy new year! Although the Logic Artists office has been closed between Christmas and the new year, several members of the team have enjoyed hanging out on our Discord server to chat with all of you who are eagerly awaiting our fast approaching release date. We’ve also been monitoring the Steam forum to see what you guys thought of the demo, and the reception has been heartwarming. It’s truly wonderful to see how much you loved what we showed you of the game, and if possible, we’re now even more hyped about releasing Expeditions: Rome to the world on the 20^th of January (this month!) so you can all get to experience it for yourselves.

Today’s dev diary follows up on our diary from just before Christmas, which laid out how we go about designing a good combat encounter. This week we’re going to talk about how the AI has been designed.

[...]

COG writes about the new music trailer.

EXPEDITIONS: ROME’S SOUNDTRACK GIVES IT AN AUTHENTIC & GROUNDED FEEL

Expeditions: Rome Devs Did a Lot of Research for the Game’s Soundtrack

Expeditions: Rome just got a new trailer. What makes this new preview interesting is that it gives the gaming community a more in-depth exploration of the type of music that the game has to offer. Players will know more about what they can expect when it launches on January 20th.

As seen in the new trailer, a lot of work and effort has been placed into Expeditions: Rome’s soundtrack. Developer Logic Artists wanted to make sure that fans get an authentic feel for the game through its music. With that said, the game’s soundtrack is entirely made up of live recorded instruments.

The team behind Expeditions: Rome did a lot of brainstorming and research just to figure out what types of instruments to use. The devs wanted to use instruments that were already present during the game’s time period. These instruments were then modernized so that it brings a modern aspect to the title, as well.

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The devs shared that the most important thing about any game’s soundtrack is character. Themes are flexible outside of the main one that is based on the game’s core characters. This means that each of the 300 potential endings that players may have will be distinct from each other.

Each of the four main areas featured in Expeditions: Rome has its own identity through its music. The same goes for each emotional beat in the back story, as well as the exploration, characters, and combat of the game. [...]

Logic Artists and THQ Nordic released a new trailer.

Expeditions: Rome - Gaul & Africa Trailer

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As a Roman Legatus, your campaign will lead you through many different regions. Among them, Gaul and Africa. How will you shape their future?

Logic Artists posted a new dev diary entry about the design of combat encounters.

DevDiary 13 - Building a Great Combat Encounter

Ave, and welcome to our lucky 13th DevDiary. It’s been a very big week for us since diary 12 just last week – you’ll notice the schedule has sped up now that we’re getting closer to release. The Christmas break will put the brakes on that for a few weeks, but we wanted to be sure to get one more DevDiary out before the holidays seeing as how we just released our public demo of Expeditions: Rome.

That’s right! If you haven’t already, you should immediately proceed over to Steam to download our demo and give the game a spin. It’s a frankly huge demo, letting you play the first 4-6 hours of the game – just enough to get you out of the tutorial and through 6-7 combat encounters, meet the main cast, get a glimpse at the outpost upgrades and customisation, and even try a legion battle. If you like it all, there is a handy Buy Now button for pre-ordering the game right there in the main menu.

[...]

But don’t take our word for it. Head on over to Steam and download the Expeditions: Rome public demo. The 7 combat encounters included there should easily be enough to showcase the variety of our gameplay. When you’ve completed the demo, you’ll be well equipped to come and ask us incisive questions or just hang out in our final DevStream of this year, this Wednesday December 22nd on http://twitch.tv/thqnordic at 1:00 PM Eastern / 6:00 PM GMT. Senior Producer Brad Logston and Creative Director Jonas Wæver and Combat Designer Hans Emil Hoppe Rauer will discuss the intricacies of level design and hand-crafting turn-based combat encounters.

Until then, Valete!

Logic Artists and THQ Nordic posted an update with a new combat trailer for Expeditions: Rome.

Learn How to Fight for the Republic in New Combat Trailer!

Expeditions: Rome - Learn How to Fight for the Republic in New Combat Trailer

Vindobona, Noricum / Hafnia, Daniae, Decembris XX, MMXXI: "Si vis pacem, para bellum!" If you want peace, prepare for war! The Roman Empire was built on military power. Their disciplined, well-organized, and well-equipped legions conquered almost all of Europe, North Africa, and parts of western Asia. In the upcoming cRPG Expeditions: Rome you are taking command of Legio Victrix, in order to fight against the enemies of the Republic of Rome. In the latest trailer, Centurio Caeso Aquilinius gives the new recruits a proper drill and explains, how exactly the turn-based combat In Expeditions: Rome works. So prepare to learn about the use of the Gladius, a Scutum, and the famous Roman Pilum.

[...]

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Logic Artists posted a quick update to notify that the demo was now available. Here is the link on Steam. Brace yourselves though, it's a 24-GB download.

The Expeditions: Rome Demo is now available!

Ave!

The Expeditions: Rome Demo is now available! Just use the button on the product page to install it.

If you want to watch the streaming this weekend, here is the list of content creators:

• burkeblack
• classypax
• cletusbueford
• patrckstatic
• deejayknight
• cringer
• helpinghans
• heepoh
• bikeman
• tangent

Logic Artists announced a demo for tomorrow the 17th on Steam! They have also given a preview access to several streamers who will show the game this weekend.

Expeditions: Rome - Demo, Interactive Streamer Weekend, New Trailer

How did famous consul Cato the elder put it once? "Ceterum censeo Expeditionem esse demonstrandum!" ("By the way, I think Expeditions needs to be shown!"). And who are we, to mess with the opinion of such a wise man? From December 17th, 2021 onwards, a playable demo for Expeditions: Rome, the upcoming cRPG, will be available on Steam. The demo will let you take command of conquering Lesbos at the start of the Greece campaign and offers about 4 hours of gameplay, to find out if you have what it takes to be a great Roman Legatus - and to find out if Expeditions: Rome has what it takes to be crowned your new favorite cRPG.

Download the demo on Steam: https://thqn.net/rome-steam

To get accustomed to Greece, before you set foot on its soil, watch the latest trailer for Expeditions: Rome, showing the impressive vista of Greece and the heart of the empire, Rome, the eternal city itself.

Watch the new trailer:

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Download all assets: http://n.thq.com/Hv9K30rFV7x

Streamer Weekend – The biggest and most ambitious Twitch Extension to date

If watching is more your thing – we‘ve got you covered. Starting in the early PST morning of Friday, December 17th, through Monday, December 20th, a selected group of streamers will be given special preview access to the first act of Expeditions: Rome, allowing them to play the entire Greece campaign while using the new Expeditions: Rome Twitch extension. [...]

The new developer's diary has been posted and discusses the Twitch extension, for all of you who regularly stream your games on that platform.

DevDiary 12 - Twitch Extension

Ave! Welcome to DevDiary 12, and this one is going to be special. This week, we’ll be discussing how we’ve collaborated with Twitch extension development expert Muxy to build the most ambitious, expansive Twitch extension to ever exist for any game. This has been an effort that has stretched across many years, with collaborations with many different entities, including some streamers themselves. We’re incredibly excited about sharing these details with you! 

We’ve spent time with streamers, talking with them about the challenges they have with strategy games. While fun to play, they can be tricky to stream. They are, by nature, more complex, cerebral, and slower than action-oriented titles. By using extensions in daring and new ways, we can both drive more active opportunities for streamers to entertain their audiences as well as reduce the learning curve when audiences tune-in for the first time.

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Logic Artists have announced that Expeditions: Rome would be available on January 20th (Games Press).

Expeditions: Rome Wasn't Built In A Day, But It's Ready In January 2022

Vindobona, Noricum / Hafnia, Daniae, Decembris VII., MMXXI: The fate of an empire lies in your hands! On January 20th, 2022 you can become the Legatus of a Roman legion and lead your troops through Greece, Egypt, and Gaul. You'll gain power and influence and your word will carry weight in the political affairs of Rome. Your decisions will change the life of your fellow companions, your soldiers, and even the destiny of whole nations.

This Classic RPG from the creators of the critically acclaimed Expeditions: Vikings will take you on a 50+ hour campaign across Europe and northern Africa. You´ll have to fight intense turn-based battles, level up your alter ego as well as your companions, manage your legion, explore, loot, and craft – in short, everything, you'd expect from a Classic RPG.

Expeditions: Rome is set in an alternative historical setting. Ever heard of Gaius Julius Caesar? He wasn't that important. But you'll meet Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt - if you choose to put her on the throne, that is. And even the famous Roman politician Cicero can become your ally, as well as the ferocious Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix.

Expeditions Rome will launch on January 20th, 2022 on PC at an SRP of $ 44.99 | € 44.99 | £ 36.99.

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The stream mentioned in Dev Diary 11 can be found on Twitch (I will post an update if they upload it on Youtube). Another shorter video related to the same subject has been released by THQ Nordic:

Expeditions: Rome - The Voices of Rome

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Learn more about the Voices of Rome as Lara Sawalha (Cleopatra) and Stephane Cornicard (Syneros) talk about their experience working on Expeditions: Rome together wit Logic Artists.

Make sure to keep an eye on social channels as they will make a "very exciting announcement" on the 7th.

Logic Artists have posted a new diary on voice acting in Expeditions: Rome.

DevDiary 11 - Voice-Overs

Ave! Our music event that launched two weeks ago is still ongoing, and since we’re all in an auditory mood already, we thought it would be good to stay in that general area by delving into the topic of actors and directors of voice-over.

It’s no secret that roleplaying games tend to be on the verbose side. Though we here at Logic Artists have always prided ourselves on writing more concise and less waffling dialogue than our competitors, our games have always been long and heavily story-based, so inevitably our dialogue word count always ends up in the hundreds of thousands. As an independent game studio, the cost of recording that much dialogue is prohibitive, and so the best we could do on Viking was to record combat one-liners and a few very select lines of dialogue to set the tone for each major character.

Thus you may be able to imagine how overjoyed we were when THQ Nordic rolled in and told us to go ahead and record every single word of dialogue for Expeditions: Rome. Now, on Rome we have made a concerted effort to keep the dialogue even more concise and punchy than before – we’ve almost eliminated use of narrator text during dialogue, and worked hard to put as much of the actual actions of what’s happening in the scene into the actual game world, so you can see characters move and animate instead of having it described to you. Even so, Rome is the largest game we’ve ever made by a pretty large margin, and so we still ended up with over 300,000 words of dialogue.

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In an original move to find musicians, Logic Artists announced that they were holding a contest for the interpretation of Expeditions: Rome's OST.

Blow Your Rome Trumpet: Expeditions: Rome Is Hosting a Music Cover Contest!

Blow Your Rome Trumpet: Expeditions: Rome Is Hosting a Music Contest

Vindobona, Noricum / Hafnia, Daniae, Novembris XVII., MMXXI: When in Rome, you want it to sound right. Logic Artists has worked together with composer Thomas Farnon, who created music for movies like The Dark Knight Rises, Hacksaw Ridge and Wonder Woman, TV-Shows like The Crown and Sherlock, and games like Assassin's Creed 3 and... Expeditions: Rome. Two orchestras with over 130 musicians and 6 soloists made the compositions come to life - Expeditions: Rome will feature over 75 minutes of music.

Check out the teaser for Making the Music of Rome on YouTube:

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If you want to learn more about music and audio in Expeditions: Rome, check out Dev Diary #10

Music Cover Contest

From November 17th, 2021 at 10 AM EST until December 10th, 2021 4 pm CET, a music contest will be held. The music sheets and full stems for three tracks of Expeditions: Rome's OST are available for download and THQ Nordic is looking for musicians to come up with their own interpretations of the tracks.

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Logic Artists discusses about the process of creating music and audio for Expeditions: Rome.

DevDiary 10 - Music and Audio of Rome

Hey Guys! Thomas here, the composer for Expeditions: Rome - I wanted to talk a little about the scoring of Rome, the process, the recording, and some cool and unique things we got to do with this score.

We recently recorded the entire score, around 75 minutes so we’re all done, and I’m really looking forward to sharing it with you guys – I started writing the score in March 2020. It was clear from early conversations with Brad, Jonas and Justin that it’s a hugely complex and challenging game. The initial conversations to do with score were centred around finding the tone for the four distinct regions and also the importance of finding our music for each of the characters we go on the journey with - having spent the last few years writing mostly for film it was pretty interesting transferring that that across to the gaming world. Aside from technicalities (not altering the BPM’s of tracks, and the need for tracks that evolve and don’t get repetitive when playing for hours) I treated it exactly the same as I would any film - I wanted to get under the skin of the characters, learning there life stories, work out why there where they were, and what makes them tick.

We decided early on that the player would have their own theme to take them on the journey: something we could morph and twist to fit their journey and that acted as a reference point for the player and evolved with them. I looked at the vivid colours of the game and had a lot of conversations with Jonas about the feel and tone we were going for, and essentially treated it as a film but one with thousands of possible journeys and endings. Our “Player’s Theme” was the starting point for this: it was essentially a suite that I wrote at the beginning containing the player’s theme, and two other themes relating to two other key characters.

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We hope you've enjoyed this deep dive into  the music and audio of Expeditions: Rome: We have an exciting, special stream this week where Senior Producer Brad Logston will be in the London Studio with Composer Thomas Farnon. We'll be doing a longer stream where we release a new teaser trailer about the music, listen to various tracks on stream, and announce a unique special event that will be super exciting! We hope you join us on Wednesday, November 17th at 1:00 PM Eastern / 6:00 PM GMT on the THQ Nordic Twitch Channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic.

Share the word with all your music friends too; this is a unique treat and we hope you tune in for a fun, exciting stream. See you then, Valete!

Logic Artists posted a new development diary on playstyle variety and choice & consequences.

DevDiary 9 - Playstyle Variety

Ave, and welcome to our ninth DevDiary. If you were expecting something spooky, you’re in the wrong place: Ancient Rome obviously did not observe All Hallows Eve. Come back on December 17 for the Saturnalia.

Lately our DevDiaries have been delving into very concrete and specific game systems, with diaries discussing character progression and the specifics of the crafting mechanics. Today we’re going to take a step back from all that and look at a more high-level aspect of our game design: how we strive to support multiple play styles.

Different play styles have always been an important part of our game design philosophy, and we consider it one of the most important aspects of roleplaying games – after all, roleplaying shouldn’t just be a matter of what you say, but also what you do. Play styles is a broad topic, and in this DevDiary we will touch on the way roleplaying choices affect the story; we’ll examine how quests can be approached in various ways; and we’ll even look at how difficulty settings change the player experience.

Expeditions: Rome has many strategy elements but it is first and foremost a roleplaying game. As we have already discussed, key to the RPG genre is choice and consequence in the narrative, and in Rome you will often get to make important decisions that branch the way the story progresses going forward. One of the major factors we expect to inform your decisions is what kind of legatus you have chosen to play as: are you a ruthless conqueror whose only loyalty is to the might of Rome? Are you a philosopher-general who strives to mitigate the horrors of war and address the needs of Rome’s allies and rivals alike? Are you purely concerned about your own quest for vengeance, or the power and wealth of your family and friends? [...]

Logic Artists posted their new Dev Diary about crafting in Expeditions: Rome. They're planning a dev stream on Wednesday to discuss this topic.

DevDiary 8 - Crafting

Ave! You have discovered our eighth DevDiary. Last time, we went over all the character progression systems in the game, including how the loot system works – but there was one part of that we didn’t have time to touch on: Crafting.

In roleplaying games, there are typically three ways to acquire new equipment: you can loot it off dead enemies, from treasure chests etc., or you can purchase it from a shop with your hard-earned gold, or you can roll up your sleeves and craft it yourself. Each method serves a slightly different purpose: loot drops are rewards for combat or exploration but are typically completely random. Item shops offer you some choice from a randomised menu. Crafting gives you full control over what item you’ll get, but you’ll have to invest resources, time, and effort.

We always thought there was too much overlap between these three methods – that the differences between them weren’t quite significant enough to justify their existence. When we were fleshing out the item system in Viking, we wanted to eliminate one of these ways to get items, so your items would only come from two systems. We had to keep loot of course – exploration is a core pillar of our series, and as a viking, why shouldn’t you be able to kill people and take their stuff? This left us with the choice between crafting and item shops, and crafting was clearly the more interesting system: it’s more different from loot drops than item shops are in that it gives the player much more agency with less randomness, and in terms of the fantasy, it felt more right for a viking to forge their own weaponry rather than purchase it from a travelling sword salesman.

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If you want to learn more about crafting or item progression, or about how our skill system was designed, please post your questions as comments on this post, and join us on this week’s DevStream on Wednesday October 20^th, at 1:00 PM Eastern / 5:00 PM GMT on the THQ Nordic Twitch Channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic. On this week’s stream, Senior Producer Brad Logston will once again host Combat Designer Hans Emil Hoppe Rauer to discuss how crafting fits into the intricate meta systems of Expeditions: Rome.

Logic Artists have posted Dev Diary #7 on character progression, a few days ago. And THQ Nordic, their publisher, released a showcase trailer. Time to catch up with Expeditions: Rome!

DevDiary 7 - Metagame: Character Systems

Ave, and welcome to our seventh DevDiary. In DevDiary 5, we gave you a glimpse into the design of our conquest and legion battle systems. We explained how this made up just a part of our metagame systems, and that we would be dealing with the rest of the meta systems at a later time. That time has come!

Today we will discuss the game systems that pertain to character progression: levelling up and spending your skill points, and finding items and equipment for your characters. These are the systems at the core of any self-respecting roleplaying game - the features that give you that sense of personal growth and ensure a steady increase of strategic and tactical complexity as you grow familiar with the game.

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Expeditions: Rome - Showcase Trailer

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In this short sneak peak, Creative Director Jonas Waever and Lead Producer Sonat Ozturk give you a taste of what the combat system, the world of Rome and the decision making in Expeditions: Rome looks like.

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@Farflame has spotted an update of Expedition: Rome developer's diary!

DevDiary 6 - Side Quests

Ave Legate. Side quests! What are they? Where are they? Why are they? And how did they come to be? These are the questions that we will answer in this, our sixth DevDiary. All the way back in DevDiary 3, we gave you a glimpse into our overall approach to storytelling, and an outline of the plot of Expeditions: Rome as well as the major characters that drive it – but when you’re playing a roleplaying game, you don’t expect to just follow the main questline from the menu screen to the credits, you expect distractions; tangents; quirky adventures. You expect side quests, and so help us Jupiter, we will meet those expectations.

First off, let’s all get on the same page by establishing what makes a side quest a side quest. To us, a side quest is any piece of content that presents the player with a goal to pursue, but which is fully optional. Sometimes the main quests arrive a few at a time and you get to choose which order to do them in, but what defines a main quest is that you must complete it to continue the game – at some point, you cannot go any further in the game until you finish your current main quest. Side quests are less demanding of your time – they appear when it makes sense for them to be available, and if you don’t complete them before they stop being relevant, they simply fail themselves and go away. No harm done to the plot.

There are many good reasons to have side quests. From a design point of view, the purpose of side quests is to make full use of the large, beautiful levels we’ve built, and to encourage the player to explore them and engage with them through deep content. It’s all well and good to litter a level with treasure chests, but that doesn’t make the world feel more alive – it’s characters and the stories we can tell with them that bring a world to life. Not counting the player’s legion camp, Expeditions: Rome features no less than six so-called “hub” levels which are particularly large locations ripe for exploration.

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Thanks Farflame! :)

The latest dev diary for Expeditions: Rome looks at the meta of legion battles.

Ave! Welcome to DevDiary #5, where we take our first detailed look at some of the metagame features of Expeditions: Rome! In our previous DevDiary, we made a brief expedition into the world of art direction to show you how we’ve approached the challenges of bringing the ancient world of Rome to life in a way that feels authentic, yet vibrant and exciting. Today we’ll return to the world of gameplay and system design as we delve into the meta systems of Expeditions: Rome and explore how we’re selling the fantasy of being a Roman legatus on a campaign of war. This time we’re dealing with some systems that are still very much under development, so buckle up for some serious inside baseball.

Our 2nd DevDiary, which focused on our core combat design, should have made it clear that while significant improvements – as well as some clever and risky innovations – have been made in the core combat, our focus there has always been to deliver a solid, challenging, and satisfying take on traditional turn-based combat. By contrast, the meta gameplay has always been the area where we’ve pushed ourselves to think differently and try crazy new things to separate the Expeditions series from other RPG and strategy games. Expeditions: Rome continues this philosophy.

Let’s start by defining what we mean when we say meta. The meta is the game systems that track your overall progression and allow you to interact with it. Our core game loops such as combat or dialogue are self-contained bubbles of content that begin and end discretely, whereas the meta spans the whole game and ties all the content together. Every core game loop always interacts with the meta in many ways, but in game development it’s useful to think of them separately.

(Side note: Although the overall story and the personal development of each character spans the whole game and ties together all the dialogue, in this diary we’re purely interested in game mechanics.)

The meta of Expeditions: Rome can be roughly divided into two parts: the character systems, and the worldmap systems. Both aspects of the meta are quite different than previous instalments, but the worldmap systems are what really sets Expeditions: Rome apart from other games.

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Thanks Farflame!

The latest dev diary for Expeditions Rome focuses on its visual style.

Ave! Today we have a special, fun treat for our 4th DevDiary. Up till now, we’ve been talking about game mechanics, story, and characters, but in each of these posts we’ve been showing off cool concept art and beautiful screenshots. For DevDiary 4, we’re going to be focusing on the Visual Style we’ve been building for Expeditions: Rome. Since the game is so big, we’ve decided to focus on the challenges we faced in recreating the environment of North Africa in ancient times specifically.

We consider the Expeditions series of games to be a kind of historical fiction in game form - a fictional story and series of unusual dramatic events set within the framework of real-world history. This means that while the narrative and the events of the game can be entirely fictional, we always try to keep it grounded, and if not realistic per se, within the boundaries of historical plausibility. We try to never go too far, too over the top, or create elements that are truly fantastical.

This was also the basis for the artistic vision of the game. The previous game in the series ‘Expeditions Viking’ represented a step up in visual quality for us, and when we started work on the project that would become Rome, improving the visuals of the game was on top of our list. The basic overall concept was the same; we wanted to create an exciting and appealing visual representation of the adventures and exploits of legendary generals and explorers, that will be perceived as authentic and immersive, but without being subjugated to absolute historical accuracy.Creating this kind of authentic historical setting in a top-down computer game, which is inherently unrealistic in nature, is a core challenge of working on Expeditions: Rome. Compromises had to be made, but we always aimed at making the visual design naturalistic and grounded - enhanced with a measure of stylization and idealization, but not fantastic exaggeration. Stylized pseudo-realism, if you will.

One of the visual aspects that seem quite common in historical games is that they tend to overall not be very visually exciting, but instead rather drab, or even colourless. It is as if visual blandness equals realism, and this is something we wanted to avoid at all costs. We wanted our game world to appear as vibrant and appealing as any fantasy setting; something that will excite and immerse the player and make them want to explore our world. In Expeditions: Viking we were fairly strict about historical accuracy, but in Rome we have loosened up on that a little bit to make room for more of the fantastic and extraordinary.

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Thanks Farflame!

The second dev diary for Expeditions: Rome explains core combat.

Ave! Welcome to our second DevDiary for Expeditions: Rome. In our previous DevDiary (link here), we covered the vision for Rome and what the game is about overall. We also discussed this live in our first DevStream which you can watch a replay of here (link here). For DevDiary 2, we’re going to get a little more specific and take a deep dive into our core combat system. So gear up and let’s get started!

Combat in Expeditions: Rome is predominantly expressed through turn-based tactical gameplay. While the legions fight the bigger battles for you on the world map, you and your elite team of praetorians will engage in tactical close-quarters fights on a hex-grid layout using a variety of skills and items.

Let’s start with the basics: Turn-based combat starts when you encounter enemies, so you can explore the area in real-time after any fight, and often before a fight begins as well. Once a fight starts, the very first turn of combat is what we call the preparation phase, where you can strategize and position each of your combatants on the hexes that are available before initiating combat. Once you’ve chosen where your characters will start, it’s time to get into the fight. 

During combat, you can move each character, activate skills, and use any tactical items you have equipped. The amount of movement a character can make is based on how much armor they’re wearing, which grants them a certain number of movement points. If a character wants to move farther, they may have to sacrifice their ability to take certain actions. 

Most character actions are executed via skills that are made available by either their weapon or their class. Unlike our previous Expeditions games, we no longer have basic “white” attacks. Instead, every attack is executed through a skill, and each weapon has a collection of skills it can roll with. This means that you can acquire two different Gladiuses, for example, and the skills available can be completely different, providing a ton of variety.

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Thanks Farflame!
  

The first dev diary for Expeditions: Rome explains the games vision.

DevDiary 1 - Game & Vision

Expeditions: Rome is a single player Turn-Based Tactical Role Playing Game set during the Roman Republic era roughly between 100BC and 40 BC, around the time when Rome was slowly starting to turn into an empire. At its core, Rome is an RPG, where you play the role of either the son or daughter of a patrician family, leading your Praetorians and Legions in battle across multiple regions while navigating the intricacies of Roman politics.

This leads us to our first vision statement. With Rome, we want to create an immersive, story-rich RPG with player driven choices. Right out the gate, you can choose to play either a male or female hero, and that choice has a major impact on how the story unfolds. That is just the first of many decisions you’ll make, many of which can alter how your missions unfold, what types of quests you can take, and much much more. For anyone who’s played previous games in the Expeditions franchise, you’ll have some taste of what we’re talking about here, but for Rome, we’ve really aimed to take the impact of choices to the next level. Expect to hear much more about this in upcoming DevDiaries.

We also wanted to bring an even more immersive experience when it comes to how we tell our story, and a big part of that was going for a fully voiced experience this time around. We can’t even tell you how much time and care went into casting each character and making sure we can get the best performances we can, but we think you’ll be excited about the outcome.

Our next major vision statement is about our turn-based combat. We feel we’ve learned a lot from our previous games. With Rome, we really focused on bringing exciting turn-based combat with a wide range of tactical options, driven by loot and character growth. There’s way more variety in the weapon and class based skills this time around, not to mention a wider selection of items to use. We’ve also gone through countless iterations on the core combat system and encounter design with a focus on keeping combat fresh as the game progresses. And wait till you hear about our epic Siege missions, which we’ll talk about later! There are almost limitless options for you to explore as you level up and equip your party to fit various playstyles.

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Expeditions: Rome is the newest game from Logic Artists and has a planned release for 2021.

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The future of Rome is in your hands: What will your legacy be? Expeditions: Rome is coming to PC later this year.

In Expeditions: Rome, you exert the will of Rome through your actions across the world stage, from the bright blue coasts of Greece to the deep forests of Gaul. Decide how people will view you, and Rome. Will you strike with an iron fist, or speak with a silver tongue? Will you embrace the political heritage of the Republic, or carve your own path as you navigate the complex politics of the Roman Senate? Every choice matters as you decide the fate of your legion, your close companions, and of Rome itself.

Expeditions: Rome is developed by Logic Artists, from Copenhagen, Denmark, who were also responsible for the critically acclaimed Expeditions: Conquistador and Expeditions: Viking. But as we all know: all roads lead to Rome.