As your territory grows, you’ll also need to keep an eye on the home front. Citizens taxed too heavily may threaten to revolt, while poorly-maintained settlements are more susceptible to plague outbreaks that will decimate their population and reduce the amount of Denarii they contribute to your coffers. However, if you capture a settlement located in a province with a World Wonder — such as the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Lighthouse of Alexandria — you’ll earn powerful empire-wide benefits.

“I split the early part of the campaign between capturing rebel settlements and building up my economy,” Simpson notes. “Once my economy is going strong, I can then fund enough armies to rapidly spread out across the map. I also use diplomacy to secure my borders while I’m off fighting elsewhere.”

“Learn to obey before you command,” the Athenian statesman known as Solon said during the sixth century BC. In the case of Simpson’s development team, they learned to obey their research before embarking on such an ambitious project. “We have an extensive library of books and DVDs and we always dive into them when working on a title, to fully immerse ourselves in the time period,” he explains.

For Rome: Total War, he says, “we also visited key locations, battlefields, and museums. It gave us a great excuse to watch ‘Gladiator’ multiple times.”