Legion is an upcoming strategy game from Slitherine Strategies and Strategy First.  It takes place in the second century AD, placing players in command of one of the ancient peoples of the world at a time when the Roman Empire really began to expand and flex its muscle.  Strategy First passed along a beta preview of the game and we were able to get a feel for what the game will be like when it is released later this year.

Legion is a turn-based game set at the strategic scale.  You'll be able to pick a starting territory on one of the game's four maps - Northern Britannia, Southern Britannia, Gaul, and Italy - and expand your influence to the surrounding territories through conquest and diplomacy.  Legion really places you in the role of your people's emperor - you make all the strategic decisions while your people worry about the details.  This perspective is consistently supported throughout the game and results in a game that emphasizes strategy over reflexes and micromanagement. 

Your major concerns as emperor focus on two aspects of your burgeoning empire, the economy and the military.  Central to this are the cities which appear across the map.  The cities are used to generate resources for your empire, as bases for military recruitment, and to define the extent of your power.  By building structures in your cities, you can influence the rate of production of the game's three resources, food, ore, and wood, encourage population growth and productivity, and improve the quality of troops raised in the city.  The building decisions that you make will be on the strategic level - you will decide whether or not to build a certain structure now or wait until you can afford another more expensive one, but you don't have to worry about placing the structure or assigning builders to it.  That's a job for your city managers; an emperor has more important things to worry about.

Cities can also be used to raise armies, and what you can build depends on the city and your available resources.  There are a wide variety of units available, all the way from peasant mobs to crack legionaries, and they are all modeled on the real-life units available at that point in history.  The units can be combined into armies of up to eight units each that can be used to defend your realm or to conquer new ones.  During your turn, you can move your units across the world map, and the distance that they can travel will depend on the units type and the terrain it is crossing.  When an army enters the same location as another army or moves into a city, combat ensues. 

True to its strategic perspective, the combat in Legion focuses on the strategic placement and formation of troops rather than on the control of individual men or units during battle.  Before a battle begins, you place your available troops on the map, and then select their formations and orders.  The orders consist of specifying whether units should charge into battle at full speed, advance slowly, delay their move, stand their ground, etc.  Once you are satisfied with your orders, the battle begins and you can watch the results of your strategy as your armies clash in real time, but your hands are tied from participating.  This is akin to the amount of control over a battle that ancient generals must have experienced, and makes effective tactics that take into account the makeup of your and the enemy's armies and the terrain of the battlefield the key to victory.  Winning a battle results in the elimination of the enemy units or the capture of a city, while losing means the end of your units. 

As you capture cities, the borders on the map are redrawn to reflect your expanding empire.  Your expansion won't go unnoticed, however, as you will be facing up to 20 other AI opponents.  Some will become threatened by your expansion and will move against you, while others will choose the diplomatic route and propose alliances.  However you plan to manage your empire, diplomacy is one aspect of the game that you will not want to ignore. 

While the version of the game we played is an early build and still has a ways to go before it is complete, we think that it has the potential to be an enjoyable game.  The focus on strategic level decisions gives the game a unique perspective, and helps players get a feeling for what it must have been like to be a commander in the ancient world.  We'll keep you up to date on the game as more details become available, and will have a full review of the final version when it is released.