Mediterranean & Near East · 280–31 BC

Imperium Romanum: The History Behind the Game

The two and a half centuries in which a single city-state on the Tiber conquered every shore of the Mediterranean. Era of Warlords spans from Pyrrhus's first warning shot against Rome to Octavian's final victory at Actium.

A republic surrounded by empires

In 280 BC, Rome was a rising but still regional Italian power when King Pyrrhus of Epirus crossed the Adriatic to defend the Greek colony of Tarentum — and won battles so costly they gave us the phrase "Pyrrhic victory." Rome absorbed the losses and won the war anyway, a pattern that would repeat for the next 250 years: Rome rarely won cleanly, but it never stopped coming back.

The real turning point was Carthage. Three Punic Wars (264–146 BC) — starting over Sicily, reignited by Hannibal's audacious crossing of the Alps in 218 BC, and ending with the total destruction of Carthage in 146 BC — eliminated Rome's only peer power in the western Mediterranean.

East, then everywhere

With the west secured, Rome turned east. Victory over the Seleucid king Antiochus III at Magnesia in 190 BC broke Hellenistic power in Asia Minor, and a string of wars against Macedon, Pontus (under the relentless Mithridates VI) and the Seleucids steadily folded the old Alexandrian successor kingdoms into Roman control.

Conquest abroad fed civil war at home. Julius Caesar's proconsulship in Gaul (58 BC) made him too powerful for the Senate to control, and the resulting civil wars ended the Republic itself. The last independent Hellenistic power, Ptolemaic Egypt under Cleopatra, fell after Octavian's fleet crushed Mark Antony's at Actium in 31 BC — leaving the entire Mediterranean, Mare Nostrum, under a single ruler for the first time.

133 territories, playable from any of the scenarios above, against AI rivals with their own diplomacy and ambitions.