In classical antiquity, the Roman legion was by far the most well-known and potent infantry force. It fostered not simply a brand of tactics and military organization, but a whole ethos and myth that surrounded Roman legionaries. Legion, developed by Slitherine Software and published by Strategy First, carries this flagship Roman military unit, but Legion is not a strategy title focusing on specifically one legion. It is a strategy game, turn-based in the vein of Civilization but with the city-focus of Impressions' Caesar series and a very original approach to resolving warfare. Legion is situated at somewhere between the Middle to Late Republic to the Early Empire when the Roman legionaries formed the backbone of military power. Slitherine has paid special attention to the authenticity of the setting. The use of Latin plays a great deal in this: army groups will progress saying 'ad victoria', towns are preserved in their original Latin or Celtic/German names, Roman units are separated into velites, auxilia, equites, so on and so forth. The main portion of the game is dedicated to a Civilization type of play. It is turn-based in nature but more oriented towards the management of cities, resources and armies. The only units you are able to move around are army groups. The only management you can perform on a city is to improve its production of resources, ultimately to feed the burdens of the army, which are literally the only thing you need to worry about. This is as it should be, since in the Roman Empire, the army was far and away the largest part of the imperial budget. In Legion, you manage a total of three resources: food, ore and wood. Your empire (and it does not necessarily have to be the Romans) starts out with a balance of zero for each resource. A city possessing a farm, for example, will push this balance to the positive. On the other hand, a city possessing a fort might need maintenance that will drag the balance into the negative. Like the popular city management games from Impressions or Civilization, you can build amenities like vineyards and bathes. Vineyards, for example, convert a space for a farm into something that can improve productivity for all industries but produces very little food itself. Likewise, a shrine might take up a potential place for an industry but it increases productivity for any existing ones already built. There are a maximum number of empty plots available to each city and its geographical locale affects what can be built. Cities alongside a river will have the choice of a fishery instead of a farm. In many strategy titles, especially the simpler RTS ones, war is often an inconsequential event. Cities are heavily taxed by war because in Legion, you have to give up people who might otherwise be engaged in industries to staff your armies. Each city also has a unique unit type that comes to the defense of the city when under attack. In a city with a large fort, for example, the city itself can field a garrison of three military squads in addition to whatever you might have positioned there. This makes the acquisition of some cities more important than others. German cities, for example, tend to offer Germanic mercenaries while Celtic cities offer a variety of archers and cavalry. In Legion, you're given freedom to conduct diplomacy on a fairly sophisticated level. There are tributes involved and alliances to be made such that you can practice the classic Roman tactic of 'divide et impera': divide and conquer. But the ultimate foreign policy answer rests on military force and Legion has a unique approach to it. Each battle begins with a map allowing you to adjust formations of your contingents and arrange them along the battlefield. You can set a variety of actions for each squad: advance, rapid advance, advance then hold, hold then advance. For the latter two, you can alternate between short, medium and long such that you have: long advance then hold, short hold then advance, etc. These commands might be simple at first in light of the fact that you can't chain them together or issue commands during the battle itself but it actually provides for very gratifying battles. For example, you can assign cavalry at your infantry's wings to rapidly advance and take out enemy archers so they can return to flank the opponent's core forces from left or right. Or you can ask infantry to march towards a hill and ask them to hold, letting the enemy fight uphill. Such tactical decisions vary between each battle and the forces you come up against also vary, including your pre-battle estimations of them. The enemy might have a wing of cavalry hiding behind archers or infantry that you couldn't ascertain consequently having detrimental effects to your tactical plans. So far, despite some rough edges, Legion is a fun and engrossing simulation. Its micromanagement and city-building may not be as in depth as the Impression series but it is interesting nonetheless. And it features organized combat not found in those titles. Battles often last no more than a minute or two and that's good, in that it allows you to easily sweep away inferior foes quickly but also realistically depicts combat in antiquity. Warfare is not complete eradication of your enemies. It is a test of whose morale breaks first under mounting losses. It is a test of which soldiers desert the field first. In The Godfather, the antagonist Sollozzo captures this succinctly: Politics like crime is a business and in business, blood is a big expense. Legion marches on to your PC desktop this coming summer. 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