Ozymandias: Bronze Age Empire Sim Review

Introduction

Ozymandias: Bronze Age Empire Sim is a historical strategy game set at the dawn of the ancient world in Eurasia. It spans what is known as the Bronze Age as well as the first few centuries of the Iron Age. It was a time of great discoveries, including the invention of writing and mathematics, an age that lasted for several thousand years and saw the construction of the Pyramids of Giza and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. And contrary to expectations, the developers have succeeded in packaging it into a game that can be played in one sitting, effectively creating Ozymandias: The Lunch-Break 4X Sim.

The Historical Setting in the Bronze Age

Ozymandias was published on 11 October 2022, two days shy of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the initial release of another game that explored the Bronze age and built its core gameplay around it, Age of Empires I. Although other games had incorporated the same historical period, namely Civilization I and II before that (and most recently Humankind), grand strategy games that have concentrated on the period and represented most of the world’s civilizations of the time have been surprisingly rare. Players will find some favorites, including the ancient Greeks and Babylonians, as well as the many warring states of ancient China. But a pleasant surprise is the inclusion of two scenarios following the development of the kingdoms of the Indus Valley and Ganges Plain, an important part of world history that is rarely mentioned in video games.

The Game systems: Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate

The game offers three game modes starting with a tutorial as a Story Campaign following the travels of the historical Gertrude Bell, a famous traveler, writer, and archaeologist from England. The player is introduced to the game systems over four scenarios and is presented a story through letters and photos, including the eponymous poem “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The main game modes are single-player and multiplayer. In both, the player can choose from several scenarios. Every scenario is set on a real historical map divided into hexagonal spaces and populated by real civilizations. It ranges from the smallest Indus Valley scenario which only has three choices, the Harappans, Mahenjo-Daro, and Dholavira to the big maps of Europe and Asia with ten unique factions each. While the game is described as being a 4X game, maps are always explored and end with, most of the starting factions still alive. Thus the game is missing the Explore and Exterminate from the formula and concentrates on the Expand and Exploit with a gracious amount of combat underpinning almost every decision.

Every faction has different starting positions and resources as well as four characteristics, giving each one its defining strengths and weaknesses. While an Imperialist faction will find it easy to expand its territory, a Traditional faction will develop its cities faster and a Scholarly will develop technologies to better exploit their land earlier. But if a Militant faction manages to build a good power base, all of them will struggle to defend against its armies.

Resources

New lands will allow the player to gain four resources: Knowledge, Wealth, Food, and Power. The first few turns are focused on Food, used to expand the player’s territory and build new cities. As soon as good land is acquired, Knowledge is needed to better exploit it, extracting the most Food, Knowledge, and Wealth possible. Wealth is important not only because it can be used to buy Food and Knowledge, but because soon the first Armies will be recruited with it, and Power bought through it. While Knowledge becomes less useful in the late game, Food keeps its importance because of its use in growing Cities as well as moving units.

Combat

The game might sound too long to finish in one sitting, but what keeps the games short and fast is the simple combat system and only two units: Armies that operate on land, and Fleets that sail the seas and move up rivers. The combat itself is resolved at the end of the turn after the units have moved simultaneously. Each space on the map has a Power rating, based on technological development and any adjoining Cities or Armies/Fleets. Every turn those spaces can change hands making combat a prolonged tug of war dependent on not only army positioning but also Knowledge and Power: both used for augmenting combat capabilities. Choosing your battles is important: not every war can be won, and not every land defended. Sometimes, it is better to invest your Wealth to augment your Power rating rather than buy a new Army, as a badly supplied horde will often lose against a smaller well oiled war band fighting on its terms.

Cities

While borders can move easily, Cities provide substantial defensive bonuses that scale with their size. Their strategic positioning can stave off an otherwise unstoppable army, but their loss can cost more than the City itself if the enemy breaks through your carefully designed defensive line. Even if one ignores the City’s role in expansion: lowering the acquisition cost of surrounding spaces, their importance is clear when buying Armies and Fleets, the latter available only in coastal Cities. A City’s size becomes a determining factor in the later game, as its growing population is the only tool available in growing one’s economy apart from conquest once the map has been completely colonized.

A Drop of Chaos

The game is almost entirely deterministic, there are pre-made maps with pre-made factions in static starting positions and even combat has no random chance involved. After spending a long time with the game one could learn to play a perfect game and win every time, or more often lose, considering the factions are unbalanced by design. That is to say if it wasn’t for Opportunities introducing randomness and luck. The player can hold on to up to three Opportunities, either fulfilling their conditions for bonuses or replacing them with new cards at the start of each turn from a choice of three random cards. The fact that the cards are kept secret from the other players helps undermine and turn the table on naturally stronger factions, as it adds a drop of chaos in an otherwise orderly machine. Some cards can even provide the player with alternative ways to achieve victory.

Victory Conditions: The Pyramids and the Six Wonders of the Iron Age?

Achieving victory is a matter of proper planning and some luck, and it is typically achieved between about half an hour to an hour. Crowns are tallied to determine the winner, acquired by fulfilling seven victory conditions, mirroring the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Every Crown reflects civic and military accomplishments throughout the game. For instance, the Great Lighthouse of Alexandria provides the player with one or more Crowns for having conquered large swaths of the map while the Colossus of Rhodes counts the number of active Armies/Fleets under the player’s control. The other five reflect other factors, like researched technologies and the total City Population.

Considering the game has the propensity to allow factions to steamroll over the map only a few minutes into a game, creative strategizing is possible because Crowns can be lost as easily as they can be gained. A faction that was one Crown away from Victory can suddenly lose several Crowns if they lose an Army or a City, or in the case of the Hanging Gardens condition that provides Crowns based on amassed Wealth, the player might be forced to spend their reserves because of a cleverly devised enemy attack.

That allows different game styles to prevail rather than having a constant state of war drag out for hours until the last enemy City has been conquered. But if that’s what you wanted, the community has concocted its own “domination” mode bypassing the game’s intended design, but only because the designers have provided a great feature, the ability to set your Victory Conditions. The same map can be played with a set of rules favoring either a military or economic victory, or both. Randomized Victory Conditions are provided for every game, yet its randomness is not always a blessing. While the player can tweak them to allow for an easy victory for a chosen faction, the system would shine if the developers provided packages of Victory Conditions like the aforementioned “domination” mode, as well as cultural, military, and economic modes. That would add a more structured competitiveness to the singleplayer, allowing more prestige to victories with more difficult factions, like the Canaanites or Scythians.

Difficulty or “Athens is Blessed!”

In the scenario set in Greece during the Archaic Period, achieving victory when playing with Athens is straightforward. Taking into account the City’s defensive position at the edge of the mainland, the player needs to simply conquer and exploit the Aegean Sea. As there are almost no threats from land with the other factions busy bickering between themselves, investing in the otherwise expensive technologies to develop the sea and islands becomes easy for Athens, and prohibitive for most other factions as they need to spend their Wealth to defend their lands. Once the sea is theirs, the game is as well. Victory with the other factions is more difficult, Sparta being slightly harder and Thebes proving a real challenge.

Difficulty itself, providing that the player doesn’t manipulate the Victory Conditions too much, ranges from Very Easy to Very Hard, depending on the choice of faction. The historical choices are unbalanced, but they serve as a good history lesson and prop up the educational aspect of the game, about which we will talk later. But the same unbalanced design turns multiplayer into a frustrating mess, almost begging for the phrase “let the buyer beware.”

Multiplayer or “Caveat Emptor”

The developers mention the multiplayer mode as an important selling point, yet it is lacking. Setting up a random game often ends up with someone choosing the strongest faction and destroying everyone else, that is if there’s anyone to play with. Understandably, for a new game with a small community, the lobby usually has only a handful of people, yet their skill level is usually prohibitive to new players, making the games frustrating, to say the least. Of course, that could be avoided by playing with people of your skill level or with friends. But in a community so small, hoping to find a group of people, each choosing the faction that corresponds to their skill level to provide a balanced experience for everybody is unrealistic. It can be deduced that the game is always unbalanced and a few mistakes in the early turns can cost you a whole game when facing a real person, basically begging for an early quit and rematch, a common practice in Chess. Yet no rematch option exists and ending a game throws you back into the lobby, leaving you hoping that the other players had the same idea.

At the moment the developer has not provided any in-game ways of communicating with other players, expecting the players to use third-party software to communicate. While that isn’t a problem for most players, even a rudimentary emoticon system allowing for a show of intent or mood while in a game would help give a bit more “soul” to the minimalist social interactions, at the moment limited to aggressive army positioning in silence. It makes Chess seem lively.

Other features could also improve the game: a random map generator, balanced maps for multiplayer, a duel map for quick games, dynamic factions, and randomized faction starting locations. Of course, that might not be how the game was intended to be played, potentially unbalancing or breaking the gameplay, but as it stands multiplayer is not fun. Single-player mode is still the best way to play the game, if not the only one for many players.

Educational Potential

But seen from another point of view, Ozymandias has incredible educational potential for children. First, the period that the game covers is very important for anyone developing an interest in history and integral in understanding how our ancestors gave up their eons-old nomadic lifestyle and started a new chapter in the history of the world, or rather how history began at all. The game successfully abstracts complicated concepts and theories. Historically, peoples organized into tribes and later states, spurring city development, because of pressure from neighbors. At the beginning of the game, founding new Cities is motivated by pressure from neighbors and is done by spending Food, again mimicking real historical developments of larger settlements arising from improvements in food production that came with agriculture.

The rest of the game systems follow a similar logic, allowing for fairly historically correct outcomes to arise naturally. The only downside is that it doesn’t cover the development of civilization in Africa, except its northern Mediterranean coast, and doesn’t touch on the other continents at all. Recent announcements concerning future DLCs and game updates seem to indicate that new maps and game modes are indeed in the works, including a map of Mesoamerica.

But forcing a child to play a difficult game alone is not easy or fun. That is where a Hotseat option could add value to any parent when considering getting the game, or eventually, a Pass ‘n’ Play option if it ever becomes available on handheld devices.

Conclusion

Ozymandias: The Bronze Age Empire Sim invites the player to recreate or challenge history in a complex strategy game where every turn matters, all in under an hour. Covering a period of history almost always relegated to the early turns in other games and quickly brushed over, it not only brings novelty to the genre of historical strategy gaming but also lends itself to educational purposes. Sadly, the multiplayer component of the game is not very active and often frustrating for new players, but that only serves to highlight the qualities of the well-crafted scenarios that are available, and hopefully guide the developers to push the game towards a deeper single-player experience. It is worth mentioning that the developers seem open to suggestions and interested in carving out this unique gem of a game together with the community.  Anybody interested in ancient history or looking for a strategic challenge during a lunch break will find more than enough of both here.

Filip Rizov

Filip is interested in games and how they are created. He’s particularly interested in the art, story, and how they’re integrated with the game systems. He considers that a great game is one where all the elements fit together seamlessly. When he’s not discovering new games and writing about them, he works as a freelance illustrator and likes to read and write fiction.