Praetorians: HD Remaster - Trailer

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Gamer ZoneXF

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Published on August 18, 2021 7:11:16 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uu9OYXqehxA

Game:

Praetorians (2003)

Category:

Preview

Duration: 1:23

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Praetorians is a 3D real-time tactics video game developed by Pyro Studios and published by Eidos Interactive in 2003, based on Julius Caesar's historical campaigns in Gaul and Britain, Crassus' battles in Parthia, and the events of Caesar's Civil War during the 1st century BC. The player controls either the Roman Republic, the Ptolemaic Kingdom (inaccurately represented as the New Kingdom of Egypt), or a generic barbarian tribe based on the Helvetii, Gauls, and Celts.

Gameplay
Unlike most real-time strategy titles, Praetorians focuses on military strategy and tactics rather than building or resource management. Units are trained from a garrison, which is built on a town or village which requires a garrison to be built and a commander to be sent there to oversee recruitment.

Each civilization comes with its own unique unit pool with units that have different strengths, abilities, and weaknesses. Some unit types are simply re-skinned for all the civilizations, but the variety in units offers different strategic ideas depending on which civilization the player is using. Light infantry units are generally weaker than heavy infantry units in hand-to-hand combat, and are very susceptible to arrow fire, but are the only units in the game that can act as builders; the possible buildings they can construct range from wooden bridges and defensive towers to war machines and siege equipment such as towers and ladders. Heavy infantry units are strong in hand-to-hand combat and quite resistant to arrow fire, but generally much slower around the map, and cannot travel over watery terrain. Archer units are poor in hand-to-hand combat, especially against cavalry units, but can set fire to damage buildings and siege equipment.
Spear units are generally competent in hand-to-hand combat, particularly in their defensive "stationary" formation when they form a spear-wall, but are susceptible to heavier infantry units and arrow fire, and cannot travel in forests. Cavalry units are quick, can easily outmanoeuvre most troops, and will fare pretty well in hand-to-hand combat with most other units, but they are quite susceptible to arrow fire and most cannot travel in forests.

Development
After the Pyro Studios producer of the title, Javier Arévalo, and Eidos' Jason Walker talked about sorting out a flaw in the multiplayer game that was being exploited, an unofficial patch was released in October 2004. This helped catapult the game back up the GameSpy Arena charts.

The latest version of an unofficial extension, called MoD 4.1, became available 2004; it adds three new factions and many new maps. MoD 4.1 contains the unofficial patch to fix the multi-player game. The next official extension is called MoD 5.0 released in 2013 by Pyro Studios. It sorted out a number of flaws, decreased the hit points of some troops, updated the start screen of the game, added brand new music and sounds, presented 40 new maps for battles.

In 2008 an unofficial map editor for the PC game Praetorians was released. The map editor is programmed in the C++ programming language and uses the OpenGL computer graphics API. In the same year, the game continued to sell well, maintaining a place in the Top 20 Budget PC Titles on ChartTrack at the time.

On May 31, 2014, GameSpy servers were shut down, thus ending the official multiplayer for Praetorians. However, it is possible to use unofficial third-party clients to run and maintain servers for Praetorians.

Reception
In the United Kingdom, Praetorians sold roughly 20,000 units during the first half of 2003. Kristan Reed of GamesIndustry.biz wrote that these were "not figures that spell H.I.T." The game ultimately received a "Silver" award from the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA), indicating sales of at least 100,000 copies in the United Kingdom. It also received a "Gold" award from the Asociación Española de Distribuidores y Editores de Software de Entretenimiento (aDeSe), for more than 40,000 sales in Spain during its first 12 months.

Reception
The game received "generally favorable reviews" according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. GamePro noted in its preview that the game is "A healthy mixture of Medieval: Total War and WarCraft". GameSpot praised the graphics, tactical depth, and AI; however, the limited camera (lacking the ability to turn 360 degrees) audio (particularly the sound effects, and voice acting) and poor multiplayer matchmaking services were criticized. IGN praised the gameplay, and strategic-focus of the game, as well as its balance, graphics and campaign.

In 2017, HobbyConsolas named Praetorians one of the best Spanish games ever released. El Economista offered it the same recognition in 2020.