Pax Augusta review: A serene, authentic city-builder as dysfunctional as the Late Republic

“Pax Augusta is probably the most authentic ancient city-building simulation,” the game’s Steam page claims. “Hah, we’ll see about that,” this former student of ancient history thought, expecting to debunk that claim right quick. But I was humbled. Anyone who enjoys Roman history and can boast of some knowledge around its society and architecture will find in this game a playground unlike any other, developed by what seems to be a kindred spirit. That’s right: a single spirit.

One of the similarities between Pax Augusta and Manor Lords is that they are one-man efforts – though Manor Lords’ development team has since grown in size – and were borne out of a twin passion for the city-building genre and history. Swiss developer Roger Gassmann didn’t want to wait and hope for classic series like Caesar or Imperium Romanum to somehow continue — he took matters into his own hands and in some respects created a worthy challenger for Ubisoft’s upcoming Anno 117.

In other respects, though, the limitations of Pax Augusta become painfully obvious. Likely the biggest drawback at the moment is the game’s technical state. This doesn’t even mean bugs, because the game is relatively clean in that regard. Pax Augusta is simply terribly, terribly optimized. My high-end system protests loudly whenever I run the game, cooling fans going hard and fast, while the loading times are too long for what this game is and how it looks.

And I’m one of the lucky ones, because the game actually runs for me without bigger issues. Many other players report frequent crashes, which coupled with infrequent auto-saves mean repeated losses of progress and mounting frustration. It’s not like the title is a visual dream or simulates tons of complex systems and mechanics either.

Pax Augusta is, all things considered, fairly simple. There is no combat, no glorious conquest. You build cities. Very authentic cities. If your cities fulfill the needs of people, they come to live in your cities and pay taxes, which you then use to build more stuff — or finance your career back in Rome, which unlocks more stuff to build. There are no super deep production chains. You mostly buy all the resources you need, so you can concentrate on construction.

Construction, to be clear, is the game’s most enjoyable part, because anyone who’s ever looked at the reconstruction of a Roman city or drawn up city plans will be able to go all out here. There are tons of different building options, all very detailed and true to history, from small strip houses over the massive insulae that made Rome such a fire hazard (speaking of which, you can burn a city at any point with a button dedicated to starting fires… for entertainment, I guess?) up to the grand palaces the aristocrats would build for themselves. There is tons of modularity with parks, gardens, outhouses, and lots of other options being available to customize buildings.

And it’s all so true to life: The poorer people living in strip houses can tend to gardens for extra food, while citizens living in the insulae can work in attached arcades and bakeries and so on — Manor Lords players will find this system immediately familiar. Senators, naturally, don’t need to worry about any of that, so their houses can be expanded with fountains and other luxuries.

Similar to games like Pharaoh and Anno, the better-off citizens in Pax Augusta have more and more elaborate needs than their poorer counterparts. You’ll need brothels, theaters, baths, and so on. Aqueducts will eventually have to deliver fresh, running water into your city.

While other city-builders have different types of roads that affect movement speed as well, the developer of Pax Augusta has kept in mind the fact that the Romans notoriously hated traffic noises – Caesar banned carts from being brought into the city at night as a result – and added some corresponding effects to the roads in the game. In terms of these little details, Ubisoft’s upcoming Anno 117 would do well to take a page out of Pax Augusta’s book. 

As a history fan, you can’t help but smile when looking over your cities and reading the texts in the game — the way patron-client relationships are presented without any deeper explanations, just matter-of-factly, is a great example for this.

If Pax Augusta was a sandbox diorama-builder – which it can be, because sandbox mode is a thing – I’d end things here and give it a 9/10. Getting to play with my digital Roman buildings makes me all giddy and happy.

Unfortunately, Pax Augusta is not as great a game as it is a toybox. I already mentioned that there isn’t a whole lot of economic management, at least when it comes to production chains, meaning that aspect is very simplified. The production and trade systems that exist are quite robust and once again bustle with authenticity and historical detail, though they suffer immensely from the UI and menus not being very clear or helpful. 

Say, you’re building the wood production chain, which consists of three buildings, and they’re done and you have enough happy people to work there. Wood should be produced. But it isn’t. Why? I’ve got no idea. I’ve spent at least half an hour trying to rebuild the chain and click all the buttons I can click to change things, but nothing works and the game simply does not tell me why my wood production remains zero. No error messages come to my aid. No tooltip pops up when hovering over the production numbers to elaborate on the problem. I even played through the tutorial again to see what I did wrong, but couldn’t spot anything I did differently. 

In another save, I did get the wood production to work, but the UI still shows zero net production in the building. Safe to say, it’s a bit of a mess and probably buggy.

That’s a shame, because that’s the kind of thing that makes people stop trying to play, making them miss what’s on offer — and there are some interesting ideas here, history nerdgasms aside. There is this Mount & Blade-style overworld map on which you can travel around to hire theater troupes or gladiators to entertain your city, make trade deals with merchants to import resources, and start up additional settlements. This really connects your towns to the wider world, making them feel like they’re indeed part of the Imperium Romanum.

Your city has a fittingly named engineer, Vitruvius, who can scout the map for ideal spots to build bridges and the like, which is a cool little detail but feels a bit clunky. Why don’t you just… tell me outright where I can place a bridge or an aqueduct or a fishing hut? It doesn’t really add a lot to send the little man out.

Building suffers from a similarly clunky decision: You can only place buildings attached to a road. You can’t build structures freely and then lay down a road to connect them afterwards, which is a bit annoying.

Workers refuse to do their jobs when they’re unhappy, which makes sense and is quite common in city-builders. However, in Pax Augusta even your farmers need to be satisfied with their lots in life to produce food. So if you don’t have enough food and people get hangry, resolving the affair is quite hairy because people would rather starve than tend the fields in order not to starve. See, I get why this is the case: The Roman Empire was a globalized economy. If people had it bad in their hometown, they could pack their things and try their luck elsewhere. So, yes, it makes total sense for your population to be able to do the same, but death spirals are seldom great fun to go through and even a little mistake when setting up your city can doom it to that fate, destroying all the work and love you put into the layout.

Pax Augusta is incredibly authentic and detailed and anyone who loves historical dioramas will be utterly entranced by it, though its actual city-building gameplay has room for improvement — both design-wise and in technical matters.

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