Rome has fallen. Decades of decadence, wanton corruption, and unceasing strife have reduced the Eternal City to a smoldering ruin. Yet a spark of hope remains as you lead a band of survivors to distant shores, with everyone eager to make a new life for themselves. This is your overarching task in Nova Roma, a new city-builder and management game from developer Lion Shield and publisher Hooded Horse.

Lion Shield is no stranger to the strategy genre, having released Kingdoms and Castles back in 2017. Now studio co-founder Pete Angstadt hopes the team can replicate their previous success with this foray into a new setting. 

“Ancient Roman city infrastructure and services were quite advanced for their time,” notes Angstadt. “It makes a lot of sense for us to set a city-building game during the era as there’s lots of ideas to work with. You’ve got gravity-based aqueduct systems, monumental structures, and even mixed-use buildings with apartments on top and shops at the bottom. These are all historically-based mechanics that we’re working into the game.”

Angstadt also mentions that the team learned a lot from Kingdoms and Castles, as they wanted to allow players to experience their games through the world, as opposed to digging through numerous menus and spreadsheet views. To that end, they opted to “streamline away boring or uninteresting busywork” that players might find intrusive in Nova Roma.

It’s this streamlined approach that distinguishes Nova Roma from other long-running and classic city-builders-slash-management-sims like the Caesar, Tropico, and Anno series—the latest of which, Anno 117: Pax Romana, is also set in the Classical Era. 

First off, Nova Roma players still construct the usual assortment of residences, warehouses, farms, foresters, clay pits, quarries, and more. You don't need each and every building to connect to a road though. Instead, it’s enough for a road to pass through the general area, with buildings just a short distance away.

Secondly, Nova Roma eschews the traditional “citizen tier” mechanic seen in other titles, where lower tiers are manually promoted to higher tiers, thereby gaining new needs or demands. Instead, all citizens in Nova Roma belong to a general population count and you gain more settlers as ships bring immigrants ashore each season.

“We don’t have explicit promotion of citizens,” says Angstadt. “The citizens who arrive at your city are freed persons, escaped slaves, and disgruntled former citizens of the Roman Empire. You can see their origin when you examine them in-game. In actuality, Ancient Rome was very stratified and class-based, but in Nova Roma all citizens have a chance to live or work anywhere.”

Managing your workforce is as easy as clicking on the Job menu and moving each type of job up or down the list depending on how you want them to be prioritized. For instance, you could move builders and land clearers all the way to the bottom of the list to ensure that your citizens primarily work as grape farmers, bakers, firefighters, pottery makers, and theater performers. Your population adjusts accordingly, making micromanagement a breeze.

But your citizens aren’t the only ones with needs that need to be met in Nova Roma. You must also contend with the whims and capriciousness of the gods. Early on, you’ll be able to build temples and dedicate them to Jupiter, Venus, Mars, Mercury, and other deities. From there, you’ll complete requirements known as Divine Tasks, such as ensuring that your city has a high population, offering fish or wheat, or placing even more shrines and temples on your island.

Meet the demands of the gods and they’ll reward you with boons, including increased villager happiness, higher food yields, and greater manufacturing production, as well as extra favors that you can use to unlock new technologies. 

Conversely, if you neglect deities for too long, they’ll grow angry and you’ll feel their divine wrath. One moment you might be rejoicing at the sight of a prosperous city. Next, you’re staring in disbelief as Jupiter casts down thunderbolts, Vulcan causes destructive fires, and Poseidon floods the streets. That said, we’ve been told that these disasters—minor and major alike—can be tuned accordingly via the game’s difficulty settings.

Speaking of floods, Nova Roma also introduces a feature rarely seen in the strategy genre: terraforming and landscaping tools where you’re not only able to raise or lower the ground level, but also able to build dams and aqueducts to divert the flow of water. In effect, you can safely irrigate your fields, leading to more abundant harvests. 

“You can plan out how you want the terrain to be changed using editing tools, then your citizens will actually do the digging to make it happen,” says Angstadt. “The water mechanics aren’t voxel-based like in Minecraft. Instead, it is physics-based, so if you dig a channel to redirect a river, it will flow down like you’d expect in real life. Soil fertility is also based on proximity to water, so if you want to make a new area fertile you can split a river and direct it where you want. All the planning takes place in a simulated world so you can see the impact of your changes before they happen, allowing you to avoid causing unwanted flooding to your city.”

Numerous challenges await as your settlement continues to grow, which is why it’s important to build up your military. Initially, you’ll only have access to wooden walls and guard towers, along with a militia composed of dozens of your workers. Later, you’ll be able to field legionaries from your barracks, letting you maintain a standing army to defend your territory.

From fending off bandits and pirates that appear to ransack your shores, you’ll eventually deal with a resurgent Roman Empire which seeks to reconquer your lands. Coinciding with this threat, you can expect plagues and more invasions that grow in intensity as you progress further into your campaign.

Nova Roma looks quite promising, and will launch in Early Access next year. Lion Shield aims to beef up the game’s content throughout the development cycle. “We have a lot of stuff we want to try with the pantheon of gods,” notes Angstadt. “Perhaps you’ll see some mythical monsters, too.”

Nova Roma releases January 22, 2026 in Early Access on the Epic Games Store.