Good review, "fair and balanced".
n the actual gameplay, AJE shows some differences to its predecessors. The most obvious is a return to a monthly scale for the turns, instead of the 15-day turns in most preceding games. Therefore, especially veterans from older AGEOD games should be careful not to forget to adjust their orders to use all of the added time during a single turn.
WIA already had monthly turns, so really it depends on the AGEOD games (ROP / RUS / AACW : 15 days ; WIA / AJE : 30 days ; NCP : 7 days).
However, while Roman forces, especially the legions, rule the battlefield, forces without access to legions (for example the kingdom of Pontus with its Greek-style Hoplite armies) have a significant disadvantage. Especially since they, unlike Roman legions, cannot build siege equipment on the fly and thus have much greater difficulty conquering enemy cities. While this has certainly a historical justification, it makes the game very challenging and sometimes outright frustrating for those factions.
I agree ; playing a non-Roman faction (mostly Pontus, if you don't have the Spartacus scenario) can be downright frustrating for people not unexperimented people : the supply logistics is extremely difficult, and you lose with 4 : 1 ratio due to limited frontage - frontage not being clearly explained in the manual - so you don't understand what you can do. Well played, they really can be a match to Sulla's legion, which the Populares cannot be.
Gameplay in AJE not only consists of moving forces on the game map and ensuring that they have enough to eat, but it also includes many aspects of the political and strategical management of your forces. Introduced by Ageod's Revolution under Siege and Pride of Nations, AJE also uses decisions that can be played for a small cost on provinces on the game map. These decisions have a wide array of functions and effects, most of which are not really that useful or important, but they nevertheless can make your campaign easier.
I agree that the "provincial decisions" could be improved. Some are really useful and imply a real sacrifice, some are boring and "free" (Merchant : free 5 money per merchant with almost no constraint), some are not so usefull but cosmetic (building Roads - that's what Roman did !). I believe balancing this stuff will be on the dev'list once the remaining bugs are killed.
Speaking of expensive, the game features five basic resources. Victory points, Engagement points, Money, National Morale and Prisoners. Victory points are earned by holding key objectives and provinces, and are mainly used to determine the winner of a campaign if no side can achieve a total victory until the end of the game. Engagement points are earned from certain cities and through events, and are used for strategic choices and decisions. Money is earned through a lot of ways, but is also spent in a lot of ways. You have to pay for the upkeep of your forces every turn. National Morale is gained by winning battles and conquering objectives, and determines your overall efficiency in combat. It's always a good idea to make sure your National Morale stays around 100. Lastly, prisoners are taken during battles, and they are used in turn to recruit legions made of prisoners or to make some easy profit... well, we are in the antiquity after all.
In case you wonder, no, there is no manpower resource in the game. Instead, your ability to recruit new troops is limited by the forcepool available for your faction. In many scenarios, you cannot recruit new legions, only auxiliaries and mercenaries. This makes the legions available to you even more valuable. Meanwhile there is a pool for reinforcements by nationality and unit type which can grow through events or by you spending money on them.
Looks like my Beginner's Corner was useful
other thing is that many scenarios have empty areas in barbarian territory that are nevertheless already part of the campaign map. Cunning players will immediately guess that something will happen in those places during the course of the scenario, and prepare accordingly. This gives the player a little bit too much information.
That's a difficult balance for AGEOD games : either you do a lot of "historical events", but PBEM players need to have a pre-knowledge of the scenario to be on equal footing, and you don't, but then those events make SP even more interesting.
Note that the apparition of the Barbarians in some scenario is random to an extant, so you might prepare against - say - a Dacian raid for nothing.
I didnt't experience any serious bug or problem, but there is some room for future interface improvements. And of course, more scenarios are always more than welcome, but the next scenario pack, featuring conflicts during the rise of Rome, has already been announced and is scheduled for 2013.
There are quite a few issues (non crashing bugs, balance issues) outstanding, but I am confident they will be fixed in a short time. The team is really working on them. Most of these bugs you won't see if you don't start to bean-count (which I love to do).
As a beta, I am responsible for some of these bugs being not detected at release :/
(which sometimes seems to be contradictory to the actual ingame features).
It is going to be the object of a significant effort I believe ; the game changed a lot since the beta - and sometimes the manual was not kept up to date.