Praetorians is an excellent choice for real-time strategy fans looking for a stiff and satisfying challenge.
The game is set in the glory years of the Roman Empire during Julius Caesar's time at the helm of the Roman army in Gaul. Developed by Pyro Studios, known for the Commandos tactical strategy series, Praetorians features plenty of strategic depth in its gameplay and is a great choice for real-time strategy fans who are looking for an unusual alternative to conventional strategy games.

in Praetorians, you don't use or build individual units. Combat soldiers are organized into troops of up to 30; the disciplined armies of the Romans march in neat columns, while the more disorganized barbarians and Egyptians travel in unorganized groups. Praetorians lets you easily combine, divide, and even out the number of soldiers you have in each troop, so you can quickly fill out the numbers of a depleted battalion. If you look closely enough at your troops, you can see some minor graphical issues, such as the way mounted cavalry sometimes appear to be skating along the ground, but the unit animations do generally look impressive, especially when you see hundreds of legionnaires marching perfectly in step. Unfortunately, Praetorians' audio isn't quite as good; the in-game sound effects are adequate, but the between-mission cutscenes have rather poor voice acting. Praetorians also has a rather limited orchestral soundtrack, but at least it changes dynamically whenever you begin a battle.

Controlling all these units is easy, thanks to Praetorians' simple interface. You select your troops by left-clicking on them, and you order them to move or attack by right-clicking on their destination, and the game even shows you the formation they'll take when they get there. You can also click and hold the right mouse button to set your troops' facing when they get to their destination (which is actually an important consideration in Praetorians). You can set nine control groups with your number keys, and you can also cycle through commanders, scouts, controlled towns, and special units using intuitively mapped function keys, though the game has an unfortunate tendency to place vulnerable physician and commander units at the front of marching columns, instead of in the middle or at the rear.
Download:150 MB