Good evening, you are listening to Threws Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakeney.

Tonight, I'm joined by our friend, freelance writer, T.J. Hafer.

Hello.

And we also welcome back, once again, our friend, freelance writer, John Bolding.

Howdy, howdy.

So it's time, gentlemen.

We once again have a new Paradox development studio strategy game before us,

Imparader, Rome. We've been playing around with the review build for a couple weeks,

and it just released late last week, and people have been playing it over the weekend. But a time

you hear this, another week will have passed.

But I think it's time to sort of gather our own tribes, to consult with our own

Senate, and see what we make of this brand new paradox game that is entirely new and owes very little to any other games and

certainly couldn't be called, you know, EU Rome 2 or anything like that. So real quickly,

I guess to start off, you know what, I'll start off because I actually have a question that frames this a little bit,

and I'm curious what you guys make of it.

Okay.

When I started off playing Rome, because of course I started off playing Rome,

because that's the name of the game, it's history I know pretty well,

it seemed like a line of play that I would understand pretty well.

I have to admit that this thing felt a lot to me like a stripped down Europe and Universalis.

And that's when I was like, oh shit, this really does feel like EU Rome again, but it's a different franchise now.

And I'm curious if any of y'all had that same reaction and whether, and whether in your

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