Nova Roma allows you to build a complex city where the people are blessed and happy. However, as you start, you’ll come across many obstacles and challenges that can cause your city to suffer. These challenges can be easily avoided if you plan and are prepared for whatever is coming.
For more information on the game, please visit its official Steam page here.
Table of contents
World Settings
Before you start a new game, you have to select whether your city is going to be built on an island or a piece of land, as well as its size. These settings are set to random by default, and you can keep generating worlds to find the one that suits you best.
However, there are a few that you have to keep in mind. Building a city on a group of islands is going to be much more difficult early on than on a single piece of land.
Furthermore, you can also adjust the difficulty settings to better suit your playstyle. On Normal difficulty, the Gods in the game tend to get angry quite often, but you can adjust that and select a custom difficulty. You can also turn off invasions entirely.
The difficulty settings also allow you to adjust the frequency of merchant ships, droughts, and fires. Keep in mind that challenges, such as droughts, plagues, and fires, can get extremely challenging on normal and above difficulty if you’re not prepared for them.
Building Placements
Building placements matter a lot in most city builder games, but in Nova Roma, they can easily make your run a lot more comfortable. Most workers need a home near their workplace.
If you’ve got a Stone Quarry placed away from your residential area, you can place a house near it to make it easier for the workers to get to it. This can be an effective way to deal with tired workers who may take too long to get home after work.
Furthermore, some loud structures are disliked by citizens and should be built away from residential buildings. Such buildings include Stone Quarry, Charcoal Maker, and Undertaker’s building.
Likewise, a granary should be built near the residential buildings so the workers can access it easily. If the granary is too far, even if you have food there, the citizens won’t be able to get to it. As your city grows, you’ll have to build farms in different places so the food can be supplied to all residents equally.
Temples
In Nova Roma, you have to build temples dedicated to the Roman gods; otherwise, they may get angry and cause trouble on your land. You’ll have to build multiple temples, and it is necessary as well because you can only unlock more structures after you’ve completed divine tasks.
Each Roman god gives unique divine tasks, and completing them will reward you with their favor. This favor can then be used to unlock more structures.
You’ll get warnings if you’ve forgotten to build a temple for one of the Gods, or if one of the temples is understaffed. These gods also get angry if you don’t complete a divine task soon. This results in calamities, such as fires starting to erupt in your city, or storms that result in flooding or drought.
It’s important to keep building temples after every few years and try to complete the divine tasks quickly. You can also leave a task as it is, without marking it complete, even if you have the necessary resources, until these gods start to get angry. This will give you more time to prepare for the next offering and can be effective if you don’t need favor urgently.
Governor
After the first few years, when your population crosses 50 citizens, you’ll need to employ a Governor. These governors may either give you a bonus or a disadvantage for their term.
Keep in mind that you cannot manually remove a governor. If you get an option with good positive bonuses for the governor’s position, and you employ them and they do their job for their tenure. The next time, you can get that option again, but this time, it is recommended that you pick someone else for the governor’s job, even if they don’t have all the positive bonuses.
It is because, if a governor stays in position for more than 3 years, the citizens will begin to dislike them, and the average happiness of your citizens will start to go down.
That’s why you should switch governors, even at the risk of some disadvantages. Note that if you don’t pick a governor at all, this will also result in the population getting unhappy.
This concludes our guide for Nova Roma.
You can check out more guides for the game on its main hub here. Don’t forget to visit these pages below:
- Into Indie Games Homepage
- Project Songbird Complete Walkthrough
- Crimson Desert – Walkthrough Hub
- The Seven Deadly Sins: Origin – Walkthrough Hub
- Solasta 2 – Walkthrough Hub
Fahad Suleman is an avid fan of fighting games who spends most of his time writing walkthroughs and reviews for cozy indie titles or mashing around in Tekken. If he’s not writing or playing any games, you’ll often find him watching historical videos on YouTube for hours.
