The first thing is that it definitely should
not be
EU Rome. I read the
Vae Victis dev diaries yesterday and you can see that they were stumbling towards the character-based concept that was so successful in CK2. And that makes so much sense: the Mediterranean was dominated by large empires in this time period, so an EU game where you play
as a country just doesn't have many possibilities. There are only so many ways that you can replay the inevitable Carthage vs Rome war. Playing as a country doesn't even make historical sense, given how weakly organized the Celts and Germans were.
But a CK-style grand strategy game where you play
as a character would be very fun: persuading your Germanic kinsmen to risk their lives swimming across the Rhine, using your hot haircut
and pretty nose to seduce a visiting Roman general for reasons of state, assassinating tyrants on the steps of the Senate...
Secondly, they should seriously consider extending the time period. A country-based game gets very boring in the early centuries AD, because Rome's basically already achieved World Conquest. But a game with RPG elements would work just as well in a universal empire, and there would still be interesting decisions: most obviously whether to adopt Christianity or try to save paganism; how to deal with the increasing pressure from/as Germans. I realize that PDX want to avoid the 7th century because of the sensitivities around early Islamic history and that can be respected.
When the World Stopped Making Sense starts in AD 476, so why not end the game after another four-and-a-half centuries of fun?
Thirdly, the map and the data structures would obviously have to be very different from CK2 feudalism. There's been an interesting discussion
in another thread on how to model imperial bureaucratic governments in CK2, where I've put forward ideas that might work well in a new Roman-era game.
Fourthly, there should be a completely new name. When
EU:Rome came out, PDX was more of a one-trick pony (EU must have been the vast majority of sales) and there does need to be a name that differentiates it clearly from the many other games with
Rome in the title.
CK: Rome will just confuse fans of both franchises (and making searching for DLCs on Steam and its competitors a nightmare). There needs to be a new name that can be clearly trademarked as PDX IP for decades to come and is less Rome-centric so that it can be expanded to other ancient civilizations.
Swords and Sandals seems to have been used already by an MMORPG.
Romanitas?
The Senate and the People? Don't ask me, but the marketing department should be able to think of something.
