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.

"Praetorians" is a 3D real-time strategy game developed by Pyro Studios, based on Julius Caesar's campaigns.

Players are given the option of a mission where they play as Julius Caesar commanding forces of varying sizes against various barbarian tribes. Or a skirmish can be played in which the player first chooses a difficultly level (easy, medium, hard or expert) then chooses up to 1 character and up to 7 AI players, commanded by the computer. These can be Roman, Egyptian or an anonymous barbarian tribe. Once this is completed it can then be chosen to create alliances by putting two forces on the same team. This means that they can't attack each other and in times of crisis one team member can call to another via a message line "We need help" whereupon the ally will normally throw in spare troops to help their ally. Praetorians varies from other games of its genre in that resources do not play a part in it. In most real time strategy games, wood, food, gold, stone and glory need to be collected and is spent as troops are created. According to Gamespot, Praetorians had beautiful graphics but it was difficult to zoom in and impossible to turn the camera around 360 degrees. However it was praised by Gamespot for its gameplay and tactical depth.

The game continues to sell well even today (May 2008), with it still being in the top 20 Budget PC titles on ChartTrack.