If you think the citizens in city builders are grumpy and needy, try pleasing a bunch of jealous Roman gods

If there's one thing that can ruin a beautiful and efficient city, it's the people who insist on living in it. Build them shelter (well, command them to build themselves shelter), and they'll want a convenient marketplace to buy food. Make food available to them and they'll start complaining that they want more than one type of food. Let their neighborhood flood and next thing you know they'll be asking for ways to respectfully dispose of the bloated corpses of the dead. There's just no way to please them!

Strap in, governors, because demanding citizens are just a small challenge compared with the crowd of needy gods you need to keep happy. In city builder Nova Roma, the Roman Empire has fallen and you and a handful of villagers slink away to start a new civilization in a pristine land. The gods are coming with you.

I began my new civilization on a lovely island split in two by a massive waterfall and river, a perfectly picturesque spot for a hopeful little city. I gave my earnest little villagers their first in a long series of chores like chopping trees and gathering stone to construct our first buildings: hovels, farms, wells, and quarries.

But there's another important starter building: the temple. Placing your first temple leaves with a choice: which god will this temple be devoted to? There's plenty of competition, because the moment it's built the various Roman gods will be crowded around it, shoulder to shoulder, each offering a bonus if you pick them.

If it's a temple devoted to Vulcan, nearby industrial buildings will get a production boost. If it's near the water, you might want to pick Neptune to improve your fishing yield. I went with Ceres, god of agriculture, because I was starting to farm and her temple being nearby would help my harvests.

But the gods aren't just about buffing your ass, no strings attached. They want stuff. A lot of stuff. Ceres immediately demanded I have five farms, and in exchange she offered me a reward of three favor points, which can be used to unlock new buildings on the technology tree.

Progress a bit more and the gods will also want bribes, or as they call them "offerings," which can net you more favor. Ceres suggested I might want to build some grapevines. OK, farming grapes sounds like a good idea because I'll probably want to make wine at some point, this being Rome 2. But she would like a whole bunch of my grapes, too, and in exchange she'll give me more favor I can use to progress further along the tech tree.

Not a big deal, right? Pick a god and complete quests and you get stuff. Yeah, except the gods you didn't pick for your first temple will start regularly griping about that, appearing in your city as 200-foot-tall apparitions, suggesting that you've got a real nice town here and it'd be a real shame if it got flooded or set on fire or bombarded with lightning bolts. So, you build another temple for another god, gaining their buff, completing their quests, and earning their favor. Then some other enraged god appears, making more threats. And so on.

It's not a bad way to progress, really, because they do offer great buffs and they shower you with tons of favor points, so making your way through the tech tree to the advancements you want to unlock doesn't take all that long. But the sudden demands of an angry god can appear at less than opportune times.

I'd had a few setbacks. Most significantly, my stone quarry was sorta kinda way too close to the massive waterfall that dwarfs my city. Every spring it floods a bit, I assume from melting snow, and my quarry workers have the annoying weakness of not being able to breathe underwater. Eventually, I had to relocate my quarry much further away, so for an entire season I essentially had no stone.

That's when Vulcan showed up, petulant that I hadn't built him a temple yet, and since I had no stone to build him one immediately, he basically started trashing the place with angry god magic. Lesson learned: keep some extra supplies stockpiled to appease jealous gods.

Another time, one of the gods getting its toga in a bunch happened at the best possible time. Mars, god of war, appeared and started whining that I hadn't given him a temple either, coincidentally (or not) right at the moment when some invaders appeared on the horizon in a warship. I quickly built Mars' temple, and as the ship drew closer and closer I spent his new favor points to unlock guard towers on the tech tree.

The enemy ship circled my island, looking for a place to land, while I sat there watching nervously as my citizens slowly built the towers I needed to defend them. The timing was perfect: as the enemy piled off their ship and crossed the bridge into town, my workers completed the guard tower, which immediately began raining down arrows on the invaders. They turned and fled, and I sent my militia across the bridge to finish them off. I survived my first invasion, thanks to Mars being a huge crybaby at just the right moment.

Despite all these angry gods competing for my attention, my little city by the big deadly waterfall is steadily growing, and I think I've now got a temple for each god so I'm hopeful they won't appear and wreck all my hard work.

The pace of progress is faster than in most city builders, which I'm enjoying: I'm used to leaning on the 3x speed button heavily in most city building games, but in Nova Roma I don't think I've even done it once—there's always something going on and no time to spare. Nova Roma is entering early access this week on Steam, but what's there so far already feels pretty good to me.