A Legionary's Life
A Legionary's Life lets you play as a Roman soldier during the years of the Second Punic War and beyond. Rise up through the ranks and win prestigious awards or just focus on making it home in one piece; it's up to you.
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Never Second in Rome on Steam
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Never Second in Rome is a turn-based historical game with RPG and management elements. You are a Roman centurion in the army of Julius Caesar. You will control both your character and the unit under his command.
Never Second in Rome is a rome, historical and turn-based game
developed and published by Alessandro Roberti.
Released on May 05th 2026 is available on Windows, Steam Deck and Steam Machine.
It has received 312 reviews of which 236 were positive and 76 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.1 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 12.79€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified Never Second in Rome into these genres:
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System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS *: Windows 7 SP1+
- Processor: x64 architecture with SSE2 instruction set support
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: DX10, DX11, DX12 capable GPUs
- Storage: 500 MB available space
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User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
The gameplay loop we had in the first game where you died and then retried while being slightly better is gone. The campaign is a lot longer and has considerably less RNG. The decisions you make while choosing what to train follow you for a long time. I ended up not liking the cohort combat. As you get deeper into the game, there are battles that feel like they drag on for way too long and that barely anything is happening, and that nothing you do makes any difference. In a battle where you have to destroy an army of 2400 cohesion, it is disheartening to only do 10 damage per turn. Some of the individual fights feel the same, where the enemy turtles into a defensive position over and over again, basically wasting your time until cohort combat begins again for more not much of anything. The aspects that make me recommend this game are the historical ones. I greatly enjoyed the setting of this game and being a centurion makes a lot more sense to keep you closer to some very important historical figures you will meet. I look forward to the dev's next project.
For $13 this is an excellent game if you're a fan of Roman history. The creator clearly did a lot of research before making this game, because I've never seen any other historical game accurately reflect how combat actually (likely) worked in the ancient world (i.e with phases of clashing and recovering). Similar to the first game (Legionary's Life) you go through the story/career of a soldier during a pivotal moment in Roman history. It's really fun getting the story bit by bit from your character's perspective while having the knowledge of how things happened in history. I think if you enjoyed Legionary's Life you'll most likely enjoy this game. However, this game has one massive flaw in my opinion--the individual combat. The combat is fun. It's very strategic and once you figure it out and train up your character you'll have a blast carving through your foes. The problem is that you're not just doing it occasionally or frequently, you're doing it very possibly a dozen times or more for each battle. I might have been fine with fighting so frequently if I was just controlling my character, but you also have to control the character of many of your subordinates during battle. I really don't understand that design choice. First, it completely breaks the immersion which this game otherwise tries hard to maintain. I'm playing my character's career, why am I inhabiting the body of someone else? Second, the tedium becomes overwhelming. in almost all of the combats you do it will be for a very short duration and will lead to no significant outcome. You might take a small hit, you might land a small hit, or more likely you'll both miss and nothing will happen. After a while it becomes so overwhelmingly boring and flat out annoying to have to do this over and over and over again in battles. Sure you'll have times when you're desperately trying to stay alive against an overwhelming enemy, or maybe you're decisively beating the enemy and you're chopping them up, but those moments are few and far in between. To sum it up, I really enjoy combat when I'm playing my character that I've trained up over the course of the game. I really hate it when I'm forced to play Joe Schmo #8 doing meaningless combat #13 of the indecisive clash #6. Please add an option to simulate combat not involving our own character. If you let us watch it that would be even better (imagine being on edge wondering whether your subordinate is going to wind up dead?).
The game is good. Very good. Especially good if you like strategy-simulations that border on autistic detail. If you liked A Legionary's Life, you'll probably enjoy it. It's hard to avoid comparisons with the previous title, so I'll share some thoughts. While Never Second in Rome is an improvement in terms of strategic depth (random rolls that can feel really bad notwithstanding), I feel that it is overall more of a side-grade, than a straight-up upgrade. The added complexity of leading a century is appreciated, but I feel that something is lost at the same time: the feeling of familiarity and intimacy with a single character as you follow him through the years. The short single battles during army clashes have the taste of procedurality about them that I didn't like as much as curated duels, and can bog down the gameplay beats in ways that just weren't there in a Legionary's Life. And while it's cool to have your own notable legionaries to command, them being generated, and not hand-crafted characters lessens the impact of it somewhat, even more so when you switch legions three times, the attention now being distributed across three sets of generated characters. These factors hinder you becoming attached to your men as you could have, had they have been hand-made. I feel that Alessandro (the dev) is at his best in historical narrative, and while the systemic drive of the game is very nice, I found myself coming back to his titles mostly due to the narrative. I feel like I would gladly play a DLC campaign for A Legionary's Life that focuses more narrowly on a single character than another campaign of Never Second in Rome. But don't let that deter you from trying this title. Anyway, game is gud, play it.
I played a Legionary's Life a bunch on GOG and there are some marked differences in this game compared to that. The biggest and I believe worse change is the fact that Iron Man mode is disabled until you play through the game once. In both games there are some meta elements to it in the sense that the further and better you do on an ironman run the more points you can award to your next character. I was able to go through many runs on a Legionary's life as it is a much shorter game then this. However one playthrough of this game took me about 20 hours, and since you cannot do it in ironman mode assuming you want to replay the game that entire playthrough was wasted time in a meta sense. The second worst part of the game is your century's. You see, you are able to achieve higher ranks in this game based on three criteria. Your Valor, How much Caesar likes you and your century's Valor. Your valor doesn't reset, Caesar's Valor doesn't Reset but your century's value resets two times during the game due to you being assigned to different companies. This means that no matter how well your character does on an individual level or how pivotal a role his company plays on the battlefield, because your Century's didn't personally kill anyone or hurt the enemy in combat you are held back from higher ranks. This as a game mechanic is incredibly frustrating, especially during the second go around where you are handed fresh recruits so the Century's you are relying upon to rise up in ranks are fresh compared to their more veteran opponents. This segway's nicely into battles, compared to the first game where it is just you versus one or more opponents on a personal level this game has you commanding an army during battles. It is a pretty simple system, determine how hard you want to push the enemy and manage your fatigue and imbalance. Going harder at the enemy increases your imbalance while being cautious decreases it. Sometimes you have fights on an individual level with either your character or your century's during this at which point you have a 5 turn battle with your opponent, which is shorter then the prior game's standard of 20. You are not allowed to skip your own characters fights but are able to sometimes skip your century's. However you are extremely disincentivized from skipping any fight because this are how your century's gain valor and that is the bottleneck in your ranks. This leads to you going through the motions of the battle every time because not only do you need the valor but if you are able to kill the enemy they take 100 damage to their Cohesion. Onto the battle system itself there is some pain points there as well. There we two fights in particular that I found extremely annoying. One was a fight with Atrebatian Axemen, I had a base determination of 150 while they had 155. I had gotten their determination to 0, front to 0, their Cohesion low and had killed some of their guys as well. No matter what once a round ended and a new round started the determinations reset and they ended up with a higher determination then me again. In one of the fights one of my century's faced an opponent that was already collapsing from fatigue. Naturally this allowed my century to practically kill him instantly but if this is what they are looking like they should not have the determination to keep facing me at like they did. I was outplaying them in every way and yet there they were. The second is that there are breaks after so many turns in a fight before you start fighting again, this on paper can be useful to restore cohesion to your century and sometimes boost moral. However most of the time my enemy benefitted from it much more then I did since I was just topping off what little Cohesion I did lose. God forbid there is a lull in the fighting because while you are sitting there twiddling your thumbs with nothing to do your enemy is reconstituting itself while you watch. There was a Battle shortly after I was once again assigned to a new unit and all of my century's valor was reset where I was up against a strong opponent. It was extremely hard to keep this opponents Cohesion down but sometimes my character got in a fight where he was able to do Cohesion damage by killing an opponent. However every time in that fight after their Cohesion took just that bit of damage there was a lull in the fighting where they got everything back while I could do nothing about it. If I recall correctly this was the first fight I genuinely lost since I was unable to meet the primary objective. When you are not fighting or marching around the world you are at camp training. How this works is you set what points you want to allocate where and those are trained, one set for you and one set for the men under your command. This seems like an interesting system at first glance but once I got the training regime set to how I wanted it I never really touched it again for the rest of the game. For your Century's you are able to assign "specializations", what this does is it sets to whatever skill you prioritized to progress 20% faster while all the other skills you could have picked but didn't progress 10% slower. There are 7 skills you can select, this means that for a bonus of 20% to one skill you receive a collective penalty of -60%, -10% to each other skill. Naturally I didn't specialize any of my Century's and let them progress at the usual rate. So if you don't need to actively manage the training of you or your men, what is there to do? The Answer is events and they are few and far between. You spend the turns training clicking the progress button as your men slowly get better waiting for something to happen and sometimes (rarely) an event happens. You want to know what the most common event I got was? It was an "event" telling me that my men remembered that I don't take bribes, +70 integrity. This single event probably accounted for more then half of all events I ever received during my time playing. Which means the whole downtime system ends up just being tedious. And I think that one word describes this game perfectly, tedious. Despite being a longer game with more systems in it I think at the end of the day I would recommend "A Legionary's Life" over this one. It is just more fun to play. I am going to give this game a positive review and if if dev makes a future game I will probably play that too but for anyone reading that has to decide between the two, just play the previous game instead.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Never Second in Rome is currently priced at 12.79€ on Steam.
No, Never Second in Rome is currently not on sale. You can purchase it for 12.79€ on Steam.
Yes, Never Second in Rome received 236 positive votes out of a total of 312 achieving a rating of 7.11.
😊
Never Second in Rome was developed and published by Alessandro Roberti.
Yes, Never Second in Rome is playable and fully supported on Windows.
No, Never Second in Rome is not playable on MacOS.
No, Never Second in Rome is not playable on Linux.
Yes, Never Second in Rome is playable on Steam Deck, though it might require a few minor tweaks. Make sure to check the Steam store page and community feedback on ProtonDB for exact compatibility details.
Yes, Never Second in Rome is playable on Steam Machine, though it might require a few minor tweaks. Make sure to check the Steam store page and community feedback on ProtonDB for exact compatibility details.
No, Never Second in Rome does not support VR.
Never Second in Rome is a single-player game.
No, Never Second in Rome does not currently offer any DLC.
No, Never Second in Rome does not support mods via Steam Workshop.
No, Never Second in Rome does not support Steam Remote Play.
Yes, Never Second in Rome is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for Never Second in Rome.
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Additionally, we incorporate data from the SteamSpy API, which offers insights into game sales and player statistics. This helps us present a comprehensive view of each game's popularity and performance within the gaming community.
Last Updates| Steam data | 16 September 2026 04:11 UTC |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 13 October 2026 11:40 UTC |
| Steam price | 26 October 2026 20:18 UTC |
| Steam reviews | 22 October 2026 08:03 UTC |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Never Second in Rome, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Never Second in Rome
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Never Second in Rome concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Never Second in Rome compatibility
Game modes
Features
Online players
18
Developer
Alessandro Roberti
Publisher
Alessandro Roberti
Release
05 May 2026
Platforms