The Dam You Keep Repairing

Strategy games are usually generous with ancient wonders. You pay the production cost once, a monument slides onto the tile, a bonus attaches itself to your empire, and the thing never troubles you again. Total War took the Great Dam of Marib and did the opposite. In two separate games it made the dam the single best building in southern Arabia — and then attached a bill to it that never stops arriving.

The Empires of Sand pack, released for Total War: Attila in 2015, hands you Himyar: a wealthy, camel-riding Arabian kingdom starting in 395 CE with the Ma’rib Dam as its unique capital building. Keep it sound and it does what the real one did, lifting fertility in its province and pushing farm and herd income across the entire faction. Then the events start. Creative Assembly’s own description is blunt about the loop: “The Marib Dam was an engineering marvel of the ancient world, though it was famously breached… players will periodically be presented with options to make repairs. Leaving the dam untended brings the risk of floods, and repair is costly – however, in good working order, the dam can bring a powerful series of benefits.” It is one of the few buildings in the series that can go wrong on its own, and the one thing the game will not let you do is call it finished. Better still, the same pack ships the consequence: the Tanukhids, another playable faction, are written as refugees who “migrated north after one of the Ma’rib dam’s many floods, which devastated their homeland.” Somebody else’s maintenance failure is your campaign start.

Three years later, ROME II’s Desert Kingdoms pack rolled the clock back several centuries and gave the dam to the people who actually built it. Play Saba and you begin the campaign already owning it — the Great Dam of Ma’rib sits in its own slot at Marib, a masonry wall with a wedge of blue water piled behind it, granting faction-wide bonuses to agriculture and fertility. It can be upgraded through technology. It also, in the publisher’s own phrasing, “requires upkeep to maintain.” The Sabaeans get the good version of the deal, and still pay rent on it.

Which is, unusually for a game mechanic, more or less the truth. The real dam was never a monument; it was a subscription. Sabaean and then Himyarite rulers carved inscription after inscription commemorating repairs, heightenings, and rebuilds across more than a thousand years, and the breaches recorded in the 5th and 6th centuries CE were survivable right up until they weren’t. What finally killed it around 570 CE was not a flood beyond ancient engineering. It was a kingdom that ran out of the money, and the reasons, to keep clicking repair. A Total War campaign lasts a couple of hundred turns. Marib’s engineers held the same event at bay for fourteen centuries.