Civilization type game

Hey folks! I'll be designing and developing a simulation of the Roman invasion of Britain for my project due in June and I was wondering if you folks had any suggestions for tutorials that would help me develop a tile based map game. Simply put I want to have a game that allows combat through the conquest of squares much like civilization. I might do hexagons but I believe squares will be much easier. Do you have any suggestions on how I might get started developing such a game? Do you know of any tutorials that are similar to what I want to produce? and do you have any tips about useful features I will need to use. Not only do I want to include combat in the game but also the use of towns/settlements in the game. I don't really want a economy I just want to have towns that the player can interact with.
I plan to do it in AS2 as I have some experience in this language already. In case anyone is interested the goal of the project is to test whether or not narration in games can provide educational content. I've done a fairly simple application in flash before but I'm pretty much a newbie.:smoov:

thanks for reading.