Levelling your armies is one of the worst culprits. The real problem is that Rome II has mechanics that offer the illusion of depth, but come undone in practice. As your empire expands you'll be auto-resolving at least five or six of these battles every turn, where the opponent simply has no chance of winning.
These spawn randomly and will fixate upon a town and attack it every turn, despite the garrison being easily able to hold them off. A dedicated fishing port might become so unpleasant a place to live that the peasants revolt.Īll of these sound like interesting factors, but their implementation is poor. Families within your provinces will cause problems, such as attempting to assassinate their rivals. Alongside this you'll be researching new technologies to enhance your civil and military infrastructure, and this side of Rome II makes a lot of sense.īut there are further layers. Photograph: Creative Assembly/Segaĭeveloping provinces is simple: build up a town's military capabilities and advanced troops can be recruited, or develop its farming and fishing infrastructure to increase your growing empire's food and resources. On the higher settings it looks outstanding, but as soon as you go lower all of the colour bleeds out. The colour palette for Rome II scales really badly. The previous entry in the Total War series, Shogun II, streamlined its map micromanagement beautifully, but in Rome II there are countless new elements to consider, not all of which are welcome additions. This aspect of Rome II plays out like Civilization-lite. Each province is a loose collection of four cities, one of which is a capital with walls – which means outlying settlements can be attacked relatively easily, but a faction's home base must be besieged and worn down. The first is turn-based strategic jostling where you manage provinces, muster armies and compete or co-operate with countless other factions. The campaign map is gigantic, encompassing all of Europe and a decent portion of north Africa, and Rome II divides neatly between overarching management of your territory and up-close engagement on the battlefield. Will you take Hannibal's Carthage to victory, expand relentlessly as one of several Roman families, or rewrite history as the Gauls? After an extended prologue, during which you control the Roman empire while crushing some feeble Samnite opposition, the campaign lets you choose from nine starting factions and then try to take over the ancient world. There are a lot of ways to play Rome II, which may be one of its underlying problems, but the meat of the game is in campaign mode. In a game about conquest and battles, after all, history offers no finer subject than the Roman empire.
A ve readers – those of you who bought Total War: Rome II, I salute you! My anticipation for this game could not be contained the latest in developer Creative Assembly's Total War series, Rome II is also the long-awaited sequel to its most beloved entry and bears no small expectation.