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Just one more turn, THEN I'll go to bed!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 16 / 20
Date: February 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Just one more turn, THEN I'll go to bed

If you are like me, this something you'll be saying often and repeatedly (frequently several times in a row) when playing Rome: Total War. This game is hideously addictive.

In my University days I nearly failed my doctorate because of a game called Civilization II. I have sought far and wide for a game that rivals Civ2 for the depths of gaming addiction - a game where I couldn't bring myself to actually click menu, save, quit and go to bed - because I had so many things happening, so many strategies in mid-flight, rebellions needing to be quelled, belligerent neighbours to be taught lessons, troops stuck in the middle of a sea crossing with the enemy's navy lurking.

For a while I tried real-time strategies, but frankly, I suck at them. I love nothing better than sending an army of heavy cavalry or a phalanx or two at an enemy stronghold, only to discover that another enemy has launched an attack on my base while my workers sit around and do nothing because I have forgotten to assign them tasks, and my archers stand there like morons while the city is being sacked right behind them. And so I deal with the domestic problem, and return to my boys on the front, only to find the enemy priests have converted them (I really hate that) or they have run off into the wilderness chasing after some elusive but inconsequential peasant.

In short, I love the battles, but hate the real-time headaches. I like to really think out my strategies, look at the whole map and plan my next moves, shore up my economy and make sure my cities are thriving, without constantly having to worry about fifty things going on at once. Thus Rome: Total War is the ultimate for me. It has all the nuances and strategic elements of the turn-based strategy like Civ2, with the real-time action of something like Rise of Nations (only 50 times more realistic). The great thing is, if you don't want to, you don't have to fight the battles either - these can be automatically resolved for you (often with less casualties than in my own incompetent hands!) - but the battles are excellent fun. There's nothing like seeing a 30-strong regiment of heavy cavalry ploughing into the side of a Spartan Phalanx, or the legionary cohorts marching fearlessly into a head-on horde of charging barbarians.

This game is well worth shelling out for. It's well worth every cent. And you will need something with this much depth to it after you are fired for turning up to work every day after only 3-4 hours sleep. Be warned!

The RTS that could have been Emperor of RTS.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 17 / 22
Date: April 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

When I think of Rome Total War I think of many things like incomplete, unbalanced, full of bugs, and wasnt worth my 50 dollars. CA managed to deliver a slap in the face to every veteran fan of the Total War series and a slap to every other fresh new fan. Kids please save up your money for game developers who actually communicate with their fans and that actually clean up the mess they left. CA refuses to acknowledge the mess they left even though their two patches clean up some of it it also created more bugs to clean up.

great game IF they'd fix the bugs and the AI

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 18 / 24
Date: April 07, 2005
Author: Amazon User

First time I played RTW I thought that was the best game I had ever played, the graphics are stunning, the game play amazing and the strategy and tactical aspect very fun...
So why the 1 star?
Well as you progress through the game you come to realize that the AI is severely flawed, this combined with severe bugs make the game impossible to lose against.
There is an infamous bug with loading games which make the AI reevaluate incorrectly their situation and lift all sieges. If you play long enough and don't reload you will still find the AI is hopeless at sieging your cities, as soon as you've built walls the AI won't be able to capture your city even with siege engines...
Hopefully the creators of the game will some day decide to fix those problems but apparently they have a 2 patch policy only and those patches have already been released without solving those problems...

start wearing diapers and buy your girlfirend more stuff after you buy this game, trust me, they're both necessary!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 13 / 15
Date: August 29, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I got Rome:Total War [hereafter refered to as rtw] the week it came out, late in september last year. I got home at about eleven, from going somewhere, i don't remember, it's not important. What is important is that i played this game until five in the morning, then woke up at ten to keep playing it. It's that good.

You ought to start out with the Tutorial Campaign, which teaches you the basics of the campaign map and fighting battles. The graphics for the campaign map and battles are superb, really.

Well, before I continue, I should explain more about the system. Players start on the Campaign map, where you control cites and provinces, and can build buildings, recruit units, set tax rates, attack and conquer armies and provinces. This system is detailed to the point of laberinthine complexity. Fore example, at least ten factors can influence the population growth rate, the annual income, and the happiness, or 'public order' of a city.

You can construct a myriad of buildings in each province, such as walls, to augment the defensive capibilities of the city, Barracks, which allow the recruitment of better troops, and roads, which allow armies and other units to move further along them, and increase trade income.

One has to start out as one of the three available Roman factions: the Julii, the Brutii, and the Scipii. Each of these factions controls different cites, and have different natural enemies. The Julii, for example, will find themselves fighting mostly with the Gauls. These tree factions, or families, are allied with each other, and with a fourth faction, known only as SPQR [senatus populusque Romanus, or the senate and people of Rome], who controlls Rome alone. You'll soon find, however, that they pretty much control your lives, too.

Before I ramble about the Senate, I should explain about family members. Your faction is lead by a pater familias, the male head of your particular family. He has sons, who serve as generals along with him, and get married to have children of their own, and daughters, who can marry other men, who will enter the family, and become generals as well. You can also reward a valourous captain [the commander of an army when it is not lead by a general] with membership in your family, and bribe foreign generals with diplomats to join your family.

The Senate is extremely well integrated into the game. Most prominatley, they assign you missions, such as to take a province, blockade a port, or achieve some sort of diplomatic goal. But don't dispair: the Senate will give you some sort of perk for doing their bidding, be it denarii [money], an advanced unit, or priority appointment for an office. And, of course, it'll improve your standing with the Senate, but more of that a bit later. Anyway, yes, the Senate also assigns several offices to members of each Roman faction [including their own]. I won't go into details about these offices, except that some are obviously more prestigious than others, and give bonuses to the attributes of the family members who hold them.

Ok, well, anyway, you have a standing with both the Senate, and the People. At the start, your standing with the Senate is rather high, and the average citizen on the street hates your guts. Obeying the Senate improves your standing with them, whilst military conquests, and disobeying the Senate improves your standing with the people. If the Senate starts to dislike you, they'll start making more difficult demands of you, setting stricter time limits, and simply refraning from punishing you if you suceed. If you conquer enough provinces the Senate may demand the suicide of your faction leader, or you will be outlawed. If you refuse, the Senate will outlaw you, and the other families will declare war on you. Your next step is to take Rome, making yourself Imperator [emperor].

All this will take a while, of course. And after you beat the campaign as a Roman, you're allowed to play as many other factions, including barbarians, Greeks, and Egyptians.

Well, yes, this review is long, but I still have to discuss the battles. Whenever one of your armies encounters an enemy army, or attacks a city, you can either have the computer take all factory into consideration and automatically resolve the battle. Or, you can take the more fun option, and fight it yourself. The game goes to the battlefield mode, where the geographical features of the area where the battle's taking place will be taken into consideration. Your general [or captain] will open the battle with a speech to his troops, where he'll highlight such things as the numerical balance of forces, the makeup of each army, and your chances. You'll then be allowed to position your troops.

The battles themselves can go any way. Legionaries throw amor-piercing javelins known as pila before charging and can enter the famous testudo formation, cavalry can form wedges, amd archers can fire flaming arrows. The battlefield physics are great, too, men can be killed by falling stone from damaged walls, men go flying if hit by a cavlary charge or elephants, and men fighting downhill will have significant advantages.

Anyway, the graphics of the whole game are stunning, you'll find yourself hooked in mere hours. This is why I made my two suggestions. Trust me, as a veteran of both other Total War games, rtw is the best yet, graphics aside. Its level of detail is simply amazing, soon you'll find yourself thinking about what the senate'll think of you going out to the movies. Well, maybe not quite that involved, but trust me, you'll be hooked. If you have a good enough computer, this game is an absolute must!

One of the Best

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 13 / 15
Date: October 09, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I would have to say I am very impressed with Rome: Total War. I have been playing it now since it first came out and it is still amazing. If you are a fan of the Civilization series, you should switch to Rome: Total War. It blows any civ game out of the water and is by far the best in the Total War Series. It's fun to play and has great replayability value as you can be a number of different factions during the campaign mode or just choose to fight single battles. From managing your individual cities to the Real Time battles, every aspect of this game will make you hooked on it. Not since the Age of Empires series have I been this addicted to this type of game.

Rome: Total Addiction

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 10 / 10
Date: September 20, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Maybe going straight from being a Shogun junkie to this game skews my perception a little, but WOW! This game finally represents the transition between strategic map gaming and tactical battle gaming I've always wanted to see. Never in Shogun, and not even in Medieval from what I saw, did the strategic map matter so much as it does in this game. Because it is the first of its kind to attempt this, it does have some drawbacks, but the overall game play is vastly improved over its predecessors.

Pros:
-when you attack an army on the strategy map, the terrain around you becomes the tactical battle map. This means that simply having an army in a territory does not necessarily grant you a good defense. Now you must consider whether your army is in a tactically vulnerable position. Attacking, too, is now no longer a matter of simple numbers and attrition. Those guarding a mountain pass that might be unassailable can now be outmaneuvered.
-what you do to the city on the battle map matters. Destroy a wall when attacking, and you will have to repair it. Fight hard in the streets and the nearby buildings can take collateral damage, which must also be repaired upon returning to the strategy map. And what you build in the strategy map appears in the battle map. This is not exactly new, since Medieval introduced this concept to the TW series, but Rome uses it better.
-men can fight on top of the walls. Consider yourself warned.
-cavalry/elephant charges are better than ever. Watch your heavy cavalry charge barbarian peasants and you'll be pleasantly surprised at the results. Watch your enemy charge his elephants at your heavy infantry and you'll need a few moments to regain your composure. And outflanking an enemy finally has real results, especially when charged by mounted units from behind.

Cons:
-naval battles are auto-resolved. This is a minor problem, but one I'd like to see future games tackle. I despise having the computer decide the outcome of my naval battles. It's a personal preference, but I doubt I'm alone there.
-disgustingly bad AI for your generals. Whenever you have a general lead reinforcements into a battle, he suddenly thinks he's Achilles a la Troy. He charges in, sometimes well before you can get there, regardless of numbers, troop placements, terrain, etc. Always avoid having ANY general lead your reinforcements unless you don't like him.
-only Roman factions can build highways. Granted, Romans did it first and best, historically, but that should not exclude others from being able to learn how to do it, too. A penalty applied to acquiring this for other factions might have been a better way to go.

There are others (pros and cons), but these are the ones I feel are worth mentioning. Mostly, the game has become my new addiction. The other factions are fun and interesting, but I still prefer the Romans, particularly the Brutii. You have to play a Roman faction first to unlock the other factions, but this is not as big an obstacle as I first thought (and there are probably cheats to get around that anyway). Regardless, this game is one of my very favorites, and will be for a long time.

By the way, there are a lot of reviews here that mention a save/reload glitch. For my part, I have never seen this occur. Just my two cents.

Amazing Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 14 / 17
Date: November 18, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Over the years I have played a number of RTS games such as this but RTW has to be the absolute best so far.

The graphics and attention to detail are incredible and the gaming system is outstanding. From the novice to the hardcore gamer, everyone will enjoy this program.

Once of the main things I really like about the game is the ease with which you can be up and playing the game without having to spend countless hours reading a complex game manual and more hours getting "slaughtered" learning to play.

The game includes a very good tutorial scenario that takes you step by step through the game play system. After that, you can be up and succssfully commanding your armies in short order.

To truly and fully enjoy the game does require some practice and getting used to managing your empire, however, the system is not overly complicated and if you don't want to attend to all the mundane details of administering your cities, simply turn on the "automanage" feature and continue with your conquests.

The automanage system does a fair job of keeping your cities running and the local population happy, however, from time to time, it will be necessary to intervene in the administration of some of your cities to get the best results or order them to build specific units. The only thing in this area I think they could have done better or differently is to make it possible to to manually administer cities that do not have a governor. The way it works now is if a city does not have a governor, i.e. one of your royal family members, physically in the city, the city defaults to "automanage" and you cannot order the city to build specific buildings or units, you can only tell the city what focus you want it to work towards, i.e. military growth, cultural growth, financial, etc. Otherwise it's a good AI system.

I couldn't find many negatives with the game or the play system other than some minor shortcomings mentioned in other reviews so overall I give this RTW a well deserved 5-Stars!

On the hardware side, I highly recommend upgrading your video card to get full enjoyment from the game. When I first installed the game, the graphics card in my PC was a 64mb
Ge-Force 420 MX and it was struggling to keep up, so I upgraded to a Radeon 9550 256mb card and the game now runs flawlessly. Having the more powerful card allowed greater resolution in the game and full use of all the special effects and full character/object rendering.

Anyway, enough for now, if you don't already own this game, this is a must have for the strategy and war game buffs. If you want a bloody, mindless, hack and slash game, this is probably not for you although there is plenty of action, death and mayhem for all.

Thanks,

Rick

How a great game can be a big disappointment

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 16 / 21
Date: April 07, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I was soooooo close to give this game 5 stars, until I realized the infamous save/load bug. The bug is a HUGE gamebreaker, and it really takes a lot of fun out of the game. In short, the bug makes the AI make absolutely silly decisions (lift siges, stand and do nothing for several turns, etc). This is an serious obstacle, as it makes the AI very weak, as their planning and strategies are reset every time you load the game. You can never enjoy the game fully, because you know that you have won the game on the basis of a crippled opponent.

It is an even bigger disappointment to witness the support. They do not answer your question and they refuse to acknowledge the above mentioned bug. They do not give ANY reasonable arguments for their case regarding the bug, they just try to cover their bags.

If it wasn't for the two issues mentioned above, this game would have have been great. I could live with bad support, had the game not been bugged. But the save/load bug is REALLY a gamebreaker........

Very Buggy

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 16 / 21
Date: April 09, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game is very buggy. Even with the so called 1.1 patch and the newest 1.2 patch there are still two many bugs to list. The game can be fun at times but the amount of bugs ruins the entire experiance. I have stopped playing this game months ago and I wouldn't recomend this game to anyone, until there another patch release.

Disappointing

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 16 / 21
Date: April 10, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Too bad. Rome Total War has as much potential as any game but has fallen short because of the developers reluctance to support it. Although graphics are amazing, gameplay is a let down because of very poor ai and several bugs that have not been addressed. Wait for the expansion before you buy...

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