Total War: ROME II - Emperor Edition Reviews

Nice graphics and large scale battles, what's not to like?! Huge replayable value too with other factions.

Can't recommend this game anymore even with 600+ hours attached to it due to terrible tech support and CA just being terrible. reinstalled the game recently to scratch the itch and game wont even start anymore, hit play, hit play on the launcher, and nothing. Tried everything to get it to work. Spent more time configuring files than it takes to choose a faction and do your first 10 turns. If this ever gets fixed I'll change my review, but highly doubt it ever will get changed. CA you ruined such a great franchise.

It took me around 20 hours to gain some understanding of the campaign mechanics. While the battles are relatively simple to get (and I was familiar with the TW series), I can't say the same about managing your empire - the poor UI plays a role here as well. The DEI mod adds some layers of complexity too. Watching some tutorials was pivotal in this process. In short, what an amazing game! Forget about the vanilla and go straight to the DEI mod. All my comments here are based on the DEI mod. You won't build your empire with decisive battles in a few turns. The First Punic war took 60 years and the DEI mod seems to be dimensioned to replicate the same pace of developments. The battles are not super tactical. I missed more complex maps, where you can explore the geography in your favor (sometimes you can find a path to flank your enemies while keeping your units hidden). But watching the battles unfold is really satisfying. Get it if you can find it on sale!

The base game is excellent, but with the Para Bellum mod collection, it's FANTASTIC if you're into wargaming ancient peoples.

Fundamentally broken Battle system compared to older Total War.

very well done game, co op campaigns can lead to very entertaining nights with a buddy

After 7 years abstaining from this amazing game, I thought I'd pick it up again, but sadly I became the victim of the "loading screen bug" lottery. I may come back in another 7 years.

Rome II was a mixed bag when it released in 2013 because not only was it graphically more demanding than Shogun II (and looked bad if not run on the highest settings & still had jaggies at 1080p), but even gameplaywise, was a product of its time, when more complex campaign strategy games from Paradox Interactive were taking off, so back then Creative Assembly told themselves, our consumers have become big boys, let’s give them a complex game that will make the mechanics of previous Total War games look like child’s play. So let’s first talk about the campaign map's changes. But I’ll be honest, every TW game has had an overhaul of its campaign map mechanics. Where Rome I had a simple system of the world map divided into provinces with each having a province capital with the same build list, and Medieval II splitting these into a City type & Castle type, while Empire, Napoleon & Shogun II distributed some of their buildings over the province itself on the campaign map in the form of smaller settlements like farms and mines that could be pillaged by enemy armies, in Rome II the buildings are all back inside the cities again, but the world map is divided into historical provinces (like “Italia”), and each province can consist of upto 4 regions. Each region has a city, but only the biggest city in each province, already predetermined at the start of the game, is walled, while the rest aren’t. Furthermore, while wealth is unique to every region, happiness, slaves & culture % are averaged for the entire province as a summation of activity in ALL regions of that province, i.e even unrest/temples from neighboring regions controlled by other factions! Because previous TW games had been plagued by a plethora of individual military units moving about on the campaign map, especially AI units that made some factions’ turns particularly long, the next departure from previous TW games is that in Rome II, you cant recruit units in cities, nor move them about on the campaign map. Instead, both are done on stacks led by generals. This had been sort of introduced in Empire TW and beyond already, but it was a different system where the unit would still get recruited at the city and then march all the way across the campaign map to your general, taking several turns depending on how far away he was. In Rome 2, the units automatically appear in the general’s army next turn, and you can also raise more units at a time than in previous TW games. Same regarding the navy. Instead of built at a port, you have to first enlist an admiral and can then recruit more ships through him. What you can recruit is determined by the level of military building/port in the region they are in. But buildings are just small icons. You have an upper limit on how many generals/stacks you can appoint based on your overall faction strength. This also means that in order to swap units, two of your stacks/generals have to meet face-to-face rather than send each other units across a distance, thereby wasting movement as you have to both meet up in one spot. Merging two of the same, partially depleted troops has been made harder in that you can’t drag the unit card and drop it onto the other like in previous TW games, but have to select both (using ctrl) and only then does the merge option turn from grey to available. Similarly, armies and fleets also cant just raid enemy land and sea trade routes by right clicking on them on the campaign map, but must set their “stance” to raiding, that limits their movement and such. On the pro side, other movement stances are available, like forced march that gives you a big movement bonus at the expense of line of sight, morale and any attack automatically becoming an ambush. This new system also means you cant just quickly raise an army when you see the AI approaching one of your cities with the intent on taking it, unless you purposely keep a spare general ready to be deployed anywhere on the map. Otherwise, if all your generals are out conquering somewhere else on the campaign map, your cities will have to rely on their own garrison they generate as was introduced with Empire TW and beyond. Number and quality of the garrison is based on the level of the main administrative building of that province, supplemented by the military building/dock. While such things were easier to see on the campaign maps of previous TW games in the form of grey blips, garrison size is a mere footnote found in the description of Rome II’s settlement buildings, so you have to do some careful reading. In general there is more reading in Rome II and things feel less intuitive compared to previous TW games. Rome II is also known for its amphibious battles, i.e. where ships full of soldiers come to also take part in a land battle and have cool disembarking mechanics, whereby your units jump off their ship and charge into battle, and you can choose on which part of the coastline the ship will beach. Naval battles on the other hand, are atrocious (if you don’t know what you’re doing) compared to the fine wine that was Empire/Napoleon and decent mediocrity that was Shogun 2. In Rome II’s naval battles, ramming is the name of the game as it is completely overpowered, turning certain ships into bumpercars you need to micromanage – as often a single ram is enough to break up an entire enemy ship packed with soldiers and make everyone drown. Okay, this may have been a transport ship but still. Speaking of, your land armies can now march into water and are converted into a fleet of transport ships. However, they still need a proper navy as escort, because otherwise they are very vulnerable to drowning by ramming and should not be used for either boarding actions, or ranged exchanges due to their weak hulls. The “action camera” that was introduced Empire TW onward by pressing the ‘insert’ key is now a button found on the lower left of the battle map and it now also allows you to look around by moving the mouse and return to the main camera by pressing Esc. The other major improvement over previous TW titles are cities during battle. While they didn’t exist at all in Empire and Napoleon and were the generic japanese castle with 1, 2 or 3 terraces in Shogun II, in Rome II each city feels like it was hand crafted by the devs. Some cities for example are at the foot of a mountain with their city walls ending at the slope of the mountain, while others are at the coast. Nothing looks generic or repetitive, each has a different layout. However, the AI doesn’t use the streets to its advantage or defend central squares. You don’t even win if you take these points (as they only grant a morale bonus to the attacker and losing them a penalty to the defender) and instead have to rout the entire garrison that just loiters at the city’s edge, unless it’s the walled province capital which they do a better job of defending. Then there’s the politics section in the game. If you play as Rome, you start as a republic (and can later switch to an empire) with a senate where each “party” is an influential house/family: Julia, Junia, Cornelia, Papiria etc., with differing amount of seats in the senate that is based on gravitas. No matter your faction family pick, each of your starting characters (2 generals and 1 admiral) is of a different family and along with other stats like ambition or zeal, each has gravitas, which is a counter that adds to their family's influence each turn. The more experience your generals gain, the more their gravitas. Your goal is to keep a balance of influence in the senate. If one family grows too powerful, there will be civil war and your united empire will break apart. You can balance influence between the families by having your family members (like your general's wife) do other families a favor to increase that family’s loyalty to yours, or spread rumors to lose gravitas, or assassinate characters of that family which play no role on the campaign map. Overall, a complex game!

I've tried a few other Total War games and I enjoy strategy games. With a couple of tweaks from the in-house mod manager I will be pouring hundreds of more hours into this game steadily until I find a strategy game more fun than this. It's sleek, accessible, easy to set up and engaging. The custom battle mode alone has kept me going for years because of the Rubik's cube assortment of different battles you can create. It's the best strategy sandbox I've found on the market and the flavour of autism I have means watching thousands of soldiers running, fighting and charging around random areas of Europe will NEVER get old. This is the Total War game I would recommend for anyone wanting to kick off any affair with the series. The controls are the most intuitive I've used, the battles are engaging and the single-player has the 'one more turn' spell baked right into it. I'd recommend this to anyone with even just a flickering interest in strategy or if they have the same flavour of autism I clearly have...

To make it perfect, I disable civil wars. It takes all your resources to fight the barbarians. I don't like killing off my army every hour or two. I have tried to maintain their loyalty, but it takes lots of effort out of the game play. So get a mod to make it less of a headache. I will play 426 more hours of this, until Rome total war 3 is released. As a Latin Teacher, I approve of this game.