Total War: ROME II - Caesar in Gaul Campaign Pack DLC

Get on sale. While there are some new added units there could have been a little bit more to justify the price. The narrative is alright at best and could have used some tweaks during mid campaign during the crisis. It's always fun to play as Caesar and I found that aspect alone made this worth the purchase. Only recommended for die hard total war fans.

If I remember correctly, Caesar in Gaul was Rome II’s first campaign DLC released just 3 months after the game’s bug-ridden launch in September 2013, so almost a year before the game's rebranding as the Emperor edition had ironed out many of the bugs (a process that continued until 2018 when the game got its last update and campaign DLC; Rise of the Republic). Nevertheless, this first DLC has held up well despite all the allegedly “better ones” that followed. To summarize in broad strokes: if you loved storming beaches via amphibious landings, get the Wrath of Sparta DLC. If you equally loved sea and land combat and didn’t mind a campaign map that was big enough to start resembling a merely zoomed in version of the Grand Campaign’s western half rather than having its own, distinct character, get the Hannibal at the Gates DLC. But if you absolutely hated naval warfare in Rome II, get Caesar in Gaul, because this is a land battle player’s dream DLC: A large inland map of Gaul bordered by Belgica, Germania’s Silva Nigra (Black Forest), the western Alps and the Po-Valley of northern Italy with a bit of Britannia’s southern coastline thrown in at the very north, this campaign map is filled to the brim with some 60 landlocked regions and 20 provinces where the Rome II Grand Campaign only had around 15 regions condensed into 6.5 Provinces for this part of the world. Each of the 4 main factions (Rome, Arverni, Suebi and Nervii) is led by an immortal general (Cesar, Vercingetorix, Ariovistus and Boduognatus, respectively – all of them, not just the first two, were real people who once lived) and where in the Grand Campaign you had a red military and a blue civil tech tree, here you have a red tech tree where you can do free research but which takes several turns per tech to complete just as in the main campaign, while the blue tech tree is reserved for a new “1 turn of research” type of techs that cost a lot of gold to research, each tier more expensive than the previous one. The advantage is the tech will be ready by next turn, allowing you to reap its benefits quickly and thus strategize better than selecting a tech for some need or idea you had which, once it gets researched after 4-6 turns, you might no longer require in as much urgency (happened to me many times in other campaigns). There’s plenty of fun to be had in Caesar in Gaul – you can go the historic route and play it as Rome/Caesar, conquering Gaul province by province from the south and expanding ever northward while beset on all sides by hostile tribes as you pay tribute to Crassus and others back home for political favor, or you can play as Vercingetorix who starts with only one province and has to unite all of Gaul to resist the Roman juggernaut (unfortunately, there is no easteregg village in Armorica where you can brew a potion that lets you yeet Romans across the battlefield), or you can play as the Suebi to re-enact the Cimbri and Teutonic invaders who had crossed the Rhine and spilled into Gaul half a century earlier, pushing the Helvetii ahead of them and looking for plunder amidst the chaos, or as the Belgian Nervii who are close enough to leap across the channel and secure Britannia before Caesar even gets to see the white cliffs of Dover. What I also like, is that the first time you click on a region owned by a new tribe you encounter, a small pop-up panel opens that tells you a bit about the history of that particular tribe, mostly in the form of a quote straight out of Cesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, the memoirs he wrote about his time spent campaigning in Gaul and the various tribes and their customs he encountered. The one thing that I miss is the faction politics panel which has sadly been disabled for this DLC even though it is in all other campaign DLCs. The only things you can do here is promote your generals and send them to help out with food or happiness in a province. You can’t even get them married and don’t have to worry about any rival parties. Still, I recommend this DLC because land-based combat is what Rome II is good at (naval battles are too fast and hectic for my taste) and therefore Caesar in Gaul offers plenty of that.