I am not a big gamer. I'm old. Over 50. When I purchased a new computer recently, wanting to take it for a spin, I asked my son what to do and he told me about Steam. As an ancient history buff (I'm also a writer and have written a novel about the ancient Spartans), I did searches on Greece and Rome and eventurally found Rome 2.

I read all the negative reviews about the launch. Things haven't changed much in the gaming industry. Companies have always rushed their product to market. I imagine after spending years developing a game they end up deep in the hole and pressured by corporations like Sega to push it out - no matter how many problems exist. That's been going on for years. The wise thing to do is to wait. You know there is going to be a patch. Why not let someone else trip over all the bugs? From what I gather, a lot of gamers just can't wait today.

Anyway, I love Rome 2. When I read about the Emperor's Edition having worked out most of the problems, I dove in. It's been a delight. What a great game. It's more addicting that crack. Being able to play so many different factions gives it limitless re-playability. Thus far I've played as the Romans, Spartans, Athenians and Epirus, and have had a blast with each. There is a huge amount of strategy and tactics available on both the campaign map and the battle maps. Placing your armies at choke points in the mountains or at river crossings... putting them in ambush mode... slaughtering 2x or 3x your number of units without getting your hands dirty... it's all so gratifying.

One of the things I've noticed is that I usually end up winning by gaining a technological edge over the computer AI factions. If I can survive the early stages of play, eventually I'll start kicking out armies composed of better units than my opponents. When the autoresolve gives me results I don't like, saying I'm going to lose, or take unexceptable losses, it's fun to take control of your army and lead them on to victory when the oddsmakers are betting against you. Of course, often times you're leading superior units against hordes of untrained spearmen or levies, but occasionally the computer gives you a run for your money and there's nothing like destroyng your opponents Praetorian guard or Oathsworn unit that fights to last man.

Big kudos to the modding community. After playing vanilla R2, I found the Workshop and have been in pure amazement at the products the community has added to the game. The 4x moves per year mod, agent color coding, the new unit mods, and many others deserve effusive praise. I feel like a kid on Christmas morning every time I look in the Workshop, wondering what new toy I'll find under the tree today.

The Bad. I have none. Okay, okay, there are some, but I'm like a newlywed on his honeymoon right now. I don't care if she leaves her panties on the bathroom floor or that the 4x calendar year mod makes agents overpowered. For right now, I'm enjoying the game far too much to complain about a thing.

More civil disobedience in my cities than in Ferguson

This game was literally the worst when they first released it, but after several patches i got better and better and when they released the Emperor edition it became my favourite game. So i recommend this game if you like strategy, but i don't think its worth 54.99€.

I wanted to love Rome II, but couldn't. I wanted to like it,.. to enjoy it,.. I tried for over a year but ultimately it just fell flat.

I've played Total War games since the first Shogun. They've never been perfect, but have always been thoroughly enjoyable and value for money. The following is mainly based on the main campaign as updated for the emperor version, although I did try the emperor campaign but soon gave up.

What is good?:

- The battles are good; after much patching, balancing etc. they are the strongest part of the game, which is rather important considering the nature of the game! Sometimes they can look stunning, and the size is vast.
- There are many, many units, and many playable factions (even without DLC)
- The game is easy to pick up and play, there are no over-fiddly interfaces
- The developers have provided support for this game so far (it needed it)
- There are many mods that can be easily implemented
- (External) Diplomacy - this works better than any other TW game. Truces, alliances all work well.

What is bad?:

- The lack of feeling/immersion/atmosphere, particularly without any Mods. There is very little going on when viewing the campaign map. There's no driving force behind your actions other than simply choosing a province to completely control or a new one to invade. There seem to be a few events early on in a campaign but these dry up and the benefits of them I've always found to be a bit 'well so what?'

- Limited battle maps - I got very tired of seeing the same small fishing village layout very quickly

- The overall campaign map looks open, but for areas such as Italy/Gaul in particular there are effectively just wide 'roads' linking each settlement flanked by impassable forest. This would seem historical, but seems to just feel like you are on a motorway between settlements. Particularly so as you can often move from settlement to settlement in a turn. Deserts are not like this but have themselves attrition rates that effectively force you to take the same path to cross them. The apparent freedom of movement often felt to me like simply moving from cell to cell similar to Medieval I !

- Generals -I simply don't care for them, why should I? They have no connections, no background, the traits come along all too easily that you can stockpile them and they have no 'wow' value.

- Armies - you cannot have an army without a general. Previous TW games enabled you to have small groups of units led by a non-detailed 'Captain'. The lack of captains prevents you from moving units from one area to another to join up with a different army without taking the whole army or designating a general as a taxi driver. Often not possible if you have multiple fronts. Armies also always tend to be huge, (perhaps as a result of no captains), this means there are no small skirmish engagements, always large battles.

- Battles still have their issues, mainly too short and often it feels like just throwing whatever unit is to hand into the fray, they can just be frantic mouse clicking sessions without being able to take time to flank, or watch units weaken against holding lines. (But, they have worked hard to fix many issues in the battles.)

- Graphics - one moment they are great, the next not so. The drawing distance seems rubbish, if you're viewing from on high it all looks jagged and rubbish. Up close, yes it is nice, but as mentioned there is often little time to enjoy this. I have spent a lot of time messing about with settings in game and through Nvidea, also tried a mod, trying to get things better, even just the lighting. But there's always something spoiling it

- The weird one year is a season set-up, best try some mods to balance that out if you can.

However the main issue I have with Rome II is that it SHOULD be good, it seems to have a lot there, but when you get into it, it just seems so hollow, it doesn't add up to the sum of its parts. Idly clicking 'end turn' waiting for your army to be big enough to attack the massive garrison, or waiting to be attacked yourself.. with nothing to look at. I found locating the elephants in Africa and listening to their trumpeting the best way to pass time. But the truth is I often ambled off and did some washing-up instead, this is not what entertainment should be!

The makers actually shot themselves in the foot with Rome II. 100 hours of my RII game-time was spent in the dark post-release days, (fiddling with settings, running benchmarks, restarting campaigns when patched, finding killer glitches) and what a criminal release it was too, but by about patch 12 (I think it was) things were relatively playable. I only stuck with this game because I have utterly adored previous Total Wars. However, during this time (8 months or so), I found two games made by Paradox, which immerse you and make you care! They made looking at a much blander map a far more rewarding and enjoyable experience, when on paper they perhaps shouldn't have. This may of course just be me, maybe I'm tired of the Total War format and you should look to reviews about those games judging them there. However, after sampling the immersive, engaging, passionate events of those, which kept me glued to the computer, Rome II simply plays like,...erm, doing the washing up as quick as you can, or alternately peeling potatoes slowly.

In fact there have been many other games of completely different genres during the time I;ve had RII which have simply provided good quality entertainment and much better value for money/time.

On a side note the marketing/PR activity around RII leaves a sour taste, this is possibly common across the industry, but from the terrible release through to seeing the official web forum remove comments that might spoil their one-sided celebration of the upcoming Attila release, all seems a little anti-free-speech. I'll be interested in seeing how TW games are in future, I hope they return to being an entertaining, engrossing challenge, but for now I fear the Total War franchise is a shadow of what it once was and to put it simply, you'll have more fun with somethign else.

Total war: ROME II has been vastly improved from last years catastrophic release. This is the game that should have been released originally. It's not perfect but it's now a solid fun TW Rome experience, which I can finally comfortably recommend.

Rome wasn't patched in a day.

Full Video Review

Revisiting the game and it's current state.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3LPCGZXbz0&list=UUjb9fsvM4atnePKH1ndMVWA

Launched with many bugs that made the game unplayable. However, 14 patches later and I can finally say that this game is worth buying and playing. I have stuck with it through this time since I wanted to get my money's worth out of it... and now I can say that I have, and I can recommend it to anyone else who is a fan of strategy and Total War games in general.

I would say that this is like getting a Vietnamese tranny and a female hockey player to tie you up, put a plastic bag over your head and punch your balls until you come. Some people enjoy it, some people don't.

I know I do.

My life has disappeared

killed 3 thousad people with 9 elephants.

10/10

Even though several communities hate on this game, I have almost 1,000 hours on it and the modding community for this game is just another jewel. Great game with variated campaigns, strongly recommended

This game was far off everyone expected and most itching what was advertised. It took a year till it got shaped and being in a state it should been have back in Sept. 2013.

In Steam Store it says: scalable experience regardless your rig
Citating CA: We had +40% more budget; AI dev said: "We never invested more into AI development"; CA promised "sieges battles of immersive scale".


Honestly this game was failure on release. The pictures we can see on Steam and in the trailers are in-game graphics but very much edited. I am not saying this to beat an already dead horse but because we customers have been betrayed like Varus.


Some people say the game is now absolutely fine but honestly CA is not able to fix this game completely because of the warcape engine which was never intended for Rome 2 like battles as it was made for line infantry battles. So if you care to directly compare the battle mechanics like Dr. Sane did on Youtube you will notice differences.

At the end of the day the problems this game has due the engine (core issues) and which have been discussed to death in reviews and forums either way STILL exist, despite the good efforts of the Emperor Edition and more than 14 major patches!

Also watch out this game is available legit for about 29 € so do not trust the prices on Steam. People in Russia and Britain pay a lot less than us even without discounts. Check out onlinekeystore.com to get legit and well priced keys for this game.

However, saying the game is not worth a penny is a bit exaggerated meanwhile.

By today (Sept. 2014) I rate the game with a 8/10 (original rating September 2013 4/10)

-1 point for the severe AI issues, which propably cannot even get patched.
-1 point for performance and LoD issues, which propably cannot even get patched.
-1 point for the streamlined functionality compared to previous TW games
-1 point for the athmosphere and music (music mods available by now)
-1 point for the battle mechanics compared to Rome 1 / Medival 2
+1 point for the good mods available
+1 points for the Emperor Edition release and changes
+1 for continued support

I still do not recommend to buy this game full priced! For the half price it is a good buy and can distract you for some time if you do not focus on the misses it has.

After playing in version after a lot of patches I have to change my point of view. It still isn't the best game and still I don't think it's a good TW game. However there are some improvements and I quite enjoyed it.

+ Cultures - various religions, cultures, definitely a TW trademark. There is a lot of factors responsible for growth or drop and cultures are located in the right places. Its pretty good step forward after Medieval and Empire.
+ Good diplomacy window. Nothing more to say. Its the biggest improvement since Medieval and Empire (although it makes game not only much more realistic but oddly... easier just like in Shogun)
+ The game is much more focused on politics and generals than it was ever before. Now player is not absolute tyrant who can do whatever he wishes, there are also political enemies, threat of rebellion (not only when happines is in bad shape) and need for political intrigue to gain power. And of course the traits, there are not only a lot of them, but now you can see a good reason behind gaining a one. They don't just come randomly as it was before.
+ Seasons and terrain - magnificient move, weather has its impact not only on battlefield but also in campaign map. And there are few types of every season based on local climate. And you can easily see which parts of terrain are good for defense or attack. Good one.
+ New interface is amazing. You can see everything that is important without any problem.
- Limits on armies, agents and fleets. And the fact that you can't create and army without general, so pretty much you can have only few armies, and you can't move or even recruit units without one. But... why?
- Other factions are passive. Biggest problems are rebelions and not the actual enemy. They declare wars and attack you very rarely. So basically if you are not a newbie, you will go through them softly as knife through butter.
- AI does not create huge armies with big backup. They create big amount of small armies running around and attacking cities with garrisons, and often with only small amount of strategic mind you are able to defeat that army with only garrison.
- New province system. It's neither good, nor bad, but as an "orthodox" player it's big joke and a pretty strange improvement for me.

+ Highlighting differences between units. They come in different types of armour which impacts on vulnerability (v.heavy, heavy, light). Besides quite the same types of close combat units, there are many more distance, horse and skirmishing units.
+ Mercenary units - a lot of them, located perfectly on the map.
+ Agents - I like the fact that they are not only recruited in one purpose like in older TW games. They can kill enemy generals, sabotage enemy provinces or just help your generals and provinces. But still it's nothing new, just an idea from Shogun 2.
+ Army traditions!
- Generals and agents advancing tree. What the hell is that? They decided that rather than having nice and easy to understand tree like in Shogun2 they prefer to focus on 3 traits that will give new abilities. But how can I now what does it really give? I don't know where I will end up advancing in authority or cunning section. I don't know what could gravitas give me. You can't plan ahead and see other abilities you are going to get when you will go one way or another. It is simply not clear enough.

+ Interface is ok... just a standard TW interface.
+ Graphics are of course great...
+ Great new movie camera, but... i will say more it later
- I hate this whole new "buff" system. In Empire it was fine, in Shogun there was small amount of "buffs", so it wasn't a big problem for me. But in this one. Hell no! It's not a MMO game, you can chill out with those that are not units formations (only ones that have right to exist, naturally formations have its advantages and disadvantages).
- Frame rate drops
- Short and not inspiring/ballsy general speeches before battle.
- Tragic AI - even when you overwhelm them with distance units, enemy army can just stay still and simply do nothing. Or they will just charge on your army even though you have overwhelming close combat power. Or they can just run in circles like morons.
- The other things are flags. What the hell is with all those flags? I get it, in previous games there were flags, but only in strategic points of map and there was one flag or maybe in Shogun and Empire there were few more for gates and towers. Now there is a lot of them in cities, which leads us to another problem...
- ... why AI doesnt even defend the flags? I could easily fight with their units and at the same time just wondering around with one unit and get all the points with flags. And the AI didn't give a...crap about it.
- Units charge and close combat are a disaster. The unit collision is wrong, and after charging on enemy they don't stay in formation, which leads to having just a bunch of units pilling up in one place. I would like to see fighting animations but I couldn't even see one. To be honest I didn't see anything just chaos. As I said the new movie camera is great. Would be great, if I there was anything interesting to see.

+ Soundtrack - nothing unexpected, TW games always have some good background music.
+ Main menu is... just ok i guess.
+ Steam Workshop! This is one great thing. Mods are always good for the game, they fix problems and introduce new units, options, designs. It was great move.
+ Guide pretty much teaches everything. It's just great.
+ In game event movies are cool...
- ... but no event movies for agents, which was a great, funny things, adding some spirit to previous games.
- They decided to squeeze the money out of players, by doing that many DLCs. You want to play fricking Sparta or famous Epirus? Of course you want! But it will cost you extra money. It's a surprise they didn't do Rome faction as a DLC...

Premiere version was ONE BIG MISTAKE and probably ONE BIG PILE OF.... Right now, after improvements, patches and some mods... it still is quite enjoyable game. But for me, as an "orthodox" in TW gameplay and a huge history fan... it doesn't work well after all hype it got. It was over-hyped and now I know that. I bought the premiere version, the price was too big for this game and now I know that. But was it worth to see for myself and did I have some fun. Yes I did. Indeed I did. :)

failed the prologue
10/10

I once hated it, and reviewed it as such back in february. Long story short I have officially erased that review to replace it with a positive one. Good Job CA you deserve all the praise you can get. It's not perfect, and it's not my favorite title in the series, But you've made it right by me, and as someone who preordered, defended its launch, then got fed up and bashed-- I can only praise the fact that you did not leave it in the state it was in and jumped through hoops to make it right as you could.

I think at the very least we can simply forgive the past, and play the game. Just please don't do it again, boys.

Is this game the best in the series? No.
Is this game better than the original ROME? as far as I'm concerned they can't even be compared.
Is this game perfect? No.
Is it fun? yes
Do I recommend it as a TW-veteran that's played these games since my age only had one-digit? Yes, Yes I do.

I still say it's geared to the more casual-player, but honestly thats a really hard position to defend. If you like Total War you will get good gameplay out of this. If you've never played total war this is a good one to start with in my opinion.

When this game was released, it was a mess. But there was a good game underneath the many bugs lacking features and performance issues. One year and 15 patches later, the game is vastly improved. I highly reccomend it to anyone interested in historical strategy.

With the release of Emperor Edition, Total War: ROME II has finally launched the game they meant to make back in 2013, a full year ago. What this means is ROME II no longer has fatal bugs, crashes, humorously rendered faces, poorly designed building trees, poorly designed tech trees, or painful wait times between turns. The bugs are gone, the polish is there, it is safe to say this is a completed game.

This might be too long for people, so I'll put my final thoughts here and then if you wish you can read the justification for them below:

Rome 2 is more of a management game than a strategy game. There are very few strategic descisions to be made in this game after 30 turns into a campaign. You simply build buildings, train troops, give movement orders, and upgrade generals because if you don't the game gives you a pop up telling you what you forgot to do. There's a shameful lack of interesting battles to be fought, and it hardly matters what buildings you choose to upgrade or build, and it certainly doesn't matter what general traits you choose. So you click the buttons to get the pop ups to go away, and eventually you start wondering why you started the game up in the first place, because there's no game to be had here.

I'll start with the Campaign.

The map is pretty, but a pain to navigate when your empire is large, as the camera does not zoom out enough on the main screen, forcing you to go into 'strategic mode' and double click and have the game zip the camera over there. Despite there being several views of the map: the normal camera, the strategic map, and the diplomatic map (the latter of the two having options to change different overlays) there is still no good way to get a picture of what is going on in your empire. The Strategic map will show you the position of your armies and enemy armies, but it doesn't tell you how big the armies are, or how much movement they have left. So when you see an enemy flag in your territory, you still have to zoom your camera over there to see if its a full army or one of the small, threatless stacks the AI likes to create.

On the campaign you will develope your cities and move your armies. The UI for these functions is minimalistic with lots of tool tips that pop up. This allows you to get a good look at the graphics, and a poor look at what the buildings do and what affects are on your armies and generals. To compare two different buildings you have to hover over one, wait for the tool tip, memorize the stats then hover over another, wait for the tool tip and mentaly compare the stats of the first option. There is no side by side view, or a list of effects or anything. This leaves you mousing back and forth frequently trying to pick which building you want. The buildings themselves often offer small percentage bonuses to one type of income (cultural for example) and cost food. Thus one must balance their food and food-demanding buildings appropriately. This is an ok mechanic. It's not great, but it's something to break up the monotony or the linear upgrades of other Total War titles. However once you have a large empire, it is very easy to lose interest in min-maxing your buildings, because you end up conquering so many cities so quickly that you always have food and you always have money, so balancing the economy and food tends to go away at a certain size. The technology tree feels rather pointless and linear. It provides either a flat bonus to troops (like upkeep, movement speed, or combat effectiveness) and access to buildings which allow higher teir troops to be trained. This mechanic is hollow. It primarily serves to gateway what troops are available at what times of the game, because the flat bonuses are small and inconsequential. Some of the religious buildings will increase your research rate by a small amount, but the technology tree still fees shallow and arbitrary. In Rome 1 units were gated by buildings, and occasionally (in the case of Roman legionaries) the date. This functioned better, and was more transparent, which allowed for better planning.

I like the feature of generals and armies leveling up, but they get too many bonuses and they seem so small and unnoticeable. This leaves me clicking one at random and not really caring, similar to buildings.

Other aspects of the campaign map are simmilar enough to the other Total Wars that I can't expect anything more or less from them.


On to the battles.

Battles are pretty. There's plenty of nice effects that let you see your army of antiquity on the battlefield in high fidelity. However, due to the nature of Total War AI (which is SLIGHTLY improved in Rome 2) the battles are boring. As long as you line your men up to face the enemy properly and prevent any sad attempts the AI makes at flanking you, you'll probably win. This is a problem because the battles are supposed to be the best part. That's where they spent all the money, right? Right?

The unit variety is nice, and I could complain about the way pikemen don't really feel like pikemen, and that the difference between heavy cav and light cav is very minimal, but there's no point, because it takes a special kind of idiot to lose to a Total War AI. I haven't played much multiplayer, I presume the battles are decently interesting when they're both controlled by a human.


Over-all.

There's a mysterious and unfortunate paradox to the Total War series. If you are playing correctly on the strategy map, you would make sure you have the highest chance to win a battle as you possibly could. This means that most of the battles you fight you will have overwhelming odds and you can auto resolve them with 95% of your army remaining. Fighting it out would be boring, and you probably wouldn't save that many casualties commanding yourself so what's the point? This means that there's a small 20-30 turn window at the start of a game where you actually fight the battles because you only have one or two armies and you need to put them in 'risky' situations. And since in a fair fight you will always defeat the AI you win those risky situations. But once you're large enough you tend not to fight battles, and just auto resolve as you blob over the entire map. Which leads me to the short sampler from the top of the page.

Really enjoy Rome 2 especially with the latest Emperor Edition update which has added some needed changes to the game.

Rome 2 for me is a excellent game

Havent had any problems with it yet, havent seen any buggs, glitches or anything in that order.
The combat and the showing of the Roman empire are excellent, very detailed game with amazing graphic options.
The large scale war is amazing to look at, and my game runs in a solid 60 FPS without any issues at all. Havent seen a single graphic bugg whatsoever.

Total War ROME 2 it's just a deep beatiful strategy game like every other game of the total war series! Don't be fooled by the bad review couse it has some imperfection but it's only the performance that need to be improved and some Ai adjustement nothing more!

This game is for me a keeper and deserve praise not the differ a solid 9/10