The game requires a heck of a lot more work put into it!
First of all, the game is riddled with bugs, glitches and errors.
Apparently you can still run your troops through the doors of a fort even if the enemy is inside. The doors will magically open up for them from the outside.... amazing.
The enemy wont even bother climbing the walls of the forts to shoot at you, but rather just wait for you inside? Whats up with that?
Your soldiers will take the amazingly complicated and long road to get to a place you want them to go. Happens more often than not and its really frustrating since you have other important stuff to pay attention to.
Not to mention that sometimes your troops wont follow your orders rather just idle around and get shot at.
Naval combat isnt exactly optimised. You can just sit still with your ship and turn it on itself while shooting the other ships approaching. Even when you attacked first in the strategy map... which makes no sense.
The strategy map looks good? Not really. It looks more like Sid Meier's latest Civ. Rome Total War's map looks MUCH better. The battle map is good and makes this a Total War game but the ship battles feel like another Sid Meier game.... Pirates. Which was also much more fun.
I ran this on my gaming rig, 3.0 ghz dual core, overclocked and with a nice GeForce 9600... plenty of ram and still this game is glitchy and skips frames all over the place. Latest drivers too.
The sound comes and goes when your advisor tries to speak. Either in battle map or strategy map i ended up muting them instead. I fail to see how someone with no Total War experience can make sense of any of this.
Overall, the game is a pretty big letdown. I think the modding comunity needs to step up like they did with Rome Total War and make something happen with this. The entire scope of the game doesn't feel half as epic as a game like this should be.
Hopefully the developers should release a patch and make the game a little more enjoyable, it really needs one.