On a whim, I decided to buy Rome: Total War today. I've heard good things about it from Delphy and other various sources, so I went into thinking it was going to be a great game that would offer me some fantastic times. Sadly, that's not what I got.

The game just rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it's the current mindset that I'm in - I mean, the last few weeks I've been really craving some good old fashioned role-playing experiences (I'm currently playing through Neverwinter Nights 2 and its expansion, and the original Neverwinter Nights plus expansions as well), but this games just seems extremely dull. I started out with the tutorial, which wasn't all that bad...until it kind of left me hanging without any real sense of direction. With a game like this, the tutorial can make or break things for a lot of people and I think the tutorial in Rome: Total War completely dropped the ball. It does very well while it's going - it gives you a good sense of the features it does explain, but it leaves you to do your own thing far too early and fails to elaborate on many of the game's more complex features, leaving to guess and/or stumble around to find out the solution to your issues.

Once I got tired of the tutorial, I decided to give the main game a try. Thankfully, you can tweak the options of the main campaign to make the game a little more exciting - you can set the game to auto manage the dull city tasks for you and you can change the mass battle mechanics to be slightly more action oriented (although I personally couldn't really tell a difference, but that's just me). The problem with this though, is that the computer AI doesn't seem to produce units in auto-manage mode (I played for a good 150 turns or so). Just buildings. Normally, this would be all find and dandy, but the senate tends to give you a lot of missions and many of them require separate armies. So you're basically forced with choosing between managing the cities yourself which is extremely overwhelming with everything else going on the game or letting the AI manage your cities and being severely gimped by its flaws.

At this point, I'm not sure if I want to continue. It'd be great if there were a mod that managed cities and created units at the same time; that might allow me to focus on the part of the game that does interest me - the massive battles. I guess I'll have to wait and see.