This is easily one of the best strategy games ever created, a blend of epic RTT action and an addictive TBS campaign.
Rome: Total War is the third game in Creative Assembly's amazing Total War series. It's also the first game in the series to use a fully-3D engine, and brings with it some other improvements.
The campaign map stretches from the British Isles in the northwestern section to Ancient Egypt in the southeastern section, or Northeast Africa. At the southwestern section, Carthage shares Northwest Africa with the Numidians. In the opposite end of the spectrum, Scythia occupies the Northeastern section of the map.
You can choose to start the game as one of the three dominant families of the early days of the Roman Empire, either the Julii, Brutii or Scipii, in the year 273 B.C.. Each of these families conquers and managers their third of the Empire under the supervision of the Senate and People of Rome, the governmental body of the entire Roman Empire and the faction with the power to order each family under its control to carry out its will.
The SPQR will order you to perform certain missions to further its own agenda and the agenda of the Empire. Depending on your success rate, you'll either be rewarded for success or just not punished for failure. If you've got a good track record with your assignments, the former will turn out true. If you've got a bad track record, you'd better hope you don't fail any more missions or else they just might order the other two families to attack you.
The Julii family are tasked with conquering those factions to the northwest of the Italian Peninsula (where the Roman Empire starts off), namely Gaul, Germania, Britannia (in the British Isles) and the Spaniards residing in the Iberian Peninsula. While these factions are easy to defeat due to their low-tech nature and their vastly inferior economic potential, the rewards you gain for conquering their lands are rather unsatisfactory, as they tend to be underdeveloped.
On the opposite side of the Italian Peninsula, the Brutii start off from the eastern end and are tasked with defeating the factions residing in Eastern Europe - such as the Greek City States, Macedonia, Thrace and Dacia. Beyond that, you can also cross the Aegean Sea and attack the other Cities and Islands still under Greek control, and along with that you can steamroll through the Pontii, the Parthians and the Seleucids, assuming they haven't killed off each other by the time you get there.
Finally, the Scipii, who start off on the southwestern end of the Italian Peninsula have to advance in that direction, destroying the rising empire of Charthage - the rival of the Roman Empire - and the Numidians in their path. Because the territory in this area is extremely limited, a Scipii player will often find himself expanding into Julii territory (the Spanish Peninsula) or expanding towards the east where the stagnant husk of Ancient Egypt resides, but it is still a powerful faction and could be considered a rival to the Roman Empire in its own right.
At one point in the game, the Roman Empire will go through the Marion reforms - historically, this would happen in 107 B.C, though you can get it as early as 240 B.C. if you construct an Imperial Palace quickly enough. This converts your "self-equipped Citizen volunteers" army into an army of professionals, their equipment and training all paid for and managed under the state. Effectively, this drastically improves the power of the Roman military, as the new Legionaries are considerably superior to the original soldiers in terms of discipline and equipment.
But let's not get carried away with writing a book about Roman history. Let's talk about the economy, the military, the diplomacy and the espionage systems. And also, the family system.
The settlements in the game have five tiers (four for Barbarian factions) - Village, Town, City, Large City and Huge City. Moving up the tiers will improve the quality of life, military production potential, economic production and such for the city. However, be careful to keep your city population in check, because if it gets out of hand your income and public order goes down drastically, until it riots (the city gets damaged) or rebels (the city is no longer under your control and it creates an army to rampage across your lands) against you.
You can improve public order by building a variety of entertainment, religious, law enforcement or public health structures. These structures will curb unrest and squalor, but it won't help if the population grows too much anyway. If it's dangerously close to rebelling, then you can either lower your taxes or start training large numbers of garrison units, but if your garrison's already full and you can't lower your taxes anymore, the city's gone.
Besides the economy and military system, there's also a diplomacy and espionage system - you can train Diplomats to negotiate ceasefires with your enemies, form alliances with neutral nations, start trading, demand or send tributes over and such. You can also bribe armies that are destroying your property with no army of your own to stop them, but that costs a beefy amount of denarii if the army's particularly large and it doesn't work if the army is lead by a Faction Leader or Faction Heir. A diplomat's skills improve as he negotiates.
The espionage system works with two units - Spies and Assassins. Generally, spies are supposed to infiltrate settlements, forts or armies and provide information about them to the player. They can get detected and executed, and their subterfuge skills will increase if you get more succesfull infiltrations, so it's recommended to perform operations with a low chance of detection - usually due to weak law enforcement - to improve the spy's subterfuge abilities first.
Assassins are supposed to kill leaders, diplomats or spies - the chance of success is, as with the spy, related to the subterfuge and killing skills of the assassin in question and the quality of the law enforcement. And as with the Spy and the Diplomat, his skills will get better as he performs more successful missions and as with the Spy, he can also get executed if caught. He can also sabotage buildings to disable them until repaired.
Lastly, there's also a "family system" in the game. The members of your (hopefully) vast and growing family will reproduce and create new members as time goes on. Male members can be used as governors or generals, whereas female members will be used as brood-mares and you can marry them off to get even more male members. Just be careful to ensure that your still-fertile family members stay alive, because a smart enemy can perform assassinations to wipe out the family (and when the family dies, the faction loses by default). The family being referred to is the governing body of each faction.
Each member has some stats for his Command, Management and Influnce skills. Command skills improve the ability of the general to lead an army to victory, and improves the morale and fighting ability of the army. Management skills improve the member's governing skills, and if he does well in this department he'll be able to improve the income and lower the costs of the city, among other things. Influence helps the member when it comes down to his popularity and bodyguard size, and it's there mainly to protect the general from danger.
Related to the family system is the Traits subsystem. Each male family member possesses a set of traits that define the bonuses and detriments he provides to armies or towns as a general. Some can become corrupt if your empire gets too rich - some can become shining examples of upholders of proper moral values. They can also become shining examples of obese people if they get a well-developed gluttony trait. Traits can develop differently depending on the environment the family member is subject to.
The other subsystem of the Family system is the Retinue subsystem. Basically, male members add new people to their retinues as time goes on - these can be orators, slave merchants or even body slaves. They also add strengths and weaknesses to the effect a family member has on his surroundings, and like Traits, the ones he gets depend on his performance and surroundings.
Onto the military system - each army contains twenty "unit cards" capable of holding 1-60 units each. Depending on your settings, the soldier count of each unit can multiply as much as 4 times, meaning you can have armies holding as much as 4 800 men. However, most infantry units in the game have 40/80/120/160 men each, and any infantry unit with more than that (usually at the 60/120/180/240 mark) tends to be much weaker.
There are several different forms of infantry - I'll separate it into melee and range for simplicity. The "melee" infantry consists of Light, Medium and Heavy Infantry, and some examples of these classes of infantry can go into special formations such as the Testudo ("Tortoise" formation for Roman Legionaries only) while others can go into "Phalanx" formations which are only for anti-cavalry specialist spearmen units with several-meter-long spears or pikes. These heavy armour formations tend to slow down the infantry units and reduce their flexibility but benefit them by increasing their defensive capability.
The "ranged infantry" units consist of Skirmisher, Slinger and Archer units. Skirmishers are essentially Javilineers, normally carrying 6 javelins each. Slingers have have about 40 slingstones each and are used for the sole purposes of bombarding entire armies with their small, but powerful slingshots. Archers carry around 30 arrows and have the longest range of the bunch. All of these are to be used as support units, while the melee infantry are intended as the mainline units.
On the cavalry aspect of the game, each unit should have 32/64/96/128 horsemen, with the tougher, heavier cavalry units - chariots and elephants - possessing 18/36/48/72 units - though that's a count of men, and the heavier elephant units can contain as many as three men on their backs, effectively tripling the number shown without increasing the number of actual units. Most cavalry units are melee-oriened, but there are horse and skirmisher cavalry units designed to harass an enemy army and then retreat. The heaviest elephants can carry up to two archers and can use that as a softener before the elephant slams into the enemy.
Cavalry are also used as bodyguard units for the generals - they have more hitpoints than their normal counterparts, and they generally start with 12/24/36/48 (for horse cavalry units, chariots are different) horsemen. From there, the size of the unit can expand depending on how much influence the general has. The bodyguard unit is extremely powerful, but it should not be used on the frontline, because it is extremely valuable as you can't train or retrain it, and the general leading it can die if caught in the middle of a fight. And you don't want to lose your generals, unless they have terrible stats.
Generals can establish forts to hold locations on the campaign metamap which aren't covered properly by any cities around. Forts will dissapear if abandoned, but if a unit is left inside a fort, it'll stay there. Armies in general can also construct Watchtowers, which are purely for watching over an area and are not intended as defensive structures. It's cheaper than a fort, however, and it doesn't go away when not maintained.
Armies can lay siege to settlements and forts - while doing so, the target is blocked from receiving aid or reinforcements, and units cannot move out without first driving away the besieging army. A siege will last as long as the grain stores in the walls of the city - if those are drained, then the attacker takes control of it. In the process, some of the buildings and the garrison are damaged, so it's recommended for a garrison to retaliate against a siege force immediately if it has a chance of winning. If it loses, the attacker gets control anyway.
A siege is a convenient way to take city, as it causes no losses to the attacker. On the other hand, it takes a lot more time to receive control of the city, and the city will end up in bad shape anyway. Any damage incurred to the structures and units inside can be repaired in a turn or two, but the damage done to the surroundings takes much longer to go away and it reduces the economic output of the city.
In each battle, the player can arrange his forces in a formation before actually starting it. During this phase, you can't see the opposing army, but it's better than starting out with your army all over the place and then spending half the battle trying to rearrange your troops into a workable formation.
That's about it. If you haven't fallen asleep yet, you have nothing more to fear - I'm pretty much ending the review here. Just buy the damn game already, it's going to be a worthwhile purchase no matter the price.