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Puts to shame all other Real Time Strategy Games!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 209 / 268
Date: November 01, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This game is INCREDIBLE!
I am Roman, from Rome, Italy. Classical studies are in my backgroung... this game is a perfect recreation of ancient Rome: its politics and, especially, the way Romans used to conduct war.

You can play the game in tactical and strategic way, deciding to just stick to strategic or to delve into tactical too.

In strategic, you govern cities, move armies, build new structures (as Temples, Academies, Stables, Training Facilities, Arenas), hire and train troops, etc. If you do battle you then decide if you want to go into tactical or just want the fight to be resolved based on the number and kind of troops you have.

In tactical you fight. You will see hundreds of soldiers on the battle field. All in formation, just as the Romans used to fight. You will battle hordes of barbarians, opposite Roman factions, greeks, etc...

What was in history... IS IN THIS GAME.

But most of all...this game is FUN.
Normally games that are too realistic are really boring. This game has it all.

I won't go on and comment too much on graphics, fighting engine, help menu, sound... because it is all so good it all deserves a 10 out of 10 and just one comment: SUPERB!!!

I'll just add a note on Soundtrack: I makes you feel like you were in the first 20 minutes of the movie Gladiator. Incredible.

This is one of the best games I EVER SAW IN PC.

If you are an RTS fan YOU HAVE TO BUY THIS GAME.

First Thoughts

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 160 / 222
Date: August 27, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Im a Total War Junkie. Rome Total War is the 3rd game in the Total War series. Total war was the first game (with the exception of "Lord of the Realms") to sucessfully merge turn based strategy gaming with real time strategy battles. All total war games consist of two parts: A campaign game and a battle engine. The campagne game resembls a very complicated version of risk where you manage your empire, taxing provinces, building structures and training units and dealing with economics and diplomacy. This gives you the big picture and a satisfying way to handle the strategic theater. When two armies meet on the campagne map or clash over control of a province the game switches to battle mode and the real time battle portion of the game. Here you actually fight the battle with all the units you had on the campagne game.

The total war series is best known for it's real time battles which ussually allow for upto 10,000 individual soldiers to be on the screen at once. These arent RTS battles, they are very deep tactically and realistic. Combat is affected by such factors as ammo, morale, terrain, fighting experience of units, weather, command abillity of generals, weapons and ammor quality, and more.

I've been playing the game for about a day now and I am just going to post my initial thoughts:

Pros:
The graphics are astounding, and I was blown away by the audio as well. When armies march you hear it through the house and when elephants charge your room will rumble! The physics engine is great and allows for momentum and impact of charges to be seen, felt, and heard. You see men go flying in a cavalry charge, and when elephants die they can crush men underneath them! The new fully dynamic campaine map is amazing. It's details and very intuitive. The strategic possabillities are infinite now. You can outmanuever enemies strategically and attack with two armies from two different sides! Wow! Blockades, and transporting troops by sea now feels so much more real. Economically and diplomatically this game is leaps and bounds ahead of the previous total war games. There's a lot to digest here - but only if you want to get into the nitty gritty. Automatic handing of these details is improved and just about any aspect of the game that doesnt appeal to you can be handed over to competent ai to take over. You can play the game however the heck you want. The new sieges are crazy and very deep. Fighting in the streets is lots of fun and now if you destroy something on the battle map it is also destroyed in the campange map - the link bettween the two is 100% solid. You can even see any given city in 3d at anytime you wish just to admire it's progress.

dissapointments:
it's inevitable, but I have a few things that made me pout. For one thing you HAVE to play as one of the roman factions beforew you "unlock" the other 8 or so playable factions. That really sucks because I wanted to play as carthage so badly and now I have to play a whole game as rome first before I can do that :( I also dont know why but it wont let me enable antialiasing - the demo would but the full game wont, I have a geforce 4 and updated my drivers and everything so im stumped. There's also no saving battle replays in the campagne game - only for the custom battles! WHAT??! I have NO idea why that is but it's dumb.

Overall... Im blown away just like I thought I would be. This is a jaw-dropping revolutionary game and as I fiddle with it more i will give a more detailed review of the game.

Even better than its predecessor

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 49 / 56
Date: October 13, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I've been following this series since I started playing Medieval Total War, and Rome is a beautiful sequel. I bought this for my dad, and he can't stop playing. It appeals to fans of the Civilizations series (like my father), as well as fans of Age of Empire's real-time battle sequences. Like Medieval, it's really two games in one, except with significant improvements over its predecessor. What's great is that if I'm not in the mood to fight lengthy battles, the option exists to autocalculate them - but you won't get to lead the troops the way you want.

When I first started playing Medieval Total War, there was a steep learning curve to understand how to win real-time battles against larger forces. Some of what I learned in Medieval I've been able to translate over to Rome, so I can imagine anyone trying the game the first couple times might have some difficulty getting the hang of the battle sequences. Start with easy battles where you outnumber your opponents, and learn which units oppose which the best (horses against archers, spearman against horses, etc). Use Pause as much as you need. Eventually you'll recognize the strategy involved with flanking your opponent, hiding your cavalry in forests, and positioning archers behind a protective wall of infantry on a hilltop. If you suddenly charge an enemy from behind them, they will panic! If a general dies in battle, the troops will be demoralized! And if you destroy a building, or worse lose an heir, that will be reflected in the main game.

The reverse is also true. What units you build in the main game and where you position them on the map will directly control how the real-time battles will look when they begin. It's that kind of realism that makes this game truly dynamic and fun.

Civilization for the new era.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 34 / 41
Date: October 25, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I remember playing civilization for the first time. I started playing friday evening, and only stopped when I could hear the birds outside on saturday morning.

RTW is the same deal. You get drawn in totally to the world of strategy and compelling gameplay. There are differences of course. The main one is the added realism... better graphics, and it doesn't look like RTW cheats (Civilization did). In fact, the graphics engine was used in a recent TV program on BBC3 (a BBC channel, aired in the UK), where a team of tv personalities re-enacted famous historical battles in real time via a virtual simulation that was provided by a networked version of this game!

I have all the graphic settings up to max and it works a treat on my Radeon 9800 pro, 1 gig or RAM and an XP2800. In fact, the final game works better than the demo (in terms of performance and less bugs), although, admittedly I still see crashes to desktop once every 10 or so hours of play. In most games, this would be unforgivable, but I haven't docked any points because it always seems to crash immediately after auto saving, so just re-loading the game and hitting the Continue Campaign option seems to put me back where I was.

One of the defining factors of a good strategy game is that it gets more difficult the more successful you become - not because you get to harder levels, but simply because being successful means you have to work harder to keep your conquests, and this game gets this perfectly. You start off with a few cities, but as your empire grows, you not only have to deal with enemy armies, but also keeeping your own people loyal (through either loyalty by keepin them happy, or by fear via large garrisons in every town). You also start to find your armies stretched, and cities well away from your capital become particulalry prone to attack from rebels. Being a good general on the battlefield is only part of winning this game.

The game also has a twist about half way through, where something unexpected happens within the Roman Empire (well, it was for me, perhaps I just didn't pay enough attention in history class!), and its something that totally turns the game.

You also get non-roman civilizations unlocked if you complete the Roman campaign, something that adds to the longevity.

A (very) minor niggle is some of the voice acting and scripting, which seems to be produced by the same casting people that produced some of the over-the-top Hollywood dialogue from the 1950/1960 era... the ham-it-up spirit of Tony Curtis lives on!

If you are a fan of the previous total war games, you really need to play on hard - medium is just too easy, particulalry because on that level, the enemy doesnt seem to mind getting too close to your castle walls and just sits there and gets decimated by arrows. Previous fans of TW will also really appreciate the better modelling of castles, which are now more realistic. The battlements now work (you can place soldiers on them), and to storm an enemy stronghold, you have to either scale the walls, batter the gate down, or simply demolish the walls. Sea battles are still not modelled in real time, although the reasoning for this is probably so they have something for the next game (or expansion) because everything else is modelled perfectly, and in detail.

Overall though, its a must have for any strategy fan. There's simply nothing out there to compete in either scope, depth or realism, so I must give it full marks. Oh, and also because its just an addictive, thoughtful, thinking-persons strategy game, with enough graphics and fun-factor to wow the video console kids into playing the game!


S

The game is quite unfinished.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 21 / 26
Date: April 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game had such potential. Even now, if the developers wanted to, it could surpass by leaps and bounds every other game on the market now and probably in the next three years. However, the developers rushed it out of the door. Now, this is a normal practice these days. However, unlike many developers, Creative Assembly gave the game minimal patch support.

The game currently has several huge flaws, one of which actually makes the game unplayable. When addressed on this issue by the community, the developers replied that the bug did not exist. They did not answer questions asking them whether they had performed the simple test that displays the bug. In fact, all threads at the official forum pertaining to the bug were locked, a very telling tale.

Almost worse than the bugs is the deliberate historical inaccuracies and downright unrealism. Even were all the bugs fixed, I could not recommend this game to a serious gamer. While it's fun, except for when you encounter the bugs, it's a joke in the realism and history departments.

So if you are looking for a working game, a game realistically depicting Roman-era warfare, or both, then this game is not for you. If, however, you would like a buggy, half-finished, and unrealistic game made by developers who have almost no communication with the customers and even less scruples, then I recommend buying the game.

Rome needs work

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 21 / 26
Date: April 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I had purchased all of the previous games in the Total War series and had high expectations for RTW. While the game is certainly visually stunning, it contains numerous bugs that the developers and others refuse to acknowledge. There is the save game bug mentioned in other several reviews, and there are also several bugs in the battle mode of the game. One of these frustrating bugs occurs when you select multiple units and direct them to attack a certain unit. Often, the selected units will attack the closet nearby enemy unit rather than the one they were directed to attack. Another bug in the battle part of the game is that when you direct a group of selected units to break out of their special formation, not all of them will. There are also bugs in the muli-player part of the game. The game state will often diverge on different player's machines, and they will fight in completely different battles. After having "murdered" an opponent in a MP game, they will often boast that you were the one who lost. And your replay of that MP game will sometimes show the opponent's version of the battle, the one that in which they won. These issues with the game are the reason I feel compelled to give it such a low score. Visuals do not make a game in my view, game play is what does. And RTW fails to live up to the standards of expectional RTS gameplay set by the previous games in the series. This game has a lot of potential, but I'm afraid that it may never be realised. Rome wasn't built in a day, and RTW is analagous to the eternal city after the first day of its existence. It's not yet finished.

Embodiment the decay of the video game industry.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 27 / 37
Date: April 09, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Rome: Total War is the perfect example of the decay of the video game industry. Don't get me wrong, I'm no liberal violence fearing Lieberman slave, I've been an avid gamer my entire life. And I have played the Total War series with a passion since the first game, Shogun: Total War. This background information will provide some credibility to this review, as it's not just going to be another pissed off customer giving 1 star for no apparent reason other than the fact that they never took the time to play through the tutorial and learn how to play.

Rome: Total War is a great game for the first day or two that you play it. Huge armies to command, lots of cities to manage, and lots of opponents to conquer. You'll encounter a couple bugs in the first few days, but you'll shrug them off and continue.

Then after the new purchase happiness wears off, you'll be overwhelmed with perhaps the buggiest game ever released on the market - well, aside from Soldner of course. When you tell a group of soldiers to go attack an enemy formation and your soliders just sit there and do nothing, click after click, the frustration sets in. When you tell a battering ram to go bash the gate in and it just sits there doing nothing, then you start to lose patience. When sieging cities, AI pathfinding is atrocious. They will usually take the least direct route to your desired location. Often times the AI cannot process a route to where you told them to go and so your units will sit around, and do nothing. Sieging cities is neither fun or epic-feeling, as your soldiers act like fools. It is not unlikely to be commanding troops on top of walls and tell them to move down to the streets below, and instead of locating the nearest staircase they will run off the walls and fall to their deaths. When fighting battles along rivers with a bridge in the middle, it is very common to see you tell a unit of cavalry to cross the bridge to the other side, and instead they simply ride straight for the river, miss the bridge, and gallop into the river and drown. What's the point of playing?

Managing cities becomes impossible later in the game. There's a concept in the game called "squalor". Lots of factors, such as location, distance from capital, resources, garrison size, and crime all contribute to a percentage which tells the player how likely a city is to rebel. The problem with managing 45 cities is that squalor becomes impossible to deal with. The game massively over exaggerates rebelliousness so that later in the game, having half your cities rebelling every turn for no sensible reason without any solution is not an unlikely situation. Many players choose to actually cheat or download modifications to the games' files, because this is the only way to have an enjoyable game experience.

Even patches don't fix the game. They just introduce even larger bugs into the game.

[...]

A huge patch was released recently, but players of the game know how many new errors it introduced. Horse mounted archers, critical units in the game, could no longer fire on the move - one of the integral tactics of many factions within the game. A fun new saved game bug was introduced, where all AI was reset when you loaded a game. So basically, whenever you loaded a game, you'd be dealing with brainless AI that ususally just sits around and lets you roll over it.

[...]

The only saving grace of this game is its music score. Though the poor AI takes the epic feel away from the game, the music sure lends some atmosphere. The musical score in Rome: Total War is brilliant. I recommend buying the game's soundtrack instead of the game itself.

In summation, this game is not worth buying. The developers took minimal repsonsibility for their errors and blamed many of the bugs on players, insisting they were playing the game incorrectly.

[...]

My solemn recommendation is as follows: do not buy this game. Save your money for something useful.

Those with anything other to do than play a game: AVOID

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 24 / 32
Date: April 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Unless you can play this game for 6 hours at a time, don't waste your money. If you can, it *can* be a great game. If you need to do things like work or eat or such, then this will be an unfortunate waste of money.

Now, I would normally keep my opinions to myself, but seeing the tremendous disrespect that Creative Assembly, the game's developers, have shown to their customers, I have decided not to be silent.

The problem that plagues this game has been mentioned, so I'll just refer to it as the Loadgame bug. Now, if they were unable to fix the bug due to financial difficulties or low sales, I would still be unhappy, but understanding. As it has sold very well, their refusal to even read what the bug actually is, much less test it (and of course forget about them fixing it) has no legitimate excuse, insofar as I am aware.

Now add to that what is now an instant shutdown on any mention of such a bug on their forums. Add to that posts from the developers themselves to the effect you don't know what the AI is doing, so you are incompetent to judge if it is or is not a bug. Add to that moderators who tell you that if you encounter the bug it is YOUR fault for being so presumptuous as to actually *load* a game.

There is no chance of this problem being fixed.
None.

So unless you can play for at least 6 hours straight, don't bother with this game.

immense potential... squandered

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 20 / 25
Date: April 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This is a painful review to write. I really love this game. I really do. But it's like loving an abusive spouse. The way the company chooses to support its product and the way they have gone about public/consumer relations is deplorable. [...]

[...]

It is a shame because I loved Shogun:Total War, and I really had faith in the developers. No longer. If they cannot even admit that the save/load function is severely flawed, let alone dedicate the resources to fix it, what response do you think they should expect from their end-users? The saddest part of all this is that there are obviously very good people in the company, and you can see they poured their heart into what easily could have been one of the best strategy games ever made, only to have that vision squashed by whatever corporate maneuvering has occured to bring us all to this low point.

Potentially amazing game ruined by uncaring developers.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 20 / 25
Date: April 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game could have been a great, but it was rushed [...]

There are many bugs. First, horse archers (a numerous unit during the ancient times) should be able to fire while on the move. They used to be able to, but the recent (and "last) patch broke that ability so the entire speciality of the horse archer is ruined by the bug. The even worse bug, that everyone has heard about, completely stupifies the AI, making it pointless to play since there will be no opposition forever. If you save or load ONCE, the ai collapses, breaking off any city under siege, deleting any offensive goals, and having their diplomatic system stop. If you can play this game in 12 hour instances without saving or loading ONCE, this bug won't really affect you. But who can do that? Creative Assembly has stated that this bug does not exist, despite thousands of fans confirming it over tens of thousands of hours. They have no intention of fixing their game.

This game isn't worth the money, especially since it will be rewarding game developing practices like this.

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