“Reasons why Rome total war is the 'disappointment' of 2004, lets look at pros and cons: Pros: Superb graphics My favourite historical setting. New 3D campaign map Sieges are more detailed Impetus from cavalry charges Cons: WORSE AI OF A 'KILLER' TITLE OF 2004 Fantasy units Units don’t fight like they should Underwhelming combat (quick retreats) FIGHTS DONT LAST LONG ENOUGH Bugs galore - ai gives up sieges Boring sieges, yes its nice to have them but they are awful-mainly due to the hold the square element to them and stupid AI. MISSILE UNITS ARE OVERPOWERED Cavalry are overpowered Few factions. Replays are inaccurate (yep even these don’t save properly! instead of being a movie the game refights the battle but memorises instructions so archers can screw it up) You HAVE to play as the Romans first In conclusion, its all flash no substance. A damn shame considering im a total war fan from Shogun TW days. The reviewers for this game could have done with actually playing it longer than a couple nights for the 'wow' factor to wear and see how poor the game turned out to truly be. But why do I get irritated when fan boys tell the developers there’s nothing wrong its all good and pat them on the back? Because it feels like they'll convince the developers that nothing is indeed wrong with the game and they'll not get round to fixing the problems, amending the shallow game play the awful truly awful AI, fix the imbalances and just make the game relatively fun, don’t sacrifice 'history' for 'game play' which turns out to make archers overpowered after people watched them in Lord of the rings take down guys in plate armour, or fantasy units such as Egyptians pharaoh units, don’t make hoplite combat so buggy, make it fun. MAKE THE GAME FUN! update - CA failed to make RTW/BI fun, MTW2 is pretty poor to, the passive AI bug was inexcusable (CA's excuse was 'oh our beta testers were aggressive and always attacked the AI so we didnt know it just stood around doing nothing whilst getting shot up to pieces duhhhrr) the campaign map is still a joke, its big, but so what when some provinces are gigantic and contain nothing - heck its not like you're going to encounter a enemy in those big provinces except near towns, next up wtf is with there being no multiple start times? early, high late campaign starts are not there again! the squalor issue is still ridiculous shouldnt even be added in the game and the idea of having either towns or forts doesnt work well in the game either . great so we now have to deal with the overpowered mongols (why the hell do they constantly have 3 silver chevron valor upgrades even when the last city of theirs is taken and they rehorde up into 3 or even more big stacks all with you guessed it loads of valor upgrades GR8!) and the timurids are just bad oh and then theres the silly units making areturn mounted priests , 'sherwood' archers etc then the battles, well the AI was mentioned -on very hard at least it fights better without the bonuses it was given in RTW to give the illusion that the AI was better (when in fact it was still as capable of what I imagine a labotimised chimp is on a computer game) and well theres the campaign AI which is truly stupid, offering an alliance, attacking the next turn with half a stack, then losing all its territory's bar one and turning around and instead of offering peace making outrageous demands..great, oh and the AI will gang up on you to or declare war even though your on the other side of europe and havent actually seen them....) battles themselves, still not as satisfying as MTW (even without considering MTW's superior AI to RTW/MTW2) as the battles last only a few minutes before one unit will retreat sending a ripple of fear to every other unit, which is a little OTT at least in MTW the fights lasted a substantial amount of time wereas this is abit like RTW (it didnt feel as bad but..) pretty friggin shoddy when in a wargame like this a unit makes combat fights for 3 minutes (a whole minute longer than RTW!!) and retreats!! decided to give MTW2 kingdoms a try since it was cheap and well, considering how poor the main campaign is these extra campaigns are all shoddy to except the holy land one but even then you have ridiculous flame thrower units SO what is there now? Empire Total War given the dire trend CA took with RTW onwards ive decided not to purchase this one (especially since it needs FANTASTAC!! steam mandatory installation to register the game, what a gr8 idea i really want to load that client up!! wait no - guess what? i support online distribution so long as the prices are good - that doesnt mean weekend deals etc were one price gets lowered drastically and everything else stays the same) and were the client is well client free (ala gamersgate) unfortunately the digital distribution services do two annoying things, sometimes block content to specific countries (whats the point in that really) and they charge ridiculious prices (eg a vampyr tale 39.99 euros compared to 9.99 euros brand new physical copy hmm somethings amiss there) anyway with empire total war negative points from non fanboy opinions: -steam installation is silly -AI is still moronic -strategic map is silly - france is 'a province' and italy more

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