Total War: Rome II Review

If you want peace, prepare for war. 

Rome has always been the ideal setting for the Total War series. It has plenty of powerful empires, each with its own strengths and opportunities and, in gaming terms at least, a fairly even chance to rise to dominance throughout Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East. It also has loads of fascinating units which make combat exhilarating, challenging, and, let's face it, visually exciting. Whether you're building a massive maritime trading empire from the shores of Africa, assassinating rival generals in Rome, trying to unite the various German tribes against a common enemy, or using Greek hoplites to fend off war elephants in a narrow mountain pass, Total War: Rome II delivers everything that the setting could offer. At the same time, it also calls attention to some of the same AI and interface problems the previous Total War games suffer from.

The core of the campaign game focuses on managing the civic infrastructure required to commission and maintain your armies and navies. The burden of this management has always been a problem for Total War over its 13-year history, particularly in the late game when an empire can become sprawling, and Rome II's provincial-management system goes a long way towards lightening that load a bit without sacrificing depth. Now, instead of having to click through every different region to check food and order levels and set build orders, you manage reach region as part of a larger provincial unit. Italy for example, has 11 regions, but you manage them in three large groups.
It preserves the depth I crave by leaving room for specialization, and rewarding us for smart use of it. Since each region has a limited number of building slots, you'll need to carefully consider placement when building up the temples, aqueducts, farms, barracks, and ports that make up each region. What makes this system particularly exciting is that each section can be conquered individually, and only one per province has city walls, which makes sieges rarer and more significant. Taking an unwalled town still gives you a bit of urban fighting, but without the predictable gate and tower assaults.
If you own all the regions within a province, you'll gain a small benefit and be able to enact province-wide edicts, which can boost that province's abilities in a key
area. If you've just conquered a province owned by a different culture, you might want an edict that encourages their assimilation with your culture. If they're already on board with your culture, you might want an edict that improves tax rates or the food supply. This additional layer of specialization adds another interesting series of decisions that can help refine your strategies without necessarily requiring additional micromanagement. Some of the interest and opportunity depends on which of the eight the factions you choose to play as – leading one of the major powers allows for lots of opportunity to grow and shape your empire. Playing as one of the Germanic tribes requires a bit more runway before you start having the same impact you’d get from playing as Rome. Army management has been streamlined a bit as well. With the shifting of recruitment and mustering to be focused on generals and admirals rather than the regions, getting around the map and prepping assaults has become that much easier. You'll also be limited in the number of armies and navies you can field at one time, which puts the emphasis on a few larger forces rather than lots of tiny armies. While these restrictions definitely improve the speed and focus of the campaign game, you can't do anything with units without a commander present, which makes scouting, reassigning, and general shuffling of forces a bit more problematic.

You'll likely spend a lot of time tinkering with the new features of armies: promotions and stances. The promotions include abilities that apply to the army as a whole and to the particular general in command. You can specialize units for things like ranged attacks, ambushes, sieges, or battles against barbarians. While it's a fun feature that adds a bit of story and character to your forces, it also seems somewhat redundant in the face of the time you've presumably already spent building up the right mix of forces, researching the appropriate technologies, and applying your own upgrades. The stances, on the other hand, feel much more necessary and useful. You can switch an army into forced march stance if you need to get to a far corner of your empire quickly, or you can switch to raiding mode if you're in enemy territory and want to live off the enemy’s land. It can be a pain to have to manually swap back and forth as needed, but I value the flexibility to match my army's attitudes with its current needs each turn.
That, of course, is only half of a Total War game. The other half, the real-time tactical battles, are more stunning in Rome II than any the series has ever delivered. The impressive detail, unit model variety, and intricate animations give each fight a sort of you-are-there immediacy that had me regularly dropping down to eye level with my troops to see the action from their perspective. Sure, it lets you see some of the seams in the system, particularly with clipping, but I was amazed at how connected the combatants felt. There's some swinging at air and the odd soldier off by himself seeming to drop dead of a heart attack, but just as often these guys really look like they're fighting with each other.
I also appreciate the hundreds and hundreds of unit types available. If you're not completely bought into the setting, it can seem like overkill to have five kinds of hoplites, but if you really want to dig into their subtly different stats and compose an army that delivers exactly what you want on the battlefield, you can do it.
With as much as it has going on, Rome II's complexity is sometimes its greatest weakness. The political system is a great example: I got one or two Senate missions at the start of my campaign and then never got any others. Nevertheless, my Senate approval ranking kept rising until I had nearly 80% of the Senators on my side. It never really seemed to make a difference for me, so I decided to burn some support adopting and marrying other generals into my family in case we had a civil war. It cost me half my support in the Senate, but I soon had almost all of my generals safely in my family. Things went fine from there; the inevitable civil war broke out, and I easily crushed my opposition and was asked if I wanted to change Rome to an Empire or maintain it as a Republic. There's no context behind either choice, leaving us with nothing to go on except which word they like best.

There are plenty of examples of this vagueness in Rome II, where we’re are asked to make what seems to be a critical decision with very little awareness of what's at stake. New additions to a general's retinue, for instance, prompt you to replace an existing member, but the UI doesn't tell you who the existing members are or which one will be replaced unless you dig it up on a different screen. Likewise, the province list and overlays for the strategic map tell you which provinces are suffering from high or low public order, but that information is much less irrelevant than whether or not order is improving or worsening. For that, you have to look at a city individually.
I've struggled to identify a city I'm going to need to defend when the camera randomly reorients itself on the campaign map during the AI turn. I've strained to associate the names of generals, which are used exclusively on the strategic map, with the names of their armies, which are used everywhere else. These might seem like small complaints, and they probably are for some players, but they are plentiful and represent a general unhelpfulness and inefficiency that requires you to dig for information or click through multiple screens to get where you need to be. When a single turn can take as much as 10 minutes, those little inconveniences add up. Don't get me wrong; Rome II is a game worth savoring, but it also asks you to tolerate difficulties that don't need to exist. These problems also have the potential to bog down the multiplayer campaigns, which also seem to be missing some of the personality and persistent elements from Shogun.
For the sake of all that it gets right, I'm generally tolerant of some of the interface issues, but wonky pathfinding and poor strategic and tactical AI, particularly with smaller forces and sieges, are more annoying, even if they're less persistent. I've laughed as recently ousted armies batter themselves against my walls as individual units rather than wait for nearby reinforcements. I've cursed as my spearmen ignore a wide-open gate right in front of them and raced instead for a different gate on the other side of the enemy fort. These types of things don't happen every time, but they do happen, and can ruin an otherwise enjoyable turn.