Enemy armies are still sometimes vulnerable to kiting, as has always been the case with the series, allowing you to lead entire armies on merry chases around the map. Welcome in their absence are the computer's suicidal assaults against well-defended settlements, though smaller factions now have a strange habit of declaring war against you when you're clearly the biggest cat on the block. It's a more coherent AI, mind, and even a devious one at times. Naturally, not every turn is going to have you committing to an exciting battle or making critical political decisions, so sometimes you're clicking through turns just giving out a few build orders or growing your (now tweaked) research chains. Once your empire is the sort of size that fills Britain, Italy or Iberia, you can feel the game grinding away. This makes it much easier to get a campaign underway and get a good few years of progress under your balteus, but slowdown is still inevitable. Turns now take less time to resolve, too, at least in the early stages of the game. Gone are the graphical bugs that brought up low-resolution textures even on the highest settings or produced strange visual deformities.
If playing as a Roman doesn't appeal, there are always other empires nearby.Īfter a thorough polish, Total War: Rome 2 looks better, performs better and behaves better. Past a certain point, keeping a lid on things internally starts to become a much greater challenge than holding your borders. That said, I'd only been playing for a couple of years in my first game as Octavian before my own faction fragmented under the weight of war. It's now easier to see how recruiting generals and statesmen from different families affects your level of political influence and thus how, in time, perhaps far down the road, it can be your undoing. If Roman soap operas aren't to your taste, the campaign still offers you the choice to take control of distant Armenians or indifferent Celts, both carving out their own corners of the ancient world and both initially far less susceptible to internal power plays. It's a fitting change to introduce alongside a campaign based around the ambitious Antony and Octavian. There's also been a tweak to the political system, in both this campaign and the main game, which makes it easier to see when a civil war is likely and also reduces the cost of political actions. It's not a tremendous change, but there are a few new cities (Sicily now has three, for example) and some new factions punching each other's teeth out. What begins as a shaky alliance between Octavian, Mark and their numismatist buddy Lepidus, each of them grasping for more control of their respective corners of the Mediterranean, inevitably collapses into infighting.Īll this plays out across a map subtly altered to reflect our turning to a different page of the history book. Rome is split into factions so taut that all politics becomes a fraught shimmy along an electrified tightrope. The new campaign is set just after the death of Julius Ceasar, with Octavian, Mark Antony, Lepidus and Pompey's son Sextus all vying for control of the Republic. Benefiting from several updates, bolstered by the new Imperator Augustus expansion and now titled as the Emperor Edition, Total War: Rome 2 has filled out. The enemy reinforcements aren't here yet? What a shame. While Rome 2 can't be given a wholly clean bill of health, it's in better shape than it was at release, when I wrote Eurogamer's original Total War: Rome 2 review. It was a bit of a pain, as a number of things in Total War: Rome 2 are a bit of a pain, but it didn't really get in the way of my continental ambitions and, more importantly, it didn't stop me from enjoying myself. None of the time controls worked until a crash to desktop had me restarting the game. A journey back through the main menu allowed me to rescue my destiny courtesy of an autosave, and so this didn't become one of those stories of how a kingdom was lost for want of a snack, but I did face a compromise. When I came back, everything all browned and buttered, Total War: Rome 2 refused to unpause. My lunch popped up and so I paused the pitched battle I was waging with another local tribe - a pivotal battle where I had a numerical advantage, but nevertheless had to press home my assault. The Getae civilisation was nearly destroyed by two slices of toast.
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