Rome: Total War™ - Collection

Battlefield graphics close-ups are excellent for the age of this game.

Oldie but Goodie!!!

After years of having it in my backlog, I decided to give the original Rome Total War a go. While at times it does make you feel badass, ultimately the annoyances pile on. [h1]Flows[/h1] [list][*]It's a big chaotic world (until inevitably it isn't). [*]Graphical improvements over your cities. [*]Seeing your catapults bombard enemies from across the map can give you an erection that's very difficult to explain. [*]You get to feel like a military genius.[/list] [h1]Flaws[/h1] [list][*]Terribly optimized. I had terrible lag during both the battles and the overworld map. And my PC is 16 years younger than what this thing was released on. I didn't even have the graphics at max. [*]Assassins are a joke. You can lose 4 trained killers to one random 70 year old diplomat. Also the way the enemy AI functions, assassinating leaders doesn't even make a difference. [*]Your family cannot breed fast enough to give you enough generals to run your empire. I bribed about 2/3s of my generals from enemy factions, at absurd prices, because a city governing itself is virtually impossible without importing Abdul from the other end of the globe with an H-1B visa. [*]Terrible siege mechanics. Basically the towers of each city are a continuous source of damage for either side, somehow. The problem is the unit AI reacts to enemy units, and siege towers aren't units. Your army will just sit there and get slaughtered unless you manually move each and every one of them. Also sieges work with a "king of the hill" mechanic for some reason. [*]As more enemy factions get wiped, diplomacy and subterfuge become impossible, and the game becomes a slog. [*]The game will interpret tactical withdrawal (and I do mean tactical, we're talking "just move behind our spearmen and keep firing") orders as a panicked move and start fleeing. You can lose an army at 90% capacity for no reason in a winning battle. [*]There is a limit on how many units you can control in a battle, which makes sending 2 or 3 armies to a battle pointless unless you give command of the extras to the AI. And the AI is garbage. [*]Auto-battle is a joke. Either the game will manage to lose with numbers 5 to 1, or with the same numbers you will get a "close victory" with half your army slaughtered. [*]Rebellion mechanics are absurd. If a city rebels (which will happen very often when you win them through diplomacy), suddenly it will get roughly 1500 troops from nothing. And we're not talking common peasant units. At some point, a city rebelled and suddenly had an army including 80 war elephants. "I" didn't even manage to get a single elephant while owning it. [*]Arcani are the elite badass assassin squad that need insane requirements to be met for production and cost more than elephants to produce. And they are absolute garbage. [*]I caught the game multiple times cheating by spawning fleets in the fog of war, when it was physically impossible for its factions to spawn them (it was in the black sea, I controlled all the ports & the passage from byzantium, every 2-3 turns an egyptian fleet would randomly spawn in the middle). [*]Ranged units can run out of ammunition. This includes catapults. Catapults throw rocks. You can run. out. of. rocks. [*]Enemy factions can siege you without initiating a war. You attempting to break that siege will initiate a war though. [*]I think you can become emperor through normal senate work, but f@ck if I know how. I completed all their insane missions without fail for 100+ turns, and my senate affection meter was still 2/10 or so. [*]Enemy assassins clearly operate under different mechanics than yours when sabotaging cities. They just lower public order without destroying buildings. [*]UI is terrible. Yes, I love going through all 80 cities I own before I find the one that finished building the amphitheater. [*]The game has an advice mechanic on what to build next. The wise will listen to it and then do the opposite of what it says, because the AI is an idiot.[/list] [b]Thumbs down. The game has some moments of brilliance, but the irritations pile up fast. Let it rot in your backlog.[/b]