I could see my empire rating rising but I’d conquered nearly half the map and wasn’t really feeling it yet. Suddenly the thrill of being a legionary wore off. Those cities were basically the same as the others I sieged. At every new region I expected to find those terrible germanic legions that destroyed Varus and halted the roman empire.īut I never did. Slowly the empire grew, and slowly I spread that great red blob north and west. I hit the Arverni followed by the Lusitani. My empire grew bit by bit as I gobbled up Sicily, then moved north to Cisalpina. (Will my kid look at my game collection like that in ten years?) Without rose colored glasses it was just old. The game feels dated and I had no nostalgia to get me through the clunky bits. Most people actually told me ignore TW:R2 and play TW:R1 instead. When Total War : Rome came out in 2004 I was in university and so poor that ground beef was a luxury. Now I never played the earlier Total War games. I fight some battles, recruit some units, siege a city and voila, I’m playing Rome 2. I’m some nobody consul off to rescue some other consul after his army gets nabbed. The prologue campaign opens up well enough. If you’re into some obscure war then you’ll play anything, regardless how crappy, to get your fix. I was told by many many people that TW:R2 is a bad game and I was a bad person for playing it.īut hey, you fall in love with an era and sometimes you just gotta do it. The best I can figure is the reviews were so terrible for the original Rome 2 that they rebranded it, and fixed some issues, to give the Metacritics and such a clean slate. To clarify I have the Emperor’s Edition, which I guess fixes the original issues with Rome 2? I’m not sure. At some point the drunk me must have bought it on Steam because when I went to buy it I found out I actually owned it already.

So I sought out games to cover me between pre-republican Rome all the way up to the the reign of Alfred the Great. My evening reading has been Mary Beard’s excellent SPQR, and Bernard Cornwell’s the Last Kingdom. Lately I’ve been getting my gaming fix away from prodigious hexes and even more prodigious spreadsheets.

Age of charlemagne mercia guide