Coming back to Total War: Rome II using the Emperor Edition is like meeting an old friend again after a few months, finding that he lost some weight and then waiting patiently to see how his worldview has changed.
key review info
The Creative Assembly says that this is the definitive edition of the strategy experience, and after trying out the new campaign and the newly added factions, I have to say that fans will be happy with most of the changes that have been introduced and that newcomers who are looking to get into the series will find that this is the best possible entry point.
There are still some weird behaviors here and there and the game needs a solid system to run on, but Total War: Rome II – Emperor Edition is a solid release. Cz 750 sniper rifle review.
Story
Total War: Rome II – Emperor Edition still allows gamers to just choose the Grand Campaign, select a faction and simply try to reach the objectives or even conquer the entire world, creating their own narratives of success, betrayal and rivalry in the process.
Those who have not touched the title since shortly after its launch will also be able to choose from a number of new nations, including the just added Armenia.
But the center of the Emperor Edition of the strategy title from The Creative Assembly is the new Imperator Augustus campaign, which is designed to offer a self-contained experience based around the political situation created by the assassination of Julius Caesar.
Fans of the Romans will be able to take charge of factions within the nation controlled by Octavian, Marc Anthony and Lepidus, all of which feel they have a clear right to the legacy of the great ruler that has just died.
Total War: Rome II – Emperror Edition
At the same time, Pompey loyalists are still interested in power and there are six outside nations on the borders of Rome that seek to use the internal conflict to expand their own borders.
Gamers need to carefully consider their alliances and their enemies as they seek to complete smaller objectives which will allow them to consolidate their starting provinces, deal with smaller factions, and finally defeat the other major rivals to the title of Augustus and the position of first true Emperor of Rome.
The whole way, politics and the civil war have been modified for the new version of Total War: Rome II and the characters are also living longer, which means that it is easier to deliver narratives around faction leaders and prominent generals.
Gameplay
Total War: Rome II – Emperor Edition is still a game with two core elements: a turn-based one where gamers manage cities, move armies and generally keep order in their empire, and another where they move to a real-time battlefield in order to command men and try to vanquish their enemies.
The Imperator Augustus is somewhat more focused than the Grand Campaign, but offers more choices and strategic conundrums than either Caesar in Gaul or Hannibal at the Gates.
I played with all the Roman factions and about half of the barbarians (using the designation of the Empire) and all of them have a clearly delineated expansion route created by the developers, but can also deliver surprising moves and attacks.
The Artificial Intelligence is solid on the campaign map, able to attack weakly protected regions and to make sure that its own provinces are out of harm’s way as much as possible, although it does have a tendency to be a little conservative.
When two armies meet in the Total War: Rome II – Emperor Edition, players enjoy a generally solid tactical experience, although the computer-controlled enemy does have a tendency to once again send its generals too far away from the army on suicidal attacks, a long-term problem for the franchise.
Naval battles still feel clunky at times, but on land, the spectacle of Roman on Roman violence is impressive and engaging, especially when zooming in to see how the various units deliver blows to their enemies.
One weird element is the autoresolve for combat, which seems to weigh in favor of the conservative options and sometimes seems not to take into account the presence of reinforcement armies.
In Imperator Augustus, gamers will have to decide quickly whether they plan on being aggressive, raising armies as fast as possible and fuelling their recruitment, upkeeping with raids and with sackings, or if they are more interested in first upgrading their own provinces in order to support future conquest expeditions.
The battles can vary in terms of difficulty, but the campaign is hard to complete, mainly because sieges are more complicated than in the initial version of Rome II, and the AI is a little more competent.
Clash over Rome
The Grand Campaign continues to be exciting and massive, almost intimidating when it comes to faction variety.
I played with newcomer Armenia and favorite Dacia and the engine does feel faster and more responsive, with the weight of accumulated patches making sure that I did not encounter any major issues.
The game is not without its faults, despite the massive improvements and the new campaign.
Traits might have been reworked, but generals in cities still seem to gain too many negative points and the political side of the title still does not make perfect sense.
The Creative Assembly might have to deliver one more major patch in order to fix the final few issues and declare its work on Total War: Rome II complete.
Graphics and audio
Total War: Rome II – Emperor Edition does not introduce any sort of major update when it comes to the look of the title, but even more than one year after launch, the experience created by The Creative Assembly looks very good, both when gamers are planning thier moves on the strategic map and when they are directly commanding armies in the tactical battles, a game that creates a very immersive take on the Ancient World complete with plenty of small details.
The new map is beautifully designed, with plenty of minor details to draw gamers in, and there are a few new units on which the player can zoom in during combat to see a range of new animations, some of them pretty impressive.
The interface and the color choices have also been updated and mesh better with the overall feel of the experience, but the player still needs to have a rather powerful system in order to enjoy everything it has to offer.
The sound design of Total War: Rome II – Emperor Edition reflects the resources The Creative Assembly has access to and manages to enhance the immersion, although the soundtrack and the voice work are a little too theatrical at times.
Multiplayer
Total War: Rome II – Emperor Edition allows players to engage in multiplayer sessions for all the included campaigns, even for Imperator Augustus, and players can still simply launch battles if they do not have the time for a longer session.
The community of players who are involved in this aspect of the title is pretty hardcore at this point, skilled when it comes to tactics and sometimes a little impatient with newcomers, but I have experienced no insults or bad behavior.
The Good
The Bad
ConclusionTotal War: Rome II – Emperor Edition really shows how much the title from The Creative Assembly has evolved since it was originally delivered and the way the entire experience has been updated based on the needs of the community and the cool ideas of the development team.
The Imperator Augustus alone can eat up tens of hours of gameplay with its ten factions and interesting strategic challenges set in one of the most interesting moments of the Roman period in history.
The Grand Campaign has also been improved in plenty of ways, although civil wars are still a little weird and there are still some weird movements from the Artificial Intelligence during tactical battles.
Those who get bored of these modes can engage in the solid multiplayer modes or play single battles, and there are always community-made mods which enhance the title in interesting ways.
Total War: Rome II – Emperor Edition is a good buy for all strategy fans who have at least a passing interest in history and in reliving or re-writing it.
story 9
gameplay 8 concept 10 graphics 9 audio 8 multiplayer 8 final rating9
excellent
NEXT REVIEW: Qbeh-1: The Atlas Cube
Total War: Rome II – Emperor Edition Images (25 Images)
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Fresh ReviewsRome 2 Total War Empire Divided ArmeniaUpdate Night is a fortnightly column in which Rich McCormick revisits games to find out whether they’ve been changed for better or worse.
Back before Rome became the big boss of the Mediterranean civilizations, it was just one of many cities on the Italian peninsula, distinguished primarily by being founded by a murderer with a taste for dog milk.
It’s this early phase in Rome’s existence that’s the setting for The Creative Assembly’s new Total War: Rome II DLC, Rise of the Republic. The £12 pack whisks players back to 399 BC, plonks them into the sandals of its first politicians, and asks them to guide the nascent city to control all of Italy (and small bits of north Africa) on a shrunk-down version of the standard grand campaign map.Winning the game is dependent on control of the entire region. Or, you can crush Rome into the ground and build an empire with one of eight other factions, messing up the primary school education of kids everywhere in the process. As a brand new republic, playing as Rome gave me fun political crises to chart my way through, but these other early cities have their own fancies and foibles. The Samnites live in the bit around modern-day Naples, and can magic up an army at the drop of a toga thanks to their religiousness. Taras, on the other hand, prefers science to religion and players can harness the brainpower of philosophers to boost their research speed.
These varying factions are new additions to Rome II, but they’re certainly not the only update the game has received since its launch in 2013. The Creative Assembly has stuffed their game with a continent’s worth of playable factions in the years since release, offering some in chunky campaign packs like Rise of the Republic, some (like Greek States Athens and Sparta) in paid-for culture packs, and a few (like Armenia, Getae, and Massilia) for free.
There’s distinct variation in how each of these factions plays: in their unique units, their starting position, their rivals, their objectives, and even the time they existed. Rome’s first few years are rocky, for example, beset on most sides by other cities and tribes that aren’t keen on an expansionist upstart ruled (in part) by the unwashed masses. Step into the city ruler’s sandals 300 years later, though, and Rome is poised to become the European powerhouse it was in real life. The druid-fancying Insubres, on the other hand, have an easier start but will take longer to convince the rest of the Latin, Greek, and Italic cultures on the peninsula that menhirs and moustaches are the way to go.
There’s a big difference between a power like Rome and the wild barbarians of the north, the Greeks of Athens and Epirus, or pirate raiders like those from Tylis. Rome II offered an array of challenges and playstyles at launch, and that list has only gotten longer since, allowing for two campaigns to start off satisfyingly different in tone, expectations, and approach. There are even appreciably different visions of poster boy Rome: the free Imperator Augustus campaign pack splits the empire into three after Julius Caesar’s death, letting players pick Octavian’s classic Rome, Lepidus’ Iberian-centred bit, or Antony’s Greek’n’Turkish portion of the empire.
Coming back to Rome II after a few years away, though, I was more interested in Rise of the Republic’s challenge to build Rome from nothing. As with modern British democracy, playing as ancient Rome means balancing the wills of the plebs against the demands of the sneering hereditary elite, and as with modern British democracy, I found it was the latter that had the actual power. When the plebs kicked off, I could placate them with bread and circuses; when the patricians got upset, they attempted to secede from my imperfect union, spawning army stacks and stealing cities from my growing Roman empire.
Total War Rome 2 Macedon
The new DLC takes advantage of Rome II’s overhauled political system, but it also adds a new feature: family trees. These trees produce individual characters over time, each with their own traits, skills, and “intrigues.” These intrigues are mini-missions that can be used to curry favour with rival houses, provoke problematic peers, or boost your own skillset through things like marriage, bribery, or humanitarian visits to far-flung provinces. Playing as Rome, I controlled the scion of house Furia, securing the favour of the two other biggest voting blocs in the Republic in part by showering them with favours.
Not that I really needed to. The new family tree system was a neat way to connect me with the world and ground me as a powerful politician, rather than an omnipotent floating mouse cursor, but the truth was that I didn’t really need to engage that much with it. While I had to smack down a few secessionists in the early game, through either luck or process of elimination I ended up sharing power with two other noble houses who entirely approved of my actions and who made no moves to depose me. I may not have had the most influence in the Senate — giving me slightly smaller bonuses to development — but my Republic was totally stable, and my rivals were happy to keep its borders expanding.
No, indolence was more of a threat to my burgeoning empire than active intrigue. Despite its various overhauls, Rome II still starts to slow down significantly in the later stages of a campaign. It’s a problem in all aspects of the game, from the drudgery of moving larger and larger armies around, to mopping up tiny factions, to fending off suicidal rebels. The once-careful apportion of skill points to a network of spies, generals, champions, and politicians becomes boring busywork, and the time between turns increases hugely as more of the map is uncovered and AI enemies wage war against each other.
For me this frustration built over time toward the same end. No matter how different and how exciting a faction’s early- and mid-game is, its end-game still becomes a tiresome exercise in tidying up, generals forced to play genocidal Whack-a-Mole with straggler civilizations and pop-up barbarians appearing in hard-to-reach corners of your empire. Even in Rise of the Republic, with its diddy-sized Italy-only map, I spent 20 grinding years wiping out Gallic armies in the frozen north of my empire, wasting turn after turn trying to chase Asterix and Obelix around alpine forests.
Harder difficulties require more interaction with Rome II’s expanded and clockwork-esque systems of interlocking parts: a game where every ounce of influence, gravitas, food, and public order can matter. The kind of people that can track all of those elements across huge empires should probably be running real countries, though, such is the amount of information they’ve got to keep in their minds. It’s also not clear exactly how your reactions to the game’s situations really make a difference at first, though due to the small selection on offer, you’ll find out soon enough. I got informed that I had been spurned from a banquet so many times in one campaign that I started to think my guy must’ve been the smelly senator in class.
Rise of the Republic may have an older vision of Rome, but it’s a spruced-up game from its original incarnation. CA adapted quickly to complaints about the vanilla game’s AI, releasing a patched-up version a year later that they subtitled the Emperor’s Edition. More modern tweaks have come with subsequent DLC packs, adapting enemy behaviour both on and off the field of battle. I certainly felt like I was fighting against devious rivals most of the time, but that’s not to say that Rome II’s AI is completely immune to stupidity
I almost lost an otherwise-even city fight when half of my force couldn’t work out how to park their boats on land. Watching them oscillate between two perfectly viable jetties while their friends got royally Caesared a few hundred feet away was minutes of groaning frustration. Similarly, cities in general seemed like a problem for my friends and foes alike, their tight quarters causing enemy troops to stand off for no reason and my guys to walk up to ramparts and just… stand there. We get it, guys, it wasn’t too long ago you were wandering around forests with your wolf mum, but ladders and doors are not that complicated.
Rome 2 Total War Armenia Reddit
But most of the time, Rome II’s battles lend themselves well to spectacle. That’s especially true after its latest graphical update, which makes it look almost as spiffy as a strategy game released in the second half of the 2010s. New lighting effects make soldiers stand out and water sparkle, and even the campaign map looks nicer — although the low-level clouds that drift across the zoomed-out view are an unnecessary annoyance. It’s on this campaign map that I spent most of my time in the game, auto-resolving most battles once my armies had superiority over my rivals’, but I still engaged in the odd battlefield fight as a palate cleanser. The rock-paper-scissors interaction of spear, sword, and cavalry troops is easy to understand in this early timeframe — certainly much simpler than Total War: Warhammer’s fantastical equivalents.
Its grand campaign still suffers from the aimlessness that has plagued Total War’s late-game since time immemorial, but the wealth of campaign packs now available for Rome II do at least offer neater and more manageable goals for desk chair generals. Total War: Warhammer has it beaten into a wizard’s hat in terms of scale and silliness, and it still has a tendency to turn into a genocidal grind, but Rome II is in a much more stable state than it was at launch. That makes it well worth a visit if you want your grand strategy with more Gauls than goblins.
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