Quote:Wait! Why were they chatting on the set of HBO's Rome....? I feel like I'm missing something, it's like six years ago that the series ended....

Quote:Unfortunately, it's not just the strategic campaign that's messy. The tactical battles are a major step back for the series as well. First, they're distressingly rare. In the first 50 years of a Roman campaign, I had only one pitched battle between relatively even armies. My first major battle simply didn't end, probably because I killed every man in my enemy's last unit instead of routing them—so I had to wait 10 minutes while the timer expired (a later battle crashed while loading the map, highlighting the many technical issues I encountered).

How that battle got to the point of me killing everyone on the enemy's unit, instead of simply routing their army, illustrates the biggest problem with Rome II's tactical combat: it's not particularly tactical. At its best, Total War combat contains several critical decision points. First, you decide how you set up your army: whether to risk missile troops in front of melee troops initially, how to take advantage of hills and forests, and so on. Second, how to engage: whether you want to attack or defend, in part or in whole. And third, once the bulk of the armies are engaged, you pick what will turn the tide. In Shogun II, a well-timed cavalry charge into the flank of an enemy unit can rout them—then the entire army.

Rome II’s battles are more like those in a cut-rate real-time strategy game: messy, anti-tactical scrums where forming lines and maintaining morale aren't considerations compared to throwing all your units into the fray. Battles turn into handfuls of individual units sprinting at one another until a couple are left standing instead of one army breaking another army. All of the components are there, but everything seems off. Charges are too fast, individual units rout too quickly, and those routs don't affect nearby units enough. Shogun II had this balance right, from the release version through the patches and expansions. For perhaps the first time in the series, Rome II appears to have learned nothing from its predecessor.