Rome: Total War

I have to admit, I have held no great affection for the Shogun series. I went out and bought the Warlord Edition of Shogun, and it was so tedious and badly done that I refused to even install the demo of Medieval. But when I found a disc with the single-player demo of Rome, I installed it just because I'd heard rumours of flaming pigs. I went out and got the full version very soon afterwards.

My usual strategy diet is the likes of the C&C series, Dawn of War and other such games. In other words, build the biggest and baddest of each unit category, and go kick ass. Its fun, but not exactly mentally taxing. Do that in Rome and even a barbarian warlord will turn your nice mishmash of units into a not-so-nice pile of corpses. This is a strategy simulation.

That last phrase is probably taken by most non-Rome players as being synonymous with 'difficult'. I assure you that it is not. The difficulty settings are very scalable, but even at the lowest diffculty setting a mass cavalry charge, as impressive as it might look (the graphics are very sweet indeed), will not work against a decently constructed enemy force. What you have to do is match unit types in a rock-paper-scissors (or cavalry-archers-spearman triangle) sort of way. The difficulty settings just change how easily the enemy will allow you to do that.

You don't even need to spend hours wading through tactics manuals to do it. The system is very simple- cavalry beat archers, spearmen beat cavalry, archers beat spearmen and just about anything beats light troops. Light Cavalry move faster than Heavy Cavalry but aren't as strong. There, that's the highly complex Rome: Total War summed up in a sentence. That's all you ever need to memorise, the rest is up to your own preferences.

This game is full of fine touches that make a good game great. Apart from the fantastic graphics (which surprisingly put little or no strain on my system, compared to the likes of UT2004), the pre-battle speeches are very well done, the previously mentioned flaming pigs (which serve absolutely no practical purpose except to frighten enemy elephants) are nonetheless very amusing to watch. Except when you've spent half your dinarii allocation on them in a custom battle, expecting enemy troops to be perhaps slightly hurt when hit by a fast-moving lump of burning bacon. There will be moments that will make you shout at the screen with relief or frustration- like when you see the highly skilled enemy commander being hit by a rock from an Onager right at the start of the battle, or when you arrange your defences perfectly at a town that's under siege only to realise after you click 'start battle' that there's another gate at the other side of town and all the enemy forces are going for that. The latter involved a single squad of Cavalry Mercenaries fighting over 200 barbarians while my slower-moving Hoplite Mercenaries and missile troops scrambled to their positions. I eventually won the battle with 10 of the cavalry left (with a little help from the throw-everything-at-them sort of charge that only really works against light troops like the Warband). Rome is like so many other great games in that you produce your own memorable moments- many of your well-executed moves in Rome will be just as satisfying as taking on the entire enemy team with a pistol in CS Source, or destroying a Battleship in Freelancer.

The campaign plays, as many other reviews have stated, like Civilization with decent combat. Individual units- which could be 20-odd heavy cavalry to a Warband over 100 strong- form into Armies, preferably but not always headed by a member of your family. These have a limited number of movement points, which can be varied depending on the units in the army and the general commanding it (smell Civ anyone?), but importantly the 'Army' is not actually a fixed unit itself- you can freely swap units between armies, say if one of your town garrisons just took a battering your faction leader could lend it some of his Triarii (rather effective Roman spearmen) for example. The one weakness of the campaign game is city management- for no apparent reason at all your cities can go from a reasonable profit to a 1000+ dinarii per turn loss, and reversing this seems to be a matter of hit-and-miss. So much so that you'll find yourself capturing reasonably prosperous enemy settlements for the sole reason that their profitability will counteract the losses made by your own towns. The timescales involved are shorter than those in Civilization (a turn is 6 months as opposed to 20 years) but still break the suspension of disbelief- are we seriously expected to believe that it takes cavalry 6 months to march a quarter of the length of Italy in good weather? Or that a city can withstand a siege for 3 years by the simple virtue of having a wall round its food store? This game is often compared to Civ 3, but given the real-time nature of the combat all it inherits from that game is some weaknesses in the turn-based section. Towns descend into civil disorder far too easily (why exactly are they suddenly rioting when I've just won a great victory?), budgets are impossible to manage, because unlike Civ, you are not given info on income, trade etc. so you don't know if you'll be able to afford a particular improvement, or if it might save you.

These discrepancies do little to detract from the main business of this game- the War of course. With whom is, to an extent, up to you (although the Gauls have an intense dislike for the Julii so don't expect any peace with them to last). The combat is frantic, like when you realise that those reinforcements you were relying on consist of a family member with a cavalry retinue of 20 men, and a squad of peasants who have just run away at the sight of the enemy's weakest unit. Or when the enemy breach your city's wall and your well-planned defence is inevitably thrown to the Wardogs as you charge every infantryman you have to plug the breach. This is strategy heaven. Just one more turn...