#ROME TOTAL WAR 2 FACTION MAP SERIES#

Exploring the map and setting up trade routes will give you money, but it will also open up more parts of the map. The small average faction size forces you to make annoying choices that go against the central point of the game. AdvertisementĮnlarge / The excessively slow prologue campaign is a sign of things to come After 10 to 20 years, when all the factions start moving their spies and fighting their wars, waiting for turns bloats up. Early on (the game starts in 272 B.C.E., and each turn comprises a year), waiting for the next turn can be a fairly reasonable 20 to 30 seconds. It also becomes tedious to watch the AI opponent take charge of every single one of the dozens of factions while you wait for your turn to come around again. This makes diplomacy incredibly annoying, as clicking on 30+ factions just to see if they might want a trade route is the opposite of entertaining. Most of those factions are tiny, composed of one or two cities. Unlike many previous Total War games, there are no independents. There are around 200 different cities, and every one of them is controlled by a faction. The campaign map, as good as it looks, is simply too damn big. The single biggest problem with Rome II is that it's bloated. And if all of these aspects have issues, the entire game comes to a screeching halt. If any of those components don't work, then the harmony is broken and the game becomes frustrating. That's how it worked in the first Rome: Total War game from 2004 and the most recent installation, 2011's Shogun II-probably the two high points of the series.īut it's a difficult high-wire act. Making decisions on the campaign map should be as fun and important as fighting tactical battles. When a Total War game works, all of these components harmonize with one another. Here you maneuver your lines into position and then exploit any advantages you have for victory. Battles, on the other hand, should be tense tactical affairs. The campaign is turn-based and used primarily to move armies across the utterly gorgeous map, recruit units, construct new buildings, and occasionally engage in diplomacy. There's a balance between a strategic campaign map with real-time battles. The basic premise is still the same as in previous Total War games.

#ROME TOTAL WAR 2 FACTION MAP SERIES#

So why is it such a failure? The reasons are big, messy, and complicated, but to sum it up: Rome II takes everything that the Total War series does well and gets it just wrong enough to remove all the tension. Rome II should have been its crowning achievement. Like Rome itself, the Total War series could have been an empire that lasted for decades. Was it overextension? Unclear succession? Christianity? Bad luck? Lead poisoning? History, of course, is big, messy, and complicated, so it's probably not any one of those things. Game Details Developer: The Creative assemblyįor centuries, historians have argued about the reasons the Roman Empire fell.

Rome total war 2 faction map