'Rome' is the third war campaign strategy game in the 'Total War' series, following the 'Medieval' and 'Shogun' games, and it remains a game of two parts. The first part being a turn based strategy game on the map screen, the second being a real time strategy battle game.
Easing you into the complexities of the game the 'prologue' does an excellent job. It teaches you about the general commands, and almost anything else you want, without using long-winded rambling information that gets tedious. And there is quite a lot to learn so it is worth doing. Once in the main campaign there are cities to run, armies to manage, battles to fight and allies/enemies to keep watch over. There is a huge amount of information to keep track of as you gradually conquer new areas or do deals with other leaders. This will keep you busy for hours and hours and, again, the available help is very useful.
Greek, Carthaginian and Egyptian armies can be played as well as Roman. When playing as a non-Roman army you just try to build an empire, but when playing as a Roman faction the Senate will ask for specific missions to be carried out whilst your empire is, (hopefully), expanding. Sometimes you may struggle as they ask just a little bit too much of you. Each nation has a few unique units at your disposal, which helps make the campaigns different from each other to add to the life span of the game.
The most stunning part of this game though, is the battle section. Which unit's you choose and where you place them plays an important part in the battles. If you just charge in, you could still win, but will probably lose more men in the process, and they cost money to replace. If, however, you make use of the terrain and each unit's ranges, speed and weaponry, you might just come out with a few less dead soldiers. For example hiding units amongst trees can be useful in setting up an ambush, whilst an archers range is increased by placing them on higher ground. The same rules apply to your enemy though. You may be charging your cavalry around to execute a flanking manoeuvre when, oops, an ambush squad wipes them out, causing you to drastically rethink your tactics. A beady eye is needed at all times, and the novelty of zooming right into the thick of the action will usually be sensible only when a battle is as good as won. Killing the enemy general helps, as his army will go into badly organised chaos. The AI of the enemy is spot on. If you don't like this side of the game, (and I can't imagine why), you can always let the computer automatically calculate the winner of a battle.
Everything from the map screen to the individual soldiers on the battlefield, (up to 10,000 of them), are now shown in glorious 3D graphics. The camera can be moved around with ease and then zoomed in extremely close. So close, in fact, that you can be stood in the middle of a battle, in amongst your soldiers wiping out the enemy forces, all in glorious detail.
Careful management of everything is needed. Poorly managed cities can't fund sufficient armies and poorly run armies won't stop invaders conquering your cities. Even with clever management and strategy though, it will be quite some time before you will be saying 'vini, vidi, vici'. There are so many clever touches that I could go on writing for ages. Instead, I'll let you discover them for yourselves and just say that this is a phenomenal game, in which I can not find any faults.
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