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...
