I started out by liking this game, then hating it and now I am back to liking it again. The other day I took out an entire rebel army with just 2 of my cavalry units. I must admit my success was due to the AI behaving stupidly and this would not happen against a real player, but it was the kind of fun that I have not had since the old Rome Total War game. But then I went back to the main campaign map and realised that I wanted to reinforce a particular position but could not do it because the game has the most ridiculous feature of not allowing you to split units away from the General's army. Aaaaand back to the hate corner I go. If you have enough patience to deepen yourself in this game it becomes an emotional roller coaster - some features make you want to applause and some make you want to remember in which of the cupboards you left your gun.
Most players it appears have concentrated on ripping this game a new one due to its technical issues and its graphical glitches, but ever since the game was released there has been a wave of patches and fixes, which will proabably continute for a while. At first even the medium size battles would cripple my relatively new computer and now it seems I can have thousands of troops on the field without too much of a problem. See bugs get fixed. Bad gameplay usually doesn't and the main campaign of Rome 2 has a lot of the latter. But to the true fans of the series I suggest to soldier on and try to see all the sides of the game because hidden under the strange gameplay design choices there is a good old Total War game and it can be a lot of fun. Sip it every now and then like wine, don't gulp it.
...unless you don't care at all for real time strategy battles and also only play multiplayer, in which case stay the f. away from this game at the moment because the campaign map and the multiplayer are messed up.