At least, that's the principle goal of each faction. But there's a fourth, unplayable Roman faction, one that can influence your course during the campaign: the Roman senate. The senate will order you on missions, from blockading a hostile port or conquering a city (and perhaps exterminating the populace, depending on the level of enmity between Rome and the faction in question) to forging a trade deal or an alliance with a foreign faction. It's up to you whether you actually obey the order, as sometimes the senate will try to stretch you thin on purpose. If you carry the orders out successfully, you stand to gain a monetary reward, a useful new military unit, or influence in the senate. Failing to carry out missions earns the displeasure of the senate and affects your standing with that body. By and large, though, the senate missions help to focus the otherwise huge scope of the campaign--instead of being faced with the monolithic task of trying to conquer Europe, you can instead look forward to accomplishing a long series of short-term goals.
It's helpful to perform senate missions because they can affect an improved feature in Rome: Total War--families. Each of the three Roman factions is essentially one huge family, and your generals and governors are related to one another by birth, marriage, or adoption. These are the leaders of your faction, and they all have traits--strengths and weaknesses--that define their abilities. A strong general may have an excellent command rating, but his disdain for bureaucracy would make him a poor governor. Meanwhile, an otherwise strong governor may have a dislike of farming, which would affect the agricultural output in the province he's in. But if your family members are selected to hold important senate posts, they'll gain influence and abilities once out of office. This introduces a limited role-playing component in the game, as you actually care about trying to further the careers of your family members so they can serve you better.
In addition to traits, family members--not to mention your spies, assassins, and diplomats--can all attract retinues. These are the hangers-on who surround important people, such as advisors, mentors, bodyguards, lackeys, sycophants, and more. Each of these can affect your characters' abilities. For example, a wrestler can improve a character's influence (by being able to literally twist arms), as well as provide added protection against an assassination attempt. You can actually collect and trade retinue members among your family, so you can transfer them to where they're needed the most.
Thankfully, when you're short of governors, your cities will be taken over by the "automanager," which is represented by an appointed official who runs the city in your name. You can give the automanager certain priorities, such as to follow a military or financial policy, and it will go about constructing the building and units required. (You can also turn on the automanage functionality in cities that do have governors, if you don't want to micromanage at all.) The computer is generally good at doing what you tell it to do, and this should appeal to players who don't want to spend a lot of time on the campaign map. But if you're a fan of grand strategy and want to control every detail, you'll want to make sure you have plenty of family members at your disposal.
The early to middle part of a campaign game can be quite tough, as you'll be hard-pressed on many fronts without a lot of resources at your disposal. In one particularly brutal game, our Julii faction found itself waging battles with Carthage, Spain, and the Gauls on three fronts. However, if you survive and defeat your enemies, you'll eventually have enough resources and momentum to deal with most other threats. The next big challenge occurs when civil war breaks out and you must march on Rome and defeat your rival Roman factions for control of the empire. This late-game development is particularly challenging, as all the core Roman cities have grown to massive size, and their close proximity to one another makes it easy for factions to throw advanced units at one another.
The imperial campaign runs from the early days of the republic to the peak of its power, a period covering approximately 270 years. Given that each turn represents six months--there are summer and winter turns--this means a campaign game can last more than 500 turns. That's surely an epic-scale length, and a campaign can easily consume days, if not weeks, if you decide to play out all the battles. There's also a smaller campaign that only requires your faction to conquer 15 provinces and eliminate your principal rival or rivals. And in addition to being able to play as the three different Roman factions, you can also tackle the campaign game as a foreign faction, such as Carthage, Britannia, or the Gauls. The only prerequisite is that you must crush the faction in question during a campaign in order to unlock it as a playable side. This is a bit annoying, as you'll probably have to play several campaign games to unlock all the playable factions. But these factions are worth unlocking, because they have access to unique units in the game, including chariots, elephants, and axemen. Also, not every faction in the game is playable, so be careful not to get your hopes up.
The campaign itself takes place on a beautiful 3D map that depicts a living, breathing world. Tiny caravans travel the roads and highways, while ships ply the trade routes between ports. During the winter turns, snow covers most of Europe, and that has an effect on units moving and battling in those conditions. But, most importantly, the new map is easy to read and is a big improvement on the board-game-like maps found in earlier Total War games. There are terrain features such as valleys and rivers that serve as natural strategic choke points on the map, and you can place armies in those positions to block them, thereby protecting your cities from sieges. You can also hide armies in forests, which allows them to ambush passing units, to devastating effect.
Of course, the turn-based campaign is only half the story in Rome: Total War, as the most anticipated new feature in the game is the 3D real-time battle engine. The transition from the 2D sprites found in earlier Total War games to Rome's 3D units has an almost revolutionary effect on the battles, as the action comes to life like never before. It's simply amazing to watch battles unfold and to see thousands of soldiers trying to kill each other. Though there a few awkward moments--such as seeing your men scramble around a single soldier they're trying to kill--the carnage is generally well animated and occasionally over the top. You'll see elephants hurl soldiers 30 or 40 feet in the air at times, or see guys fly 20 or more feet after being hit by a cavalry charge. Yet there are countless moments when you can simply zoom in and watch as individual soldiers try to slash and spear each other to death in moments that are reminiscent of the huge battles in recent Hollywood movies.
You'll need a perfect storm of events in order to witness the largest battles possible, so most battles skew toward the smaller scale, with only a couple of thousand troops on the battlefield. These smaller battles still look amazing, and they are easier to manage, as you have fewer troops to worry about. You can pause the action and issue orders at any time, which is extremely helpful, though you don't have that option during a multiplayer game. At the highest detail settings, some of the largest battles and sieges can cause the action to stutter, but even at the lower detail settings the game still looks spectacular. The camera controls take a bit of getting used to at first, but you'll eventually get the hang of it. About the only flaw that we can find in the graphics is that it occasionally feels like you're watching clones on the battlefield, as all the soldiers in a unit look exactly alike. It would have been nice to have seen a little variation in the troops, but most of the time the action onscreen is so hectic you won't notice anyway.
The sound and music during battle also deserve some recognition, since they complement the visuals on the screen very well. When you issue a march order, you hear the stomping of hundreds of boots on the ground and the music changes to a fitting march theme. When battle erupts, the audio stands out, with the clang of steel on shields, the whoosh of spears and arrows in the air, and the cry of thundering elephants. Above it all, the music constantly shifts gears to fit the scene, much like the score to a motion picture. The driving tempo of the music helps sweep you up into the action.
But issues like these are easy to overlook when you consider the big picture. Ultimately, this is a deeply satisfying strategy game that can appeal to game players of all types. If you're looking for a complex, addictive, conquer-the-world campaign, you can look forward to the imperial campaign, which is good for countless hours of gameplay all on its own. Meanwhile, if what you want are realistic, cinematic-style battles, you can dive into the historical battles or the skirmish or multiplayer modes, or have the computer manage all the details in the campaign and just join the battles. And if you're looking for both, then you'll probably find Rome: Total War to be perfectly sublime blend of the two.
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