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Rome: Total War
Developer:	Creative Assembly
Publisher:	Activision
Release date:	September 22, 2004
Genre:	Real-time strategy
ESRB rating:	Teen (T)
Platform:	PC
Media:	CD

Rome: Total War (or RTW) is a grand strategy computer game where players fight historical and fictious battles during the era of the Roman Republic, from 270 BCE to 14 CE. The game was developed by Creative Assembly and released on September 22, 2004. A demo of the game, which features a playable version of The Battle of the River Trebia, with the player taking the role of Hannibal, was released on August 23, 2004 and is freely available for downloading.

The game features large scale battles of ancient armies with tens of thousands of warriors. The main innovation is a brand new high-quality 3D graphics engine that allows reproduction of large scale battles realistically. Another prominent feature is the integration of the strategic and tactical views - the landscape for the battles is the same as seen on that particular spot on the strategic map where the armies meet.

The player can take the role of generals such as Hannibal, the brilliant Carthaginian general during the Second Punic War, the Gallic warlord Vercingetorix, and Julius Caesar. Among the playable factions are three Roman families (Julii, Brutii, Scipii), the free Greek city-states, Carthage, Gaul, Britannia, Germania, Parthia and the successor states of the Seleucid Empire and Ptolemaic Egypt. Unlike Medieval or Shogun: Total War, there are also many non-playable factions, including the Dacians, Numidians, Scythians and Armenians.

The gameplay is similar to that of its predecessors, Shogun: Total War and Medieval: Total War, although there are some additions like sieges and greatly improved city fights.

Thanks to the realism of both the simulation and the graphics, even before its release a preliminary but completely workable version of the game engine was used in two series of TV programs: Decisive Battles by the History Channel where it was used to recreate famous historical battles, and Time Commanders by BBC Two, where teams of novice nongamers commanded ancient armies to replay key battles of antiquity. The game engine was fine tuned specifically for these television shows by military historians for maximum historical accuracy.

Factions in the game

When Rome is first installed, it will only allow the player to play as one of the three Roman factions: the Julii, the Brutii, or the Scipii. Over the course of a campaign as the Romans, additional factions will gradually be unlocked, up to a total of eight when the player wins the campaign. There are a further nine factions which cannot be unlocked this way, but which play well if unlocked through a user-created modification. Two final factions have special roles in the game, and may cause instability if played.

Roman factions

Rome includes three playable Roman factions: the Julii, the Brutii, and the Scipii (in addition to the unplayable S.P.Q.R.). The three factions start out allied to each other and the Senate, and may not attack each other at the beginning of the game. Each Roman faction can also view the others' map information in real time, a benefit not accorded to any other alliance. However, the factions generally function independently, and a player controlling a Roman faction probably won't bother lending assistance to his allies.

All three factions receive missions from the Senate, but may choose to follow them or not at their leisure. Following Senate missions will increase the player's standing with the Senate, and players in good standing with the Senate will receive progressively greater rewards for completing missions. If one of the Roman factions is unpopular with the Senate, however, the Senate may begin demanding that the faction complete the missions it's assigned, and penalize it if it doesn't.

In addition to Senate standing, Roman factions must keep an eye on their popular standing. In general, popular standing tends to increase as a faction gains more territory—the public likes a conqueror. On the other hand, the Senate tends to get worried when a faction accumulates too much power. At a certain point, the Senate will inevitably request that the player's faction leader commit suicide. As with any Senate demand, the faction may accept or refuse—if it accepts, the faction leader dies and the heir becomes the new faction leader, buying the faction a few more years of Senate toleration before the demand is repeated; if it refuses, the Roman factions are plunged into civil war. The player may also initiate civil war once his popular standing is high enough by simply attacking another Roman faction.

The Julii start out in the northern portion of the Italian peninsula, and they usually focus on fighting barbarian tribes to the north. The Brutii start out toward the middle of the peninsula, and they usually focus on the Greek factions to the east. The Scipii begin in the southern end of Italy, with one province in Sicily, and usually focus on fighting Carthage and Egypt to the south. Other than that, the primary difference between the three factions is temple selection—all factions in the game can build any one of a few temples in their settlements, and each temple has a unique effect on the settlement. It's generally agreed that the Julii have the weakest temples.

The three-faction Roman system in the game is entirely ahistorical. In fact, republican Rome was ruled exclusively by the Senate, which had much more power than is reflected in the game. Individual families might rule small provinces, but expansions to the empire would have been assigned to new governors, not left to the generals who conquered them. Generals, too, were selected by the Senate, and the roles of governorship and generalship were not conflated as they are in the game. The primary reason for the three-faction system is to simulate the civil war that resulted in the end of the Roman Republic. The names of the Roman factions probably derive, respectively, from Gaius Julius Caesar, Marcus Junius Brutus, and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Major, all figures in Caesar's rebellion (although Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus would have been a more logical choice than his follower Brutus).

If the Senate faction is manually unlocked and played by a human player, its role in Roman policy is ignored. Senate missions no longer exist, there are no Senate officers, and there is no Senate or popular standing. If the player attempts to go to the Senate screen, which normally tells Roman factions about these four things, the game crashes.

Barbarian factions

Barbarian factions have certain unique disadvantages. Unlike most civilized factions, they can't build roads more sophisticated than dirt paths, which inhibits their strategic movement. More importantly, their technology is limited to only three city levels, as opposed to five for civilized factions, and thus they tend to achieve their most advanced units quickly. Some players feel that this makes the barbarians boring, since they don't gain new units after a short while into the game.

Gaul starts out with a very large territory, but it's usually attacked by several other factions at once, including the very powerful Julii. Due to this and its disadvantages as a barbarian, it's among the more difficult factions in the game to play. The Gauls have good infantry and good archers, but little cavalry.

Britannia starts out in control of the British Isles, with only a small foothold in mainland Europe. Its armies tend to include chariots.

Germania begins to the east of Gaul. It will usually fight the Gauls at the start. German forces include strong infantry, such as axemen.

Spain begins on the Iberian peninsula. Its armies tend to be more cavalry-oriented than most barbarians, and it usually fights the Carthaginians.

Dacia

Scythia

Other factions

The Greek Cities

Macedon

The Seleucid Empire

Thrace

Egypt

Carthage

Numidia

Parthia

Pontus

Armenia

Rebels

Rome Total War Engine Limitations

Before its release, RTW was marketed to potentional gamers by proclamations of massive, real-time, fully three-dimensional battle scenes being completely accessable to the gaming community at large. However, many veteran gamers were disappointed with the hard-coded engine limitations that cut the advertised experience short.

Battles

Many factors are hard-coded into the engine, limiting the scale of battles. Individual units can only contain up to 240 soldiers, and a maximum of 24000 individual characters can participate in one battle simultaneously. The engine itself, through extensive testing on the Total War Centre forums, has shown to handle only up to about 8000 soldiers in a single battle before exhibiting slowdown, even on the most powerful of computer systems. These figures can only shadow the tremendous scale of ancient Roman battles.

Modification

Another manner in which the game was marketed to the computer elite and veterans to the Total War series was that the game was heavily, if not completely moddable. After the release of the RTW demo, and even before then with the release of beta screenshots showcasing anti-historical, antiquiated Egyptian armies, at least one unofficial modding team was set up with the purpose of making the game as realistic as possible. However, hard-coded limitations of the engine has held up these operations, as well as many other possible modifications and game improvements. The hard-coding of many variables has heavily limited the ability to modify several key areas of the game.

The release of an official 1.2 patch expanded the numerical limits of many hard-coded variables, but left several untouchable hard-coded limitations present within the engine.

See also

• List of factions in Total War games

External links

• Official Game Website
• Important unofficial Game Website
• Another important unofficial game website, including many downloads
• Description of Decisive Battles
• A wiki for the game
• Rome: Total Realism - An unofficial modification of RTW created to provide the most realistic game experience possible

• Real-time strategy computer games
• Activision games