Total War: ROME II - Emperor Edition

The building features are historically correct, and the resolution is great, if you have a computer, which has enough pixels.

If you really enjoy the single player, then recommended for sure. However, the multiplayer is very laggy, and crashes on campaign constantly and especially when entering manual battles. trying to bugfix went over the playtime, and now can't refund. {REFUND UNLESS ONLY PLAYING FOR SINGLE PLAYER}

Despite its flaws, years of patches and a phenomenal modding community has gone a long way. Lots of fun to be had here, especially with overhaul mods like DEI.

At over 400 hours I can safely say this is the best grand stratergy game out there. The mix if historical events and accuracy along with the co op campaign makes for some really epic gaming experiences. The mod community is incredible, Divide et Impera in particulary. CA please listen to your fans. It's time to make a new historical title - Medieval III!

Good game, too expensive for a decade old game for new players.

Love this game. Wish I had the patience to play through an entire campaign. I normally do a full play through in one go, and I get burned out. I need to take breaks and try again. It does get repetitive after awhile but I still love it. The mods make it better imo.

This is by far best historical total war after middle ages 2. This game is great lot of DLCs and amazing campaigns. Must buy on sale for RTS and Total war fans. All old issues are fixed and still the game looks amazing after 10 years. I would have liked the game to use more VRAM based on modern systems and maybe make the game 64bit or release a 64bit version of this game.

A must buy game for all historical and RTS fans,

I have sunk 1100 hours into this game.

Will I get any of that life back?

No.

Do I regret it?

Absolutely not.


If you want to dive into a Total War sinkhole, this is the best place to start. Rome II really shows the best, in my opinion, in terms of graphics, gameplay, and game quality, of the whole franchise, and even though at times it might be repetitive, the workshop community for this game is astonishing, even for this being a 12 year old game. To cut it short, this game does not feel this old, and is really a good way to channel your wannabe general (even if at times you are horrendous..)

And rest in pieces to the chat mechanic. It will be sorely missed but oh well.

Love the whole series. Amazing game made even better by user mods! A must have imho.

The current Rome II edition is a definite upgrade compared to its predecessors like Rome I or its revamped version. I started from Total War: Medieval Age II and the transition to Rome II is doable as long as you give it a few hours to learn the mechanics. Enjoyed the game very much, except for sea battles - limited choices and slightly lost due to the lack of tutorials.

This is just about the only game I play anymore. I'm a general fan of the Total War series, but this title is my "go-to". Perfect balance of accessibility and detailed depth. You always want to go one more turn. The economic, diplomatic, and military portions of the game all play a significant role. Every civilization is unique. This game has almost infinite replay potential. 10/10

Addicting, Fun, strategic decisons affects overall outcomes especially on hard mode.

multiplayer is fun but lacks any drive to continue.

very well done game, co op campaigns can lead to very entertaining nights with a buddy

Fundamentally broken Battle system compared to older Total War.

The base game is excellent, but with the Para Bellum mod collection, it's FANTASTIC if you're into wargaming ancient peoples.

It took me around 20 hours to gain some understanding of the campaign mechanics. While the battles are relatively simple to get (and I was familiar with the TW series), I can't say the same about managing your empire - the poor UI plays a role here as well. The DEI mod adds some layers of complexity too. Watching some tutorials was pivotal in this process.

In short, what an amazing game! Forget about the vanilla and go straight to the DEI mod. All my comments here are based on the DEI mod.

You won't build your empire with decisive battles in a few turns. The First Punic war took 60 years and the DEI mod seems to be dimensioned to replicate the same pace of developments.

The battles are not super tactical. I missed more complex maps, where you can explore the geography in your favor (sometimes you can find a path to flank your enemies while keeping your units hidden). But watching the battles unfold is really satisfying.

Get it if you can find it on sale!

Rome II was a mixed bag when it released in 2013 because not only was it graphically more demanding than Shogun II (and looked bad if not run on the highest settings & still had jaggies at 1080p), but even gameplaywise, was a product of its time, when more complex campaign strategy games from Paradox Interactive were taking off, so back then Creative Assembly told themselves, our consumers have become big boys, let’s give them a complex game that will make the mechanics of previous Total War games look like child’s play.

So let’s first talk about the campaign map's changes. But I’ll be honest, every TW game has had an overhaul of its campaign map mechanics. Where Rome I had a simple system of the world map divided into provinces with each having a province capital with the same build list, and Medieval II splitting these into a City type & Castle type, while Empire, Napoleon & Shogun II distributed some of their buildings over the province itself on the campaign map in the form of smaller settlements like farms and mines that could be pillaged by enemy armies, in Rome II the buildings are all back inside the cities again, but the world map is divided into historical provinces (like “Italia”), and each province can consist of upto 4 regions. Each region has a city, but only the biggest city in each province, already predetermined at the start of the game, is walled, while the rest aren’t. Furthermore, while wealth is unique to every region, happiness levels and culture are averaged for the entire province as a summation of activity in ALL regions of that province, i.e. even unrest/temples from neighboring regions controlled by other factions!

Because previous TW games had been plagued by a plethora of individual military units moving about on the campaign map, especially AI units that made some factions’ turns particularly long, the next departure from previous TW games is that in Rome II, you cant recruit units in cities, nor move them about on the campaign map. Instead, both are done on stacks led by generals. This had been sort of introduced in Empire TW and beyond already, but it was a different system where the unit would still get recruited at the city and then march all the way across the campaign map to your general, taking several turns depending on how far away he was. In Rome 2, the units automatically appear in the general’s army next turn, and you can also raise more units at a time than in previous TW games. Same regarding the navy. Instead of built at a port, you have to first enlist an admiral and can then recruit more ships through him. What you can recruit is determined by the level of military building/port in the region they are in. But buildings are just small icons.

You have an upper limit on how many generals/stacks you can appoint based on your overall faction strength. This also means that in order to swap units, two of your stacks/generals have to meet face-to-face rather than send each other units across a distance, thereby wasting movement as you have to both meet up in one spot. Merging two of the same, partially depleted troops has been made harder in that you can’t drag the unit card and drop it onto the other like in previous TW games, but have to select both (using ctrl) and only then does the merge option turn from grey to available. Similarly, armies and fleets also cant just raid enemy land and sea trade routes by right clicking on them on the campaign map, but must set their “stance” to raiding, that limits their movement and such. On the pro side, other movement stances are available, like forced march that gives you a big movement bonus at the expense of line of sight, morale and any attack automatically becoming an ambush.

This new system also means you cant just quickly raise an army when you see the AI approaching one of your cities with the intent on taking it, unless you purposely keep a spare general ready to be deployed anywhere on the map. Otherwise, if all your generals are out conquering somewhere else on the campaign map, your cities will have to rely on their own garrison they generate as was introduced with Empire TW and beyond. Number and quality of the garrison is based on the level of the main administrative building of that province, supplemented by the military building/dock.

While such things were easier to see on the campaign maps of previous TW games in the form of grey blips, garrison size is a mere footnote found in the description of Rome II’s settlement buildings, so you have to do some careful reading. In general there is more reading in Rome II and things feel less intuitive compared to previous TW games.

Rome II is also known for its amphibious battles, i.e. where ships full of soldiers come to also take part in a land battle and have cool disembarking mechanics, whereby your units jump off their ship and charge into battle, and you can choose on which part of the coastline the ship will beach. Naval battles on the other hand, are atrocious (if you don’t know what you’re doing) compared to the fine wine that was Empire/Napoleon and decent mediocrity that was Shogun 2. In Rome II’s naval battles, ramming is the name of the game as it is completely overpowered, turning certain ships into bumpercars you need to micromanage – as often a single ram is enough to break up an entire enemy ship packed with soldiers and make everyone drown. Okay, this may have been a transport ship but still.

Speaking of, your land armies can now march into water and are converted into a fleet of transport ships. However, they still need a proper navy as escort, because otherwise they are very vulnerable to drowning by ramming and should not be used for either boarding actions, or ranged exchanges due to their weak hulls.

The “action camera” that was introduced Empire TW onward by pressing the ‘insert’ key is now a button found on the lower left of the battle map and it now also allows you to look around by moving the mouse and return to the main camera by pressing Esc.

The other major improvement over previous TW titles are cities during battle. While they didn’t exist at all in Empire and Napoleon and were the generic japanese castle with 1, 2 or 3 terraces in Shogun II, in Rome II each city feels like it was hand crafted by the devs. Some cities for example are at the foot of a mountain with their city walls ending at the slope of the mountain, while others are at the coast. Nothing looks generic or repetitive, each has a different layout. However, the AI doesn’t use the streets to its advantage or defend central squares. You don’t even win if you take these points (as they only grant a morale bonus to the attacker and losing them a penalty to the defender) and instead have to rout the entire garrison that just loiters at the city’s edge, unless it’s the walled province capital which they do a better job of defending.

Then there’s the politics section in the game. If you play as Rome, you start as a republic (and can later switch to an empire) with a senate where each “party” is an influential house/family: Julii, Junii, Cornelii, and two more, with differing amount of seats in the senate that is based on gravitas. No matter your faction family pick, each of your starting characters (2 generals and 1 admiral) is of a different family and along with other stats like ambition or zeal, each has gravitas, which is a counter that adds to their family's influence each turn. The more experience your generals gain, the more their gravitas. Your goal is to keep a balance of influence in the senate. If one family grows too powerful, there will be civil war and your united empire will break apart. You can balance influence between the families by having your family members (like your general's wife) do other families a favor to increase that family’s loyalty to yours, or spread rumors to lose gravitas, or assassinate characters of that family which play no role on the campaign map. Overall, a complex game!

Can't recommend this game anymore even with 600+ hours attached to it due to terrible tech support and CA just being terrible. reinstalled the game recently to scratch the itch and game wont even start anymore, hit play, hit play on the launcher, and nothing. Tried everything to get it to work. Spent more time configuring files than it takes to choose a faction and do your first 10 turns. If this ever gets fixed I'll change my review, but highly doubt it ever will get changed. CA you ruined such a great franchise.

Nice graphics and large scale battles, what's not to like?! Huge replayable value too with other factions.

Despite the lack of end turn notifications for a lot of things, which does annoy me coming from warhammer 2 and 3, the game feels great to play as. Fucktons of factions to play as where each faction may not be as unique as in the aformentioned games, but still feels distinct and fun in their own right, both in battle and on the campaign map.

Very fun game, as long as you're fine with seeing the occasional levitating dead bodies, then i would definitely recommend it.

Still a good game even now. Some of the mods are great as well (1100AD).

Probably the last good total war game ever made. Warhammers are pretty lackluster at this point and the investments that the developer takes seem to heavily influence how and what games they make next.

This game in Empire Total War aren't without flaws though as both struggle with the new engine that they released to perform certain tasks they're very poor at handling any sort of cavalry charge the AI when it comes to it messes up I can't keep the formation right, And it's often a struggle to have units on any sort of wall. Which are two massive components to this game in the real time battles.

I think this game is also missing some scale too they did simplify the campaign map on the grain campaign so that there is very few provinces in Italy and everywhere else too but I think they are missing the mark by performing this instead of doing what say Europa Universalis does and makes it so that each country is like playing a game within their own sphere of influence and then once they condense that area they move on to the world stage to start performing actions.

They've thoroughly milked people for their money off of the Warhammer licensing for this engine though and I think it's probably time for them to get a new one and I'm hoping that they'll be back to their standard glory days once they get rid of this engine

Divide et Impera Mod is all you need. Close to beating Napoleon as my favorite Total War.

Bought this game in 2024. Still an amazing game, ahead of its time really.

I love this game but I can't, in good conscience, recommend it.... If you enjoy total war grand campaigns. After turn 100 or so the game just freezes when entering battles at the campaign map.

Please do not purchase as the dev's have 0 plans on fixing these core issues. I have tried with and without mods and the end result is the same.

If you want a good, relatively stable Total War, go with Total War Shogun 2.

After 7 years abstaining from this amazing game, I thought I'd pick it up again, but sadly I became the victim of the "loading screen bug" lottery. I may come back in another 7 years.

cool political system, not as polished combat compared to newer total war games.

This game is inconceivable pure shit garbage without DEI mod

DEI full carries this game, but unfortunately core gameplay is afk simulator and fighting retard ''AI''

I really love this game, probably my favourite total war title so far, the diversity of factions, and unit rosters make for a unique experience, and plenty of replayability for those who are eager to explore all the elements of the game. Not to mention to gorgeous graphics for a game that it more than ten years old. I absolutely recommend this Total War entry !

Loved this game and played hundreds of hours growing up. Unfortunately, since Windows 11 has come out, this game will not run battles - i.e. more than 50% of the overall game. CA have no fixes or even an acknowledgement of this issue, making it unplayable today and completely dead. Shame, but that's CA for you.

very compplicated for a beginner- dont play normal on first try and try to get to know this complexx game

Siege, naval and land battles along with economic strategy is super fun.

I like this game. I loved the original and this one has better graphics. However the UI is different and it requires getting used to, so you won't be Alexander in your first hour of gameplay.

Has that classic 'one more turn' feel without being overloaded with mechanics from newer games. Overall, enjoyable and addictive.

I've tried a few other Total War games and I enjoy strategy games. With a couple of tweaks from the in-house mod manager I will be pouring hundreds of more hours into this game steadily until I find a strategy game more fun than this. It's sleek, accessible, easy to set up and engaging. The custom battle mode alone has kept me going for years because of the Rubik's cube assortment of different battles you can create. It's the best strategy sandbox I've found on the market and the flavour of autism I have means watching thousands of soldiers running, fighting and charging around random areas of Europe will NEVER get old. This is the Total War game I would recommend for anyone wanting to kick off any affair with the series. The controls are the most intuitive I've used, the battles are engaging and the single-player has the 'one more turn' spell baked right into it.

I'd recommend this to anyone with even just a flickering interest in strategy or if they have the same flavour of autism I clearly have...

The logic for this game is unforgivable. You kill the enemy, and it announces you lost. You hold out when it says "You will win if this timer runs out" and you lose the battle, and the town even though you held out until the timer ended.

It's so full of bugs and blips (like not being able to exit the game through the in-game menu without it locking up), that it outweighs whatever positives the game had. Playing the game for hours only to have these egregious cheats foisted upon you is chair-hurling, table-flipping levels of frustration.

That, plus the whole political system and family tree is so overwrought and distracting from the game of strategy and tactics that used to be the good Total War titles (Medieval, Shogun 2, even Warhammer).

The graphics are genuinely still good, it plays well without mods, performance is good, and it's bloody stable. Why would I ever want to play TW Greece when you can just play as the Greeks in Rome 2? Modern TW games and their stupid super tanky hero units can go straight to the garbage bin. Combat that flows well is 100% better than a slightly improved diplomacy system.

10/10 would send mercenaries to their deaths to avoid paying their ridiculous upkeep costs again.

Very fun not hard to learn strategy game, also quite historically if compared to other historical games

To make it perfect, I disable civil wars. It takes all your resources to fight the barbarians. I don't like killing off my army every hour or two. I have tried to maintain their loyalty, but it takes lots of effort out of the game play. So get a mod to make it less of a headache. I will play 426 more hours of this, until Rome total war 3 is released. As a Latin Teacher, I approve of this game.

Doesn't work any more everytime a battle opens up it crashes.

idk why this game gets so much hate, its fun and ads a whole new and larger variety of DLCs , updated grsphics, and has the same characteristics to its counter part, granted its still a fun game and i like that one just as much as i like this one, all though it is kinda hard to play with lag, but thats not because of the game itself its because im not playing on an advanced computer, overall pretty fun and you can see why its the most popular total war game.

I bought this game on release, and was expecting alot from it, I was disappointed with the amount of bugs, bad ai, removal of certain things from the older games, not to mention a somewhat predatory dlc policy.

Anyhow at this point, this emperor edition and attila are my two favourite total war games, with mods of course. Excellent game.

Really lacking compared to old titles. Poorly balanced and most importantly, not really fun.

Main issues I had with this game:
Tech tree, the tech tree in this game is weird. It feels like it doesn't need to be there. Most give small % modifiers, others unlock buildings, but the important military ones are easy to rush out. It just kind of sucks and doesn't need to be there in my opinion. Shogun 2 tech tree was pretty solid compared, with strategic planning to get the most out of your desired strategy (if somewhat limiting due to META strats).

Unlocking factions, seriously. This is one thing I disapprove of in the TW games. I buy the game thinking it will be cool to play X faction and find out I am forced to play another.

Loading times: saving, booting up the game, loading takes ages. Also had some crashes the quit the game and its just fustrating to deal with.

'No' proper OST, seriously guys, come on. One of the best parts of a game experience.

Cannot trade regions/province system, in this game they introduce the province system which encourages you to obtain certain grouped regions for a bonus and to consolidate culture/growth. What i find actually happens is it nonstop encourages you to keep attacking nonstop as you often finish wars with 'loose' regions, also you cannot trade regions with anyone using diplomacy so allies can permanently block you and you them. The AI really seems to struggle with getting the best out of the system as well.

Force March/AI cheats vision/movement cheats annoying. In older TW games you might not even notice them. But in this game it is obvious AI will 'never' make a mistake when moving an army (with one turn foresight). They will never move into your region (which they should have no vision) in a vulnerable state, or even in a state you can attack them, they skirt the movement range of your units perfectly. The force march mechanic makes it so you can move units faster while making them vulnerable, but the AI can use it without consequence as it can skirt your movement range with its vision cheat. Effectively making the AI just more annoying to catch. It doesn't even make the AI 'better' really from my experience as they can't see ahead of their next move. Often they march right on deep into your region, get a region then get wrecked, lose it immediately from moving to deep and not dealing with your forces. Odd behaviour really.

So navy, main reason for wanting a navy is to transport troops or defend trade, Or transport lone agents, explore. They can also attack coastal regions and islands, which is kind of neat. But they are weaker then a proper army on the field. Thing is all of their roles are not worth the cost. For the cost of a navy you could have two armies, which would perform more roles, be better at combat and train quicker. Navy trains slower then armies and has high upkeep. The system requiring a leader unit means using a single ship to transport agents or explore puts a noble at risk, which is not a huge deal but seems weird to commission and admiral for a one ship explore mission. The worst part is all armies can just magically move and attack on the sea anyway, albeit being less effective I had 8 armies at one point and thought a navy might be cool or a good thing to try and realised it would never be worth what I could get for the same cost in army.

Adding auto resolve 'choices'
So when you fight a battle you have the choice to go aggressive, balanced or defensive in autoresolve. These choice should not exist. We are obviously going to go for the better predicted autocome, these are 'false' choices. All the serve to do is buff the players autoresolve chance as they get the opportunity to 'pick' from different calculations.

Traits/Perks/Agents
Being 'idle' with generals gives them bad traits which encourages you to just constantly attack or do weird things like moving them around with useless micro for no reason.
When it comes to leveling and traditions, about half are so bad they don't exist in my eyes and if you consider that, well its very shallow.
The agent limit and cost of doing actions is very limiting, I had this problem with Shogun 2, I thought it would be fun to play Hattori, oh boy was I wrong. Bringing back this was a bad idea. Perhaps absolute spam of units like medieval was not great but I can have 8 armies and only 2 spies? Really. I end of using champions and dignitaries as spies. Also using spies AS SPIES does not grant them experience, a problem from way back in medieval tw.

This isn't unique to this TW but I found this game way to easy even on a first playthrough, they AI just hasn't improved over time at all. Due to the way units work, regions, alliances the poor balance, mercenaries and importantly the AIs choices due to their vision cheats and 'perfect' movement (ironically making them do stupid things like force marching your capital while you are threatening theirs). I never had to fight a single battle manually. I autoresolved myself to victory.

I am not even going to go into individual units which is its own rabbit hole as I can't be bothered and it would take to long. But a problem I had with even the older rome tw is the lack of unit variety. Don't be fooled by my play time, I left this game idling a lot, long loading times and leaving a pc on a night do this.

I tried a couple mods to improve things and it did help but still wasn't good enough.

Excellent game. Still worth playing more than a decade after release.

Still one of the BEST TW games out there;

Great value DLC's with one exception (blood and gore)
Potentially thousands of hours of playtime.

The only "recent" TW game I come back to regularly.

For reference, I've been playing TW games since Rome around 2006 and was an even bigger fan of Medieval II. I am halfway through a Rome II campaign now and I think this is THE BEST YET. Some things that come to mind:

Rome II in its current state is a fun game which received lots of love to get it to this state, because oh my gosh on release especially considering the advertising and the games that came before it in the series it was terrible. Unfortunately, in a lot of ways it is still too little too late, and if you look at what Creative Assembly has released in the series following this they did not learn their lessons from the failures of this game and have since doubled down on those failures. Any game in the total war series after this one suffers from the lack of character, lack of polish, and blatant cash grabby attitude that has come to dominate the series.
What does this mean for you as the prospective buyer? These games can be fun, I think you can get good value out of them, but understand that this company at one time was capable of accomplishing far more and giving you a far better product, but either through incompetence or greed they have chosen not to. I think its important you know you're being served fast food and being told its fine dining.

Great game, probably my fav strategy game, the ancient historic battles are huge in scale and epic. Expanding your territory across the campaign map is engaging and it is always interesting to see how things shape up across the world as time goes on (who else has grown into a large empire, what wars are going on, etc). The inclusion of many interesting factions from the 1st-3rd centuries BC with their own cultures and unit types as well just makes for an epic reenactment of ancient warfare that is simply unmatched!

great game and with a lot of mods, every Playthrough feels like a different game