Rome II - Total War
I have been playing Rome2 for a while now and I must say I am impressed by the game. The developers made huge changes compared to the old games of the series and even though I don't like all the new stuff I must say that in the all it has improved the game a lot. Just before summer after LaraCroft I started playing for the first time Mediaval Total War 2 which is quite an old game already. I wasn't impressed; it was just like the old Total War games with "Only" graphical improvements. But in this last game it isn't just graphics that has been improved but the game also.
The new interface
Is much better than the old one, because it just leaves more space on the screen, and today when we use all bigger and bigger computer screens we don't want to have huge icons. The interface is still to big sometimes but it much better than the old one.
What I loved the most with the new interface is the ability to cancel an attack after seeing the battle deployment. So if you see that you will probably lose you just cancel your attack. Before we used to save before trying to attack and see what is going to happen; if we lost we would load again the game 
while talking about the Battle Deployment, they have also changed the way it evaluates your probability of wining. Before if you had a good general and an army of veterans, even if the odds were against you, you would go to battle. Because you new numbers weren't as important as experience. Well now if the game puts the odds against you, you will lose. It already takes in account your troops experience, superior amour...
Creating and Maintaining armies
In all old Total wars while I played, my armies got smaller and smaller, and I had to refill them with new units. But I always had armies were all units had taken severe damage. Repairing armies were just to complicated, you had to send them into a city and if that city could recruit that kind of soldiers, then you could refill the ranks of the units. Of course while conquering territory this was near impossible to do; you never had time and the citys around you were rarely producing the units you wanted. That is why you had to transport armies from all over you territory to continue your campaign.
In Rome 2, you armies will regenerate as long as they are in your territory, no need to give explicit orders it will do it automatically, it takes more time but as your army is constantly regenerating while you are conquering new territories in stays in quite good shape. And that is just great.
Another important change is the way generals are handled by the game, you are the one that selects the generals you are interested in having and as they win battles you will decide which skills they need to improve on. This new system has a big drawback; it doesn't allow you to split your armies. You can transfer troops from one army to another but you can't split 1 existing army into 2. And that is not great. That means you must always go to war with a few armies, 1 strong army to conquer, and a few smaller ones to patrol the surroundings of your new cities in order to prevent your enemies to retake the citys while the bulk of your army is taking another of their cities. Still this isn't as terrible as it sound, because city's can now defend them self better than they used to.
Regions and Cities
The city system has also been change, is it better? Well it is but I also liked the old system. What I really like is the way you can predict a uprising. An uprising takes time; you need to make people miserable a few turns before they rise. They don't go from being happy from 1 turn to another. The other change is that every region has villages, and a city only. The villages are connected to the city, so you might have a unhappy village but a happy region, what is important is the region. The region needs to "produce" happiness not every village city you have. And that makes things much easier to control in the game.
lastly every city and village, has it's own soldiers that you can't take out from the city. Improving the city will increase the number of those soldiers and their skill. This is actually quite logical, and nice. It makes conquest faster because you armies doesn't shrink as you leave man behind at each city you conquer. What I didn't like is the fact that you can't use the militia of the main city of the region to come in help to one of the villages.
Conclusion
There are many more new things in the game, the soldiers that can travel on sea easily, just get them to a city with a port and they will embark. But there is some of the problems that are still there, everything is still much to slow, it takes too much time to move armies and to build stuff. What I liked the less is this researching technology business; that Civilisation stuff, not Total War. There other few things that might have been taken from Civ, but all of them fit well, but not this.
Pros
- Graphics
- New Interface
- New army management
- Armies travel on sea automatically throught any port. No need to create transport
- New Diplomacy tool
- Very good campaign
Cons
- Gameplay still to slow
- Each turn takes to much time, easily 5 minutes of just waiting.
- This isn't Civ and it should not become Civ.