Asking a question here: I made the mistake of being on Youtube last night and just clicking on an remotely interesting video, which led to me looking up the whole series of Time Commander Battle programmes that used to be on BBC2. Must admit, I loved it when it was on, but it only lasted for a couple of series, probably because there are only so many ways to humiliate the average person. They also had some military personnel on the programme, who completely ballsed it up, if I remember correctly.
Now to my question. That programme used the game engine from the original Total War: Rome, PC strategy game. I wasn't interested in playing it at the time, but I think I wouldn't mind a go these days. Thing is, has anybody played it..? Was/Is it any good..? What were its sequels like..? Did they make a Naval one..? Any other relevant info..? Cheers
I still play it, the battles are great fun, the campaign as a whole will start you as a Roman family controlling a city, with basically the whole of Europe, north Africa and the middle-east split up into nations and city states etc., you have to manage your cities and improve them, and build up armies to conquer the whole Empire. You can fight open battles pretty much anywhere, and besiege/defend cities. Great fun all in all, only problem is that after a while the battles become a bit formulaic (coax enemy infantry into the middle of the battlefield, flank with cavalry... win), although as you expand into north Africa and whatnot different troop types start to crop up which does make things a little more interesting, and you can try and mix up your armies with different configurations to keep things fresh. Also the management of the cities can become a bit wearisome once you have about 20 of them, but you can also just set them to be automatically managed by the AI and just concentrate on matters of blood and steel.
You can pick it up for about a fiver on Steam last time I saw, and of course it's widely available to illegally download. There are various other Total War games, but I've never played any of them so couldn't offer my thoughts on them, but the Shogun intallments, based in Japan I have seen met with a lot of praise.
The actual direct sequel, Total War: Rome II is coming out in about a month, and will include naval battles for (I think) the first time.
I'm sure in all the time I took the time to type that five other people will have said all the same things but I can't be bothered to open another tab and check so never mind!
*EDIT* Forgot to mention you can also just play individual battles outside of the campaign, historical battles, randomly created ones, and ones you can customise yourself. And there's a multiplayer I've never dabbled in.
