Rome: Total War is the third game in the Total War franchise of strategy games. Starting around the time of the First Punic War, the game allows the player to take control of one of several factions vying for supremacy in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. As the title suggests, Rome is one of the big players here, and is in fact divided up between three families, the Julii, Scipii and Brutii, and the Senate. If the player controls a Roman faction, his goal is not merely to forge an empire for himself, but, when the time comes, to take on the other Roman factions in a brutal civil war. The ultimate goal is to be declared Emperor.As with the other games in the Total War series, Rome: Total War is a mixture of Real Time Strategy and Turn Based Strategy. This entry introduces several changes compared to the previous games, however. For one, the units on the battle field are now depicted in full 3d, rather than the sprites used in Shogun: Total War and Medieval: Total War. The campaign map has been changed from Risk-style movement of troops between provinces to a more detailed turn-based game that allows precise positioning of armies. When two enemy armies meet, they fight a battle in real-time, with the landscape reflecting that of the campaign map.Two expansion packs were released. Barbarian Invasion depicts the situation in the late 4th century AD: The Roman Empire has split into two halves, the Western and the Eastern Empires, and the Western Empire is in a dire state. Countless Barbarian tribes are trying to settle the lands of the dying realm, while themselves trying to avoid being swallowed up by the rapidly expanding kingdom of the Huns. It is up to the player to take control of a Barbarian tribe and carve out a kingdom of his own, or to take control of one of the halves of the old Roman Empire and try to forge a new Pax Romana.Alexander, the second expansion, sees the player recreate the campaigns of Alexander the Great. With the help of BRIAN BLESSED.
This game provides examples of:
Absolute Xenophobe: This (and it's inversion, xenophile) are possible personality traits for family members and generals. "Xenophobe" makes it easier for governors to root out spies and hatred of specific foreigners (ex. "Hates Carthaginians") will increase a general's command rating when fighting that type of enemy.
Afraid of Blood: "Hemophobic" is a possible trait for generals. Having it decreases his command rating as well as troop morale.
Compared to other games in the series, Rome caused an outcry among history buffs in its fandom. Most egregious were the Egyptians, who looked like New Kingdom Egypt, i.e. several centuries before the game was set. A number of mods have since come out to make the game much more accurate, the most notable being Europa Barbarorum.
In the vanilla version of Barbarian Invasion, any faction that fell under the "Nomad" category had Hellenic voices, for some reason. It can be truly jarring to hear a Gothic warlord refer to you as "strategos"! Thankfully, patches were released to rectify this.
Annoying Arrows: Averted, for the most part. Arrows can really ruin your day. In fact, the Greek City State's cavalry was made just to get rid of archers, and only archers. Played straight with the right tactics for the Roman factions, due to being able to use the testudo formation after the Marian Reforms event. This will allow your legionaries to march around unimpeded by arrows unless they're from the back, allowing you to approach walls with impunity. Roman legions in general tend to be tough to take down with missiles from the front anyway.
Rome: Spears, though unlike in previous Total War titles, cavalry no longer suffer from bad terrain. In general, however, cavalry are extremely vulnerable to infantry and any cavalry unit trying to take a heavy infantry unit on from the front can expect defeat unless they use the cavalry cycle, charging in and out repeatedly to hammer the opponent. Even then, the infantry have just as good a chance of pulling through, and bear in mind we're talking sword infantry here, not phalanxes or spearmen, even short spearmen who don't get the bonus but still seem to be good at giving cavalry hell. This is justified, as infantry were the dominant feature in the Roman world (the lack of stirrups limited cavalry effectiveness), particularly heavy infantry. The exception is the cataphract, which can give anything short of a front-facing phalanx a serious beating.
Barbarian Invasion: The expansion pack is worth mentioning separately because cavalry are far more effective in this version, as the quality of the Roman legions decline, phalanxes become extinct and the heavy cavalry of all factions get better. Spearmen once again become the real answer to cavalry; just throwing heavy infantry at the cavalrymen no longer guarantees a good result.
Arrows on Fire: You can order your archers to set their projectiles alight, but doing so makes them burn through their ammo supply twice as fast, and the arrows take longer to reload, are much less accurate, and don't do as much damage. However, they are quite effective as breaking enemy morale, and of course can set fire to siege equipment, buildings and ships. You can also order your catapults and ballistae to fire flaming rounds.
Artifact Title: The Alexander expansion historically takes place before Rome became a major power.
Witness what happens when two sides use WAY too much cavalry to fight on a bridge? Most of them end up drowning themselves.
AI armies do not seem to take arrows very seriously. Marching your army up to your enemy's so your archers are just in range will allow you to decimate their ranks. The enemy army will just stand there and take it (unless your archers are exposed, in which case they will attempt a cavalry charge.) This is even worse when an AI army is attempting to assault a city. If you destroy a piece of their siege equipment, the unit that was operating it will just stand around it (or, at best, regroup behind it) allowing your archers and towers to pick them them.
Ascended Extra: A Captain (the default leader of an army when no General is present) who wins an epic battle can be adopted into the ruling family, allowing him to become a General, governor, and possibly even the eventual Faction Leader.
Atop a Mountain of Corpses: Corpses persist for the duration of battles, which can lead to this. Especially in a spot where two lines of evenly matched infantry came together. Units can still fight over top of the corpses with no ill effect, however.
Attack! Attack... Retreat! Retreat!: Units with low morale have a tendency to rout the very moment a stronger enemy unit engages them. I hope you have some cavalry to run them down from behind before they can regroup...
War Elephants. You WILL lose a lot of money in the event that they panic and run amok. And to make things worse, their greatest weakness is flaming arrows. Used in the right situation, however, they can be deadly for enemy morale.
Chariots are expensive, few in number, and rather easy to counter.
Arrows on Fire. The flaming projectiles look awesome while severely depleting enemy morale. They can also set siege equipment on fire and cause war elephants to run amok.
Badass: Depending on their personality traits, your Generals can fit any number of the "Badass _____" tropes. A General with the "Intelligent" trait or who has a "Tutor" ancillary would be a Badass Bookworm. A General who also has a lot of great governing skills would be a Badass Bureaucrat. The list goes on...
Badass Family: As your faction is controlled by one clan, and your Generals are all born from or marry into it, this can easily result.
Bag of Spilling: Any ancillaries a character has will be lost upon that character's death. However, the ancillaries can be moved to another character if they are both in the same city. (If diligent, you can pass the same ancillary on through 10 generations of your family.)
Barbarian Tribe: Plenty, and some of them are playable. As the title suggests, they play an especially major part in the Barbarian Invasion expansion pack.
The Berserker: The Germans can recruit berserkers as a unit.
Big Screwed-Up Family: Since the personality traits of your family members can be passed on to their children, this can easily happen with negative traits. Gods help you if "Insane," "Ugly," "Greedy," and the like keep getting passed on.
Blood Lust: Several personality traits for Generals describe this. At a low degree, this trait will add to their ability to command and weaken the morale of enemy troops but at higher degrees, it can severely weaken the morale of your own troops.
Bodyguarding A Badass: Even the most battle-hardened Generals can have ancillaries that fit this description. (Bodyguard, Shield Bearer, Guard Dog, etc.) This also fits the General's personal unit of guards in battle.
Boring, but Practical: The Roman faction is either this or Awesome Yet Practical. Nearly all factions have a unit or two who are better than the Romans at something, or more pleasing, but very few factions have a unit that's better overall than their Roman equivalent.
BRIAN BLESSED: He narrates and voices Alexander the Great in the Alexander expansion.
Cannon Fodder: Peasants. They have weak-to-no armor or weapons, have extremely poor moral and are prone to routing almost immediately. However, they can be useful to simply pad an army's numbers (allowing you to build more siege equipment per turn) and can be used to garrison a newly acquired city (preventing revolt) so that your main army can move on right away. They can also be dissolved in a city with a very low population, allowing you to re-recruit them as better units.
Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Sometimes it feels like allying with a neighboring faction is basically an invitation for them to attack you unprovoked...
Crippling Overspecialisation: A Skirmish Faction is a faction that is strong on hit-and-run tactics but is weak in a head-to-head fight. This is due to the fact that their unit roster does not have any good-quality heavy infantry. And in most of the battles of the Ancient era, Heavy infantry were the core of many armies. As a result, Skirmish Factions are weak and difficult to use in multiplayer due to their lack of a reliable heavy infantry unit.
Greek City-states have excellent Spear Infantry which is balanced out by their sub par archer and cavalry units.
Rome has the best Infantry of the entire game while their cavalry and archers can't compare to many other factions.
Parthia's Horse Archers, Archers, and Cataphracts are balanced out by their crappy infantry and financially poor provinces.
Carthage had good infantry and good cavalry but their biggest weakness was having no archers.
Egypt's units are very good in the desert but aren't of much value outside of that particular terrain. They become hopeless in high-money battles because of their lack of armor.
The Dev Team Thinks of Everything: Fight next to a city and you'll be able to see it almost entirely on the battle map. Fight near the ocean with a fleet nearby, and you can see the ships on the edge of the map, in the background. Fight next to one of the Wonders and you'll see it in the distance. Fight a battle in Sicily, and you'll see Mt. Etna spewing smoke on the horizon. Rome is the first game in the series that introduces the concept of buildings catching fire and collapsing into piles of rubble if they're heavily damaged by siege weapons.
Digitized Sprites: Units will change from 3d models to digitized sprites when they are far enough away from the camera, to improve system performance.
Playing as Parthian in Rome. Sure, they have huge tract of land, but most of it is simply miles upon miles of empty wilderness with cities few and far between. This means that corruption is very high and troop waypointing is tedious. Their forte are horse archers, which is counterintuitive to use and counts as very weak in auto-battle. As if that's not enough, they start out next to the Seleucid and the unstoppable force that is Egypt. However, get to high-tier horse units... and they will become the Timurids of 3rd century BCE.
Playing as the Greek Cities in Rome as well. Your starting territories are spread out and you'll almost instantly be attacked on all sides. (The Brutii Romans in western Greece, the Scipii Romans and Carthaginians in Sicily, the Macedonians in northern Greece, and possibly the Pontic and/or Seleucid factions in Turkey.) If you can survive however, you'll have access to some of the most awesome infantry in the game (particularly the Spartan hoplites,) and some of the most profitable territories as well.
Playing as the Western Roman Empire in Barbarian Invasion. They start off like their Eastern/Byzantine counterparts with a lot of territory...only of most of that to either split off in rebellion or fall to the arriving tribes, their legions aren't what they used to be and there's also the clashing dynamic between Christians and Pagans. But despite those setbacks, they're still one of the more powerful factions in-game, and should said issues be resolved can be nigh unstoppable.
End of an Age: The Barbarian Invasion expansion takes place at the twilight of the Roman Empire. While it's possible to fend off the hordes as either East or West (and even regain some lost glories along the way), the game makes it very clear that the Classical World has passed on.
Enemy Civil War: The Barbarian Invasion expansion features possible civil wars in the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, as well as the division of the Gothic faction into Ostrogoths and Visigoths.
Evil Pays Better: You can enslave the population of a captured city; it disperses the enemy population around other cities with governors; be careful, as while this relieves you of the squalor problems in addition to your unrest woes in the captured city, it can cause problems in the cities you dispatch the slaves to. Check where you have situated your governors. Or just kill most of them, which gives you even more money.
Exposed to the Elements: Some of the units do not look like they could survive in frigid conditions for any amount of time.
Gee, wouldn't those Egyptians freeze to death in the middle of a battle during a winter snowstorm?
A Father to His Men: A General with traits that would fit this trope will benefit from greater troop morale in battle.
Game Mod: The Rome: Total Realism,Europa Barbarorum and Roma Surrectum series of mods are ambitious and intricate projects, overhauling the game to more accurately portray Europe during the days of Ancient Rome.
Gladiator Revolt: Some cities in anarchy will also have "The Gladiator Uprising" as their rebellion, though in practice, they're the same as any other rebellion.
Glass Cannon: Mounted ballistae in Barbarian Invasion. They will tear apart Mighty Glacier units with ease, but die whenever a cool breeze blows on them.
Government In Exile: Barbarian Invasion features Hordes, where taking the last settlement of a faction causes several large armies to spawn and the faction to get on the move until they find a new homeland.
Handsome Devil: It is possible to have a general with such a high "Handsome" trait that Adonis himself would be jealous of the man's looks, yet at the same time have other traits that make him a psychopathic madman who must win at all costs with unquenchable Blood Lust who slaughters the populous every city he captures and beats slaves for fun.
Have a Gay Old Time: Certain Greek cities might be ruled by "Lesbian Rebels" note Rebels from Lesbos, that is during anarchy.
Hero with Bad Publicity: It seems that as a Roman faction, the more the People loves you, the more bitter the Senate become toward you. Considering that crushing the Senate and ruling Rome by force is a winning condition, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Historically, this is pretty much how the pattern went with Populari reformists, some of which were part of the Senate. Their fate was to be stabbed to death in increasingly creative ways by the senators. The example that mostly overcame this pattern was Gaius Julius Caesar.
Losing The Team Spirit: Losing a standard in Rome or your general (as in any of the other games) will demoralise your entire army.
Parthia starts out with huge tracts of empty wilderness and counter intuitive units. However, when powered up enough, they can become the ancient equivalent of the Timurids.
The Greeks start out with scattered territories and enemies all around them. But they survive, they get some of the best infantry and most profitable provinces.
Military Mashup Machine: If you want sick, look at the incendiary pigs; the pigs are pointed at enemy units (preferably elephants) and then set on fire! Stand well back.
Multi Melee Master: Hoplites and phalangites while drop their spears and draw swords when in close combat. They are better off left in phalanx formation, however.
Multiple Endings: After finishing a Short Campaign (Capture 15 settlements and destroy/outlive one or two specific factions), you can continue your campaign as an Imperial Campaign (capture 50 settlements including Rome). Both give an identical cutscene with different text below. The game's text files also have text for conquering everything.Here is an example◊. It's from the Rome: Total Realism mod, but it's the same message and video you'd get as the House of Julii.
Necessarily Evil: Even the largest cities will inevitably succumb to squalor which will put their public order and income into the negative. The only ways to slow the onset of squalor is to set the tax rate at maximum and to slaughter the populace of a conquered city.
Noble Savage: The Barbarian intro in Rome: Total War has shades of this:
Before my grandfather's grandfather was born, this was our land. These are our good places. Our gods live here, in the trees and rivers, they watch over us. We are happy, he happy, we hunt, we love, we have families, homes, and good life.
Praetorian Guard: As a Roman faction, you can build a unit of actual Praetorian Guards. Needless to say, they are extremely powerful, if costly. In addition, all generals have a small unit of personal bodyguards.
Pyrrhic Victory: Absolutely possible to do, particularly when invading enemy territory. While your army might win the battle, it can come away too weakened to actually capture any cities or take on the enemy's other armies. Inversely, this is a good strategy if you find your own army hopelessly outmatched. (For example, if a formerly neutral faction launches an attack on one of your cities and reinforcements are too far away to get there in time to help.) Use any strategy you can to make sure your opponent's inevitable victory becomes a Pyrrhic Victory, thus slowing down their invasion of your territory. Also, the included historical Battle of Asculum is actually the real life battle that created this very term and can thus be considered the trope namer.
Save Scumming: Pretty much required in order to level up your agents. Even if one is trained with a high "natural skill" trait and a useful ancillary, he will still have less than a 50% shot at assassinating or infiltrating even the easiest targets. The best thing to do is save and just keep trying until he succeeds in his mission. This is also true for naval battles, since they can only be resolved automatically.
Barbarian Invasion gives us the emergence of rebel factions if a settlement belonging to either the Roman (Western Empire), the Roman (Eastern Empire), or the Goth rebels. If the Western Empire loses control of Britannia, the Romano-British emerge, and at a certain year the Slavs come into the game.
Sedgwick Speech: The general will always give a speech at the beginning of a battle. In the case of the Roman factions, these can be quite lengthy and varied, and occasionally quite bizarre. One general's speech mentions he has no idea why they are even there, but his mother said he should at least put in an appearance, which is oddly appropriate to how Roman generals were often appointed.
One of the starting Carthaginian Admirals is called 'Admiral Akbar'. Even funnier if you stumble onto a large enemy fleet.
Stupidity Is the Only Option / Violence is the Only Option: So you've handed an enemy faction crushing defeat after crushing defeat and reduced their formerly expansive empire down to just two rural villages...yet the STILL refuse your offer of a ceasefire. And even in the rare event they DO accept it, expect them to break it within a few turns.
Suicidal Overconfidence: The campaign AI takes this Up to Eleven. Factions with no chance of even winning a single battle against you will declare war on your continent-expanding empire and will refuse even the most reasonable ceasefire treaties. The battle AI tends to avert this, however.
Uriah Gambit: Inevitably, as your faction's royal family grows, certain members will come along who have several detrimental traits and zero redeeming qualities. Rather than allowing them to hang around, spawning equally useless future generations, lowering the morale of your army as generals, and/or draining your resources as governors, you can simply sent them off into battle by themselves to die.
Someone really piss you off? Take a town, exterminate it, recruit peasants en-masse until its down to 400 people, demolish all the buildings, leave it to revolt and send an infected spy in to give it the plague. Congratulations, you have effectively depopulated the region for decades to come, and ensure that province will never advance much beyond village potential. This is recommended on the official site.
Obliterating the population is also a good way to handle an overpopulated city. Overpopulation leads to squalor (which can lead to bouts of plague) and increased likelihood of revolt. Since there is no real way to "depopulate" a city, the best thing to do is simply to pull your forces out, allow it to go into revolt, and then recapture it. Once recaptured, choose to "exterminate" the populace. Between the pre-revolt rioting and the post-capture extermination, you can reduce the city's population to a more manageable level.
Vestigial Empire: The Romans (both East and West) become this in the Barbarian Invasion expansion, and they look the part too.
Video Game Historical Revisionism: In a series known for its good research and realistic tone, Rome is probably the most fanciful entry. This is the reason why several realism mods were made, such as the appropriately titled Rome: Total Realism and Europa Barbarorum, both of which many fans swear by.
The depiction of Egypt, which at the time the game takes place in, was dominated by heavy Macedonian/Greek influence and had armies similar to that used by the other Diadokhoi (Seleucid Empire, Macedonian Kingdom, etcetera). For reasons ranging from "it looks cooler" to "we don't want to make an Egypt: Total War", the game developers made the Egypt faction look like they came straight out of "The Ten Commandments" or "The Mummy Returns", complete with Pharaohs wearing makeup, chariots and soldiers wearing headdresses and armor made of gold and outdated bronze.
The splitting of the nation of Rome into three separate Roman nations, seemingly ruled by family lines ("The House of Julii", "The House of Brutii (sic, Bruti)", "The House of Scipii (sic, Scipiones)"), note Although, if you really want to be pedantic, they're actually gens Julia, gens Junia, and gens Cornelia respectively. though this is forgivable, as it is done to characterize the Roman Civil wars (although the expansion pack Barbarian Invasion had a much better and more realistic way of dealing with that, with scripted events.)
Urban Cohorts and Arcani were not elite troops,
The Britons certainly wouldn't hurl severed heads at enemies.
Most Roman crosses had no top bars, and resembled a 'T'; the bar on the Christian cross was added to post the "King of the Jews" sign.
War Elephants: The more advanced types carry archers on their backs. Only Carthage and the Seleucids can train them.
Word Salad Lyrics: The lyrics to the "map view" music are just a disconnected series of Latin nouns. Which is, admittedly, characteristic of some Roman poetry.
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