YMMV / Expeditions: Rome

• Awesome Music: The dynamic soundtrack by Thomas Farnon gets the blood pumping, especially during the siege missions at Bithynia, Awjila, and Alesia.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: There is a Bad End where you become a cat. Though technically part of a Mushroom Samba scenario, it's the only time the game lets you go off the rails into a purely fantastic scenario like this.
• Broken Base: Regarding this installment's handling of the series' trademark Politically Correct History. Unlike the "our history, but with gender equality" approach of the previous two games, this one goes all-in on acknowledging historical Roman sexism with a female PC. While she can do all the things a male PC can gameplaywise, in story terms, she is often denied the same opportunities and must find workarounds via men who vouch for her. A Vocal Minority feels this is unnecessary and you should only be able to play a male character. Some find the chosen solution a fair compromise of historicity and inclusivity, while actually providing significant Replay Value and making your choice of gender meaningful. Others see a case of Golden Mean Fallacy and wonder what was wrong with the previous approach, pointing out that a female PC is denied most of the stuff enjoyable about Roman culture, like the ability to hold political office, while still engaging in blatantly unhistorical actions such as commanding the Roman legions with flimsy justifications. Meanwhile some female player specifically enjoy the plotline about suceeding in spite of these limitations, that the game offers a female main character. Story romance choices are also hit by this, with male protagonists having access to a glamorous, vampy and beautiful take on Cleopatra, who proves to be a powerful political ally, while female protagonists get Cato, who is perceived as somewhat plain and has a minimal amount of content, with many wishing they would have gotten the game's Worthy Opponent Hunk depiction of Vercingetorix instead, or Cleopatra as a bisexual option, since she does approve of female characters trying to flirt with her and a PC of either gender is meant to be a replacement for Julius Caesar, who historically "romanced" her. That said it is clear the "romance" between the PC and Cleopatra is more one of convenience rather than actual love. Cleopatra ultimatley wants a powerful Roman Consort to stabilize her reign, something a female PC simply cannot offer her.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: That Julius Calidus is actually a woman is obvious. Even her crossdressing portrait looks female, and she makes no effort to hide her voice. It's to the point that even the devs make fun of this in their own promotional materials.
• Demonic Spiders: Berserkers in act 2 possess the "Indominable" trait. Meaning if they take lethal damage, on their next turn they get up, become invincible, get a full normal turn where they shrug off all damage. Only in the turn AFTER that can they be re-killed. Being invincible basically leaves them free to just run past your tanks ignoring attacks of opportunities to go hit the most vulnerable targets, which they will always make a beeline for.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Raia, the Cloud Cuckoo Lander priestess of Bastet and Guest-Star Party Member who joins you for the last few missions during the Egypt arc is very popular, with many fans asking her to be made a permanent companion and possible love interest. Not helping are the strong Flashy Protagonists, Bland Extras and Dummied Out vibes her character gives, with her having a much more detailed design than most non-main characters and asking to join your group because she wants to see the world, only to leave again as soon as the current arc ends, as if she was once intended as an actual full-time companion.
• Game-Breaker: The Saggitarius (Archer) skill "Barrage". This lets them regain their Action Points when they use a ranged skill. This includes "Lure", "Quick Shot", and "Assist shot". Equip a Pilum on them and your archer can attack 12 times if you also use an "Arrow Stab" for the "Versatile" bonus.
  • There was an even more broken combo regarding the Reaper buff before its nerf in 1.20. Equipping a Barrage Archer with the "Spear of Achilles" in their off-hand and "Izil's bow" as their primary snapped the game in half. Starting the battle off with the spear in hand will give them the "Reaper" status. Any kills would now recharge all personal skills and current weapon skills, including tactical items. This means that your character will refresh all their attacks on kill, something that's easy to accomplish with three weapon skills, Quick Shot, and Pilum. Utilizing this combination could allow you to clear entire maps on turn 1 even on the highest difficulty.
• Never Live It Down: The But Thou Must! Sadistic Choice Human Sacrifice quest in Gallia was probably meant as an example of Deliberate Values Dissonance, but seems to have affected the game's legacy mostly as a particularly infamous piece of Rail Roading. It does not help that many see it as a blatant case of Artistic License – History, saying the Romans were staunchly anti-Human Sacrifice.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Pacification missions are meant to display situations not important enough for your main party to deal with, and to help you raise a more rounded team for the huge multi-squad siege battles. However, they are generally not well-liked, due to forcing you to use the game's randomly generated, non-customizeable praetorians instead of your main party (except for one member to lead them), due to just how plentiful they are (making some feel you play those generics more often than your main party), and because of the Fridge Logic of still having to go to the location in question with your main party anyway before you can start them, when the whole point is that you are delegating the task so your protagonist can do more important things elsewhere.
  • The Marathon Level siege missions have people split, mostly for their sheer length and the fact that they usually can be made much easier by bringing certainly tactical items, without actually telling you which until you have reached the moment where you'd need them and it's already too late to switch loadouts to the torches or greek fire jars that most of these special missions are helped by having.
  • Certain Random Encounters while traversing the world map. Specifically, encounters which guarantee at least one party member getting injured. If you have a quest or story mission which requires the entire main party to be present, and you got such an event on the way there, have fun travelling all the way back to your main camp to have them medically treated, because companions injured beyond "lightly" cannot enter quest locations. And there is nothing preventing the same event from triggering again once your party is healed and you are on your way to the mission again. To make matters worse, such random events can even trigger while you are in base camp in order to recover. It can also be annoying to be forced into a tactical battle from one of these when you're trying to complete a quest.
  • Legion Battles, due to being very RNG-dependent, mechanically opaque, and largely automatized. They have also been criticized as a shallow way of handling mass combat and having a pretty binary win/loss setup where if you keep your legions fully manned they'll win almost every battle in the game, and will usually only lose to the one enemy army that you leave for last, which gets reinforced by the losers on the other battles. This one got enough criticism to have the devs promising a complete rework, which was introduced in patch 1.3.
  • The UI while not terrible, is still a bit unwieldy in the sections dedicated to your camp upgrades. Instead of a simple set of icons on the screen when in or near the camp for each of the special buildings, inventory etc, there's only three, and click on buttons within those to get to where you want to go. It's also not possible to directly handle upgrading or replacing a weapon with a crafted one from the character inventory page, which can make it a pain when you unlock the 2nd or 3rd tier of weapons and want to upgrade or replace every character's weapons, even though there are filters in the specific crafting sections, it's still not possible to direct craft a new item from the inventory screen as a replacement for the existing one.
  • The requirement to actually read the crafting recipes can be obscure, leading to players who don't realise until halfway through the game why they can't actually craft any of the items you've unlocked after upgrading the forge. It doesn't make any sense at all that these items don't get automatically added to your list.
  • In crafting there's no filters at all beyond splitting armour, weapons & tactical items. There's no filter for what class you want to craft for, or the types of weapons for if you wanted to stick to a specific regional theme, or strength. At least it doesn't make each of the three tiers of an item it's own entry.
  • You will amass a gigantic amount of crafting materials, but annoyingly the game will consider these materials to be "new" items with its notification being stuck until you scroll through all the "new" materials. It really should only consider the crafting recipes for this notification.