Trivia / Rome: Total War

• Author's Saving Throw: Per its release material, Creative Assembly's goal with the remastered version was to bring the game up to modern standards in terms of visuals, mechanics, and "modern features". Even changes within the remaster itself were fixed in a very short time span as well. On top of this, if the player truly wants the original experience without the changes, they can turn all of these off.
  • Native widescreen support and room for growth will allow the game to continue to stay up to modern scratch, as opposed to the original which aged poorly over time.
  • The AI diplomacy has been overhauled, and the AI, in general, is a lot smarter than it used to be, especially at higher difficulties.
  • Several broken factions from the original have been properly fixed and implemented to allow for play.
  • Several units' armor has been redesigned to be more realistic, meaning no more "Pajama Warriors" or Bronze Age Egyptians, although options exist to restore them to their original designs.
  • Within the remaster itself:
    • An early point of criticism among streamers pre-release is that even at the highest unit scale, the increased unit size would only subtract the smallest-scale unit size's worth of population from cities (e.g. a 300-unit regiment only taking 60 people out of population). An option to activate or deactivate 1:1 population subtraction was added within days.
    • A number of early reactions didn't particularly enjoy how vibrant and saturated the campaign map was, and many wished for options to fade the colors to make it easier on the eyes. Also within days, an option to desaturate the campaign map was added to graphical settings.
• Dummied Out: One of the biggest drawbacks for playing as Carthage is a lack of archers. As it turns out, digging through the code reveals they were meant to have them, and they even have textures and a model. If you assign the "carthaginian archers" to Carthage in your export_descr_units.txt you can recruit them as Carthage. There are also some unused spearman models for the Barbarian factions, the only difference being a larger, less colorful shield.
• Technology Marches On: A large part of the reason why Rome: Total War was remastered was due to how poorly the original game aged over the ensuing 16 years. In the original game, there is no widescreen support, and the highest resolution is 1920x1080. Units are identical to each other on the battlefield, and some other quality-of-life changes like custom formation widths weren't present. Mods alleviate this, but still fail to bring it completely up to modern standards. The remaster adds native widescreen support with room for future growth, cleans up some of the graphics, "de-clones" the soldiers on a battlefield, dynamically generates battlefields based on the locale on the map, allows for formations to be widened or narrowed depending on a click-and-drag, and so on. Time will tell if future games, most notably Medieval II: Total War, also receive this treatment.