Product ReviewsRome: Total War -- Gold Edition (PC, 2006)

Rome Total War

It's my favorite total war game but it's not compatible with windows 10. If you can play it though you'll love it

Verified purchase:  Yes | Condition: pre-owned | Sold by: clints4sale

Significantly over complicated, confusing, felt like a grind more than anything.

I wasn't too impressed with the game, I love RTS but it's so incredibly slow paced and so unexplainably confusing that I really couldn't get into the game. I ended up playing it for a few hours and just sort of gave up because a mixture of being confused, bored and it felt like a grind rather than fun.

Giving it 2/5, the benefit of the doubt because so many others speak highly of it, definitely could be something great if you want to grind it out to really indepth learn it but personally, I want a game to be at least somewhat fun and/or interesting right off the start.Read full review...

If you are in to RTS and turn based games Rome Total War has it all.

This game was the first for me in the total war experience. I have owned this game for years and have repurchased it several times. I like the mixture of real time strategy and turned based management. The battles are fun and to dominate the world or finish the in games objectives will entertain you for hours and days of game time. The expansion has a different feel to it and has more interesting historical societies but is basically the same game. The units can do a little more and the style of play is a little bit different but all in all the barbarian expansion is more of the same just titled different.Read full review...

On Rome Total War Gold

1st the cons:
The game is lightly buggy as I had read in other reviews from various sources. It will quite often throw you out of the game totally and back to your desktop. Although it will usually return to the same spot in the game if you restart it, be sure and save often so you don't loose too much playing time if you have to restart. Try never to end a turn with an attack!!! I have noticed this almost always preceeds an interruption and when a bug will occur.
If you play aggressively to conquer enemy cities quickly, you will rapidly run out of family members for governors and the Automanager doesn't really do a very good job. You will constantly have difficulties with riots, rebellions and end up spending most of your cash on rebuilding damaged cities which you already conquered rather than on furthering your dominion. If on the other hand, you do not play to conquer agressively, everybody else will attack you. Good friends are truly hard to find. In a game where the ultimate goal is conquest, it doesn't seem right that you are penalized for conquoring too fast.

On the "Up side":
This is a great game despite a few flaws. In my opinion it is by far the best of the Total War series games. It is considerably more complex and has lots of complexities which the earlier games did not, and it doesn't have the religious intrusions which in my mind ruin Midievel II Total War because you have absolutely no control over these ghostly appearing inquisitors that are almost immune to assasins. The Rome total war game also has a very reasonable Victory Point in the game. You reach victory without having to conquer every back water hole in the Sahara, or any specific wonder or city, which leaves you truly free to choose your own road to conquest. Still, even once overall Victory is achieved, you have the option to continue playing and make it a 2 week long game if you choose. SEGA should have spent a little more time to totally work the bugs out of this game and re-issue a really clean ultimate or Platinum version, perhaps with occasional heroic family members being born into the faction, and some of the more exotic troops like war elephants available to be recruited and trained in the proper geographical locations rather than just having them rarely available as mercenaries which can only be used up and not retrained.
If you liked any of the earlier Total War series, or turn based war games in general, I think you would be hard pressed to find any better entertainment than this for the current going price of $13.00-$16.00.Read full review...

Rome: Total War + Barbarian Invasion Expansion Pack= A+

These games can be purchased separately, but I recommend picking up the combo pack, you'll be glad you did. I had never played a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game before, so I did some serious research before buying one. I first saw this game on the History Channel's show called "Decisive Battles". They used it to show how combat was in the ancient times. After seeing the show, I knew right away which game to get into RTS'. Almost all the Pro-Game reviews scored it at LEAST a 9 out of 10. The nice thing is that the game is a few years old, so you don't need a high-end computer to run it. As long as you have Windows 98SE or newer (almost ALL 4 to 5 year old computers have at least 98SE or Windows 2000 or XP)and a CD-ROM Drive (I don't have a DVD-Drive yet), you should have no problem running it. The game allows you to play out various battles and/or even build and manage the Roman Empire. The Imperial Campaign is where you build and manage, the Historical Battle is where you pick certain armies and play them how they really were and the Custom Battle lets you pick a map and your troops as well as how the enemies troops are. It's kind of fun to select your army with elephants, chariots and war dogs and then turn them loose on your enemy's army that is mainly made up of peasants and conscripts. You can even play against other people online (Broadband/DSL only, no dial-up connection).
It only takes a couple of hours to get really comfortable playing this game. The "Prologue" is the instructional training system, and it makes the game easy to pick up and play. There are even "Advisors" who pop up to give you advice while you are fighting. Once you get comfortable, you can shut off the Advisors and turn up the difficulty level.
The graphics are incredible, and you can move the camera around the battlefield to see all the action. Once you send your troops out, they'll fight, kill or die until you tell them to stop. You can even save a video of a battle you've fought, then watch it like a movie. I've had 10,000 highly detailed soldiers,horses,chariots,elephants,catapults and war dogs fighting it out all at once. Trust me, this game is INCREDIBLE!Read full review...

Hard to impossible single player campaigns .

Very difficult, even on lowest settings...Huge amounts of enemies, very small reserves. Not very many total factions to play overall. The campaign is the most difficult of entire series. However, this is the best "Alexander" game out there if you're getting one. Historiclly liberal, but it's still just as good as the real battle as Persians Have vast troops and you have to be a genus to figure out how you can barely muster enough new troops to get new cities.Read full review...

Fell a little short for me.

This review speaks to both Rome and Barbarian Invasion. There are some differences, but the gameplay is essentially the same.

I'm a long time fan of strategy war games going all the way back to the first Strategic Conquest game by Delta Tao. I love every flavor of Civilization, from Sid Meier's to Stardock, and games like Stronghold. So, I was looking forward to playing Rome because I thought it had elements of all of those classics. And it does. You have to build and maintain cities, raise armies and duke it out on the battlefield.

But it just didn't grab me. Not in the way those other games did. For one thing, I never could figure out what made one city a happy cash cow and another city a money pit full of pissed off plebes. It seemed to have more to do with population than with infrastructure or tax rates (certain buildings give moral bonuses; higher tax rates make people unhappy). It just seemed kind of random. The only way to conquer a city and not have a riot on your hands for ten terms seemed to be to enslave the population or exterminate them. Me, I don't even like to step on a Sim Ant when I can avoid it.

I played Rome: Total War through one time as the Romans and Barbarian Invasion through three times; once as the Saxons, once as the Romans and once as the Horde...actually I never finished the Horde game. I was just over it by that point.

So, as with most games, it's going depend on what the player enjoys and the sort of game they like to play as to whether or not Rome is for you. By this point, the game is old enough where you can find it fairly cheap on E-bay or Amazon, so it's worth checking out. I think part of my problem was reading all these rave reviews, I had big expectations that weren't quite satisfied. Hope you get more out of it.Read full review...

Rome: Total War=Awesome

THis is a great game. Even though when I bought it, it had been out for five years, the graphics didn't affect the games playability. I bought it because I love history and becuase I grew up with games like Starcraft and Age of Empires so it seemed like a perfect choice.

You get to start out as a faction (although fictional) of Rome, either the Scippii, Brutii, or Julii (representing the legendary figures of Julious Caesar, Brutus who slew him, and the great commander Scipio Africanus and his line). I chose Scippii because it seemed less of an obvious choice and because they were closely linked to the Meditarranean(middle) Sea. You can set the difficulty to your likeing; if I were you I would choose the highest setting to make it that much more fun (the AI isn't too difficult). As you progress, your units will change into the familiar legion and auxiliary unit that was the formation until the end of the empire.

Don't expect the graphics to be stunning or the horse charges to look super realistic, because you will do yourself a disfavor and will be dissapointed. This is a real quality game that will become addicting if you're not too careful. That could be a deciding factor in your decision-making though :). There are some bugs but there are updates. Overall I would give it a 9 out of 10.

CheersRead full review...

One of the Best Games Ever

One of the best strategy games, even all the gaming sites rate it really well. If you've played any of the Total War games, you'll love it. If not, you still probably will. You control cities and in these cities you build units and buildings, and you can amass armies and move them around the map attacking other cities or armies. Battles can be epic with thousands of troops on the map at the same time. If you hate micromanaging, you can set your cities to be automanaged. Theres spying, assasinating and diplomacy involved. I recommend it to any game fan.Read full review...

ROME:TOTAL WAR

For RTS enthusiasts, TOTAL WAR delivers on so many levels. Once it gets its hooks into you, there is only one course to follow: play until you dominate the game. Having a knowledge of Roman History only intensifies the game experience. The only negatives i can think of it would be better if you could have an eye level view like in battles when managing settlements...this is only a minor annoyance. There really isnt anything bad about the game...even for those who have never played an RTS before i guarantee you will enjoy this pickRead full review...