Friday, November 18, 2016

Rome: Total War - 6/20 hours

Why do the Romans have to be such dicks? That's the part of the game that's most getting under my skin. My allies, the fellow noble houses and the Senate and people of Rome, are constantly declaring war on people. I'd like to say that I'm above it all, but the Senate keeps sending my bounties on Greek and Gallic cities and I keep fulfilling them because it's a significant chunk of change, plus I get to add the city to my territory. It's a grimy, soul-sucking business, but that's the nature of the game.

But I've already covered that. Onto more practical matters. It may just be an early game, or easy-mode quirk, but in all the battles I've fought, the AI has never had a good answer to cavalry. Which is good for me, because I ultimately view battles as something I have to grit my teeth and suffer through until I can get back to my true love of city management.

I still feel like maybe I'm missing out on some critical aspect of the game, though. It's long been my custom to play new strategy games on the easiest difficulty, as a way of getting a feel for the tech tree and a broad overview of what the course of a whole game looks like. That may be less than optimal when I only have 20 hours, though. The campaign map is a lot bigger than the prologue map.

I'm going to stick with it, though. I'm only six hours into the game, and I can already tell that it's going to task my patience. Having to go into it with a basic antipathy towards the genre, inexperience with the mechanics of the game itself, and "normal" difficulty is probably too much to bear.

No comments:

Post a Comment