Editing Total War (section)

===Total War: Rome II===
Rome 2 was announced and everyone was hyped, but then it was released apparently in a broken state with DLC. Cue rage.

Now, 7 years later...is the game good? Well... kinda... at least it's finally bug free. The campaign was noted to be horrible, but at least multiplayer is better than base game Attila. Newfags and Oldfags are fighting over it like they do in every other game series. A better question to ask is: did Creative Assembly really "fall into darkness" with this game? The game was presumably rushed with the number of bugs it had, but those have mostly been fixed though it did take 2 years. And DLC, the game had 4 culture packs which added 3 factions each, the quality of those seem to vary from pack to pack. And a bunch of useless unit packs which were blatant money grabs, there was also 3 campaign packs which each added a mini-campaign that focused on a specific conflict and (save for Wrath of Sparta) added cultures pack worth of factions to the main campaign. There were also 6 Free-LC factions added while the game was being fixed, and a free campaign pack (Imperator Augustus) so maybe Creative Assembly has not become an evil corporation that cuts games to sell more DLC since one of those would not give free stuff. Pre-order factions are still scummy as hell. And even after all the bugs were fixed, snowballing is still probably among its worst out of the Total War games because Rome 2 doesn't really have a way to hope to challenge after you've gotten big, unlike Shogun 2's Realm Divide or Attila's...Attila. Unless another faction got really lucky or you've gotten extremely powerful politically among your faction which you'll generally kinda have to try to do by avoiding letting any other political factions' men become generals and gaining any influence (and with civil wars causing an army to spawn inside your borders and try to take your capital, why would you want to?) - looking for mods that improve AI's late-game power is advisable. Later patching revamped civil wars and made them more inevitable, but they're not really a problem with how easy it is to solve the issue of civil war (dismantle rival factions' armies, post your own armies nearby their territory, provoke into declaring war on you and then crush their non-existent military in the space of a few turns).

On a more positive note, Rome 2 does get the history of Classical Antiquity more correct, namely that:

* The Roman Republic is now a unified, patriotic entity controlling most of Italia, though the wheeling and dealing between the Gens still exists

* The Greek city-states and European tribes are now independent of each other.

* The hoplites are actually hoplites now, and not phalangites (Granted, the city-states still use some pike units in the game, but this is now due to Macedonia's influence than anything)

* Mostly, the Egyptian faction now looks like it actually belongs in the Ptolemaic period, although some of their more crappy units still look like they belong with Ramses II than Cleopatra Philoraptor.

* Individual soldiers now look varied, as the concept of a modern uniform didn't really come into being until the late 17th Century.

* The Rome TV Series get a shitton of shoutouts down to retainers like Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus.

There are six expansions to the game: Caesar in Gaul (Gallic War), Hannibal at the Gates (Second Punic War), Imperator Augustus (Antony's Civil War), Wrath of Sparta (Peloponnesian War), Empire Divided (3rd Century Crisis), and Rise of the Republic (Early Republican Era). This makes the game by far the Total War game with the longest post-launch support.

Overall, it is nowhere near as bad as it was on launch and these days one can even make the argument that it is the best Total War game, something no one would have even considered back then.