My thoughts based on about 12 hours of gameplay, hard difficulty and ultra unit sizes:
+ A lot of factions
+ Unit variety is pretty good, and factions feel a bit different
+ Looks good.
+ The concept of armies is awesome. It's cool to level them up, since Generals die too fast to get anything decent going with them.
+ FOW is really cool in the battles. Also, creates some surprise moments when the enemy outflanks you suddenly because you weren't scouting. Love that.
+ Still has the charm of Total War, mostly.
- End turn times are fairly long, though, not impossible in my experience.
- The highly stylized unit cards, etc, clash with the otherwise oddly modern looking UI. Also covers a lot of the screen. As it is now, it's ugly.
- The UI is not that intuitive either. But that might be because it's quite a lot different from earlier games.
- CAI* is ridiculously passive. I have not been invaded once so far. Except when I've taken over an entire faction, the remnant armies cause a hassle and try to siege regions, but they're normally no threat. Hell, no one has even declared war on me yet.
- CAI is also terribad at creating armies. I have yet to feel intimidated by anything they've scrounged together.
- So far I've destroyed plenty of factions and none has made any significant effort to stop me. If the AI has armies, they're usually not used in any logical way.
- The BAI** is retarded. The one time I was worried about an army attacking me(a relatively large remnant army attacking an empty city with only garrison forces), the AI just stood there. They never engaged my troops. I won. When the AI is defending, shooting them down with ranged is still a valid tactic, which leads to very simple sieges.
- The battles are too damn fast. Longest fight so far was 15 minutes (siege of carthage). Most of them clock around 5-10 minutes, regardless of the size of the armies. This leads to tactics being more of a sidenote when after 4 minutes of approaching there's a huge clusterfuck that ends in you winning with huge casualties for the enemy and none of note to you. Due to the battles being so fast, I haven't actually had the time to look at a single duel in the game, something that I really enjoyed doing in previous titles.
- Melee is overpowered. Ranged is underpowered. To be fair, ranged is decent in sieges when the enemy moves its troops without actually doing anything, because then you can shoot without being threatened and moving enemies take more damage since their shields aren't up. However, when the enemy attacks, there's a 10 second window of shooting before the melee clusterfuck starts. Which means that they're largely irrelevant. Shooting at units that are standing still is largely useless.
- Troops creating their own transport ships is pretty cool, as a concept. But it's also a bit silly. Being able to hop on ships in one turn is stupid. In my opinion it should take one turn for the army to do that. It takes away the tactical aspect of the game, when I can go around choke points without any problem by hopping on ships.
- A problem that persists in a much worse form in Rome 2 is that when I choose a unit in the campaign map, my fps drops. If I unselect it, it goes right back up.
- A general problem that I've sort of noticed in my campaign is that the AI factions aren't growing as fast as I do, which means that all the tiny factions just gets eaten by my ever increasing blob.
- Difficulty. On hard, the game is very very easy. In fact I did not notice a difference between normal and hard. Played Rome on normal, switched to Athens and hard, due to Rome being too easy. This happened right after I captured Carthage in 15 minutes, with 70 casualties compared to the enemies 1200.
- Though I like the concept of armies as a more cohesive unit, the fact that you can't recruit more troops to defend is a tad annoying, not really because the enemy attacks me, but because attacking the enemy is way too easy.
- The victory points seem to be even more useless because I have yet to reach one without routing the enemy first. In fact, in the siege of carthage the enemy was routed before I even got a quarter of my troops over the walls.
- Province system is cool and all, but really poorly implemented. The only noticeable bonus is that you can activate edicts which give you bonuses if you control the entire province, but those aren't a big enough reason for me to care about capturing it. In my opinion, sharing a province with another faction should cause negative diplomatic relations and it should be more lucrative to control the entire thing. (serious minuses if you don't, for example).
- You can autoresolve battles even though you have no siege equipment.
(- The clouds in the campaign map annoy me. With already cluttered screen, I don't need clouds block all of the sides as well. And the fog stuff...)
*Campaign AI
**Battle AI
In short, AI still stupid, but it does still look pretty. This time you just don't have time to enjoy it because the battles end too fast. Shame, because they were really touting about all those new combat animations. This time, though, the AI is Empire at release levels of stupid. And it's buggy. I almost miss Shogun stack spam, because at least that was a challenge at times.
Probably missed quite a lot, but whatever, I'm writing this from work.
