My game will probably arrive tomorrow or the day after. I'm not sure I will actually open or just return it after what I've been reading today.
I didn't care about Napoleon or Shogun 2 (never played them), but other than that I played every single TW game beginning with Shogun 1.
The whole franchise has just gotten old in my opinion. It's ok to be conservative about a working core gameplay, but instead of small and random tweaks (that you may or may not like) I am expecting some big improvements from time to time - deeper campaign experience (and not just Empire-like tons of micromanagement), maybe even customizable unit "designs", something like that. The only thing worth mentioning here over the past decade was the addition of naval battles, if you ask me. Wether they are fun or not, at least CA tried to improve the game for once.
I only bought Rome 2, because Rome 1 was the best in the series in my opinion. Warhounds, burning pigs, elephants, chariots, slingers, berserkers, gladiators, phalanx/horde/testudo formations... That's really all the variety you need to forget about the simplistic and quantity-over-quality kind of strategy part. I was happy to learn that basically all of those make a return in Rome 2, but somehow I expected people to be more content with the game and the AI :/
