Stolen: Anything I agreed with in Normal Text. Bold is stuff I wanted ot comment on.
+ 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. (It was so bad, I turned off AI moves. Speed things right up)
- 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. I like them. Hate the Massive UI.
- The UI is not that intuitive either. But that might be because it's quite a lot different from earlier games. Think It was. Perhaps I just don't use it much.
- 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. I've had Multiple Assaults against my armies/cities. I don't think they are passive, but they are certainly not aggressive.
- CAI is also terribad at creating armies. I have yet to feel intimidated by anything they've scrounged together. Agreed. Also, autoresolve strengths for these armies is SUPER strong, yet gets shit on in a controlled battled. Tweaking to the Auto Resolve SHOULD help AI get better armies.
- 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. AI often maxes out their army slots and then has like 6 armies of 300 troops run around and do shit.
- 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. THIS right here times 100000. Faster battles don't mean more fun(same with SUPER slow battles). I liked the(slower) shogun 2 combat. At least I don't feel like I'm controlling miniture sword tanks zooming around.
- Melee is overpowered. Ranged is underpowered. Yes and No. Pontus: have noticed that the Higher the tier, the better you are versus lower tier.
- 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. I like it, but, transport ships are far more powerful than a stupid navy ship. Navies aren't worth it int he early game.
- 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. Normal Campaign: AI is pretty quick at expanding. Liguria took over Italy and Athens has become the next alexander...
- 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. Garrisons need a buff.
- 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. Won a few sieges that way cause the AI was to worried about my ships to defend themselves. Stupid BAI
- Province system is cool and all, but really poorly implemented. I'm torn. I hate the fact that PCapitals are Walled, making them way better than the rest....
- You can autoresolve battles even though you have no siege equipment. Really? Haven't Tried.
- The clouds in the campaign map annoy me. With already cluttered screen, I don't need clouds block all of the sides as well No Kidding
Also, my own personal Opinion:
-Naval battles suck. Sorry I just don't like the fact that transport ships can beat PROPER navy ships just cause of ship spam.
