Rome: Total War for Mac

They say that in Rome you ought to do what the Romans do, but in this case the doing has been some six years. I’m fairly certain that Caesar would not be kept waiting this long especially when the game in question made such an impact on the strategy genre back in late 2004. But Mac users ought not to complain too much because a fine strategy title as Rome: Total War has arrived veritably intact.

Set during the times of the late Roman Republic and Early Empire from 270BC to 14AD, R:TW charts the ascendancy of Rome to great power and their conquests, both military and cultural, the effects of which gave way to the beginnings of the modern nations of Europe. Barbarian Invasion is set in 363AD charting the decades of endemic corruption, economic depression and religious unrest up to 476AD when civilisation in the western world came crashing down along with the Empire that had allowed it to flourish.

R:TW and it’s successors are often stamped with the labels of real-time strategy (RTS) or turn-based strategy (TBS), but this is misleading as R:TW is neither. Instead R:TW is a combination of both with gameplay split into two modes: the campaign map and real-time battle.

In the campaign map you are confronted with an initially daunting and detailed birds-eye view of Europe where you can manage your budding empire’s cities, armies, agents and finances, among other things. The campaign map also serves as a centre for organisation and command of your units, armies and navies as you advance your plans for conquest.

You don’t fight your battles on the campaign map, though. Instead you use the battle map and move your armies into position. When engaging the enemy you are presented with three options: fight on the battle map, auto-battle or retreat. If the balance of power is overwhelmingly in favour of one side you can auto-resolve the battle and move on, which is a handy feature when fighting against raiding enemy armies and rebels. Otherwise you can flee or more interestingly engage the enemy on the battle map allowing you to take full real-time control of your units on the field.

The battle map is where R:TW shines as the tactical depth in these battles is endless. Units do have statistics and all the trimmings but everything factors in on how those statistics are leveraged. Being on higher ground or behind a solid wall for example will boost morale and fighting ability enormously, as will fighting a unit type that your men are well-equipped against.

The upshot of R:TW’s combat depth is that terrain and other conditions can allow a vastly outnumbered force (both in the physical and statistical sense) to win using tactics and commanding skills. R:TW also has the distinction at being the excellent at managing units in-battle. If you group units together into a formation and order them to move they will keep in-line with each other (this even works when moving entire armies). In newer Total War titles the exact opposite occurs and all hell breaks loose!

City building is important. If a city gets overpopulated and facilities such as sewers, government buildings and better farming infrastructure are not provided then you will end up placing huge peace-keeping forces in the city to stop it rebelling against you. Buildings present on the campaign map will also appear in battle, tying both sides of the game together. Settlements are culture-sensitive so that if a Roman player conquers a formerly Barbarian settlement there will be a clash of cultures, impacting your ability to maintain public order. To counteract this you must build structures native to your culture in order to make the populace feel a part of a greater whole, rather than subjugated under your rule. Over time, as your empire expands, you can see settlements gradually adopt your faction’s culture.

R:TW focuses on special agent units such as generals, spies, assassins and diplomats. These are character units who all have specific attributes, names and ages. They generally do what their names suggest: generals lead armies and govern settlements, spies allow you to see what your rivals are getting up to as well as sabotaging buildings, assassins make people you don’t like disappear and diplomats carry out diplomacy with other factions for you.

R:TW allows you to track your leader’s family tree through the generations noting information like dates of birth, death, who married whom and titles obtained by characters (“the Lewd” being my particular favourite, as this adds a nice feeling of progression as the years pass by).

It is worth paying close attention to the traits and followers your generals gather as poor leadership and bad management have drastic effects on your ability to rule effectively. If one of your generals is governing a settlement and isn’t terribly good at it he will cause public unrest due to his handling of affairs. If you leave him long enough he will begin to become corrupt, in turn hitting your finances and possibly becoming disloyal. In the same vein if you have a raving lunatic (these character traits do actually appear in-game) leading your armies don’t be surprised when your units start routing in the field if they think the battle is going badly.

However, all is not well in Rome. The AI both on campaign and in-battle set at anything above Normal difficulty causes factions to go utterly berserk declaring war on each other and yourself for no reason other than boredom, so it seems. Your AI enemies will shower you with gifts and trade agreements one turn and declare war on you the next - for the entire game. The AI is no better when it comes to sieges. Units sit down in front of your defensive towers and archers waiting for something to happen, caring nothing for the hail of death being showered onto them. Units generally behave sensibly on the streets but when they go into or leave the cover of walls they will often sit around doing nothing, that is until a handful of men in the unit start dying causing the entire unit to inexplicably rout.

There are some unit imbalances present in the game too. I have come to the conclusion that heavy cavalry (general’s units in particular) carry light-sabres and wear tank armour. They will wantonly decimate all other units (besides other heavy cavalry) with ridiculous ease, cutting through elite legionary armour like butter while being near-impossible to kill themselves.

These issues become more prevalent in Barbarian Invasion but in a different sense. Barbarian Invasion is set some three hundred years after the original and it would seem that Rome’s armies now consist entirely of cowardly cretins who run away at the drop of a gladius. Roman units, both Eastern and Western, will flee at the sight of anything remotely scary on the field of battle whilst the barbarian’s supposedly disorganised and poorly led troops will almost fight to the last man by comparison.

R:TW for Mac runs rather well. Tested on my MacBook Pro (2.4Ghz Duo Core, 4GB DDR3) I managed to get a nice, smooth experience with a mixture of high and medium settings at 1400 x 900 when using the 9600M GT. I did find that grass, vegetation and anti-aliasing all had a huge impact on FPS and had to be turned off. When using the 9400M R:TW was playable on medium and high settings, but only just. Owners of older Intel iMacs may struggle with nicer settings.

I was surprised when I found that R:TW had significantly shorter loading times than my quad-core, GTX 200-series wielding behemoth of a PC. Outside of battles it seems that R:TW actually ran better for Mac which is a testament to the quality of Feral’s port.

Additionally the Mac version of R:TW comes with some handy features such as proper trackpad support, an option for a minimal battle UI and the ability to disable RomeShell, R:TW’s terminal which I am always more tempted to use for cheating rather than testing or bug-fixing. The Mac version of R:TW is compatible with Windows version saves and mods, which may come as a relief to some of the hardcore historians or strategy nuts.

Priced at a modest £19.95 and packing both the original game and the Barbarian Invasion expansion it is hard to find fault with this excellent hybrid RTS/TBS even six years after release on PC.