If you played every battle, the game would be longer. Once the armies lock arms in battle, only one of them comes out standing from the brawling mass that resembles two beehives in combat. In them, you move your soldiers in cohort-size formations, attacking and countering the enemy as their commander does the same thing. But then you would be missing the best part, and the game would be a poor stepchild compared to Civilization. You can automatically resolve a battle, sort of like a coin toss weighted with all sorts of modifiers. You can actually skip the tactical battles if you are infatuated with the strategic game. You should feel free to start and stop as well because you’ll be stuck with those early choices for a long time. I found this the hard way as I started and then restarted my empire several times. If you fight everyone at once, you’ll lose. You can win via cultural or economic victories in addition to conquest, but you have no real choice. The enemies may come at you from all sides, or even from within, through political intrigue and civil war before you finish building your war machine. You can expand further north into the lands of the Veneti or drive south to Syracuse and Carthage. Three top investment pros open up about what it takes to get your video game funded. It feels like an open world, an infinitely replayable space where you can choose the course to greatness or ruin. If there is a crowning accomplishment to Rome II, it’s this. After that, you the player are free to venture anywhere though sometimes you launch campaigns at the behest of the Senate. The Romans must conquer the Etruscan League, their foes to the north. At the beginning of the single-player campaign, in the year 272 B.C., just about any region can become an empire. A short tutorial shows how the Romans took on the hill tribe of the Samnites. Your aim is to build the Roman empire, city by city, region by region, from Britannia to the edge of India. In this combination of Civilization-style military strategy and real-time combat akin to Age of Empires, you begin as a humble tribe in control of a single province of Italy.

After all, now that I’ve played, I no longer feel the need to pillage my neighbor’s house or the rest of the world.

Like the first Rome game, which sold very well, this title has the potential to break into the mainstream if only to bring out the conqueror in all of us.

Rome total war 2 tutorial