My Gaming Experience - Rome: Total War

The fact that I only started getting interested in girls when I had finished Rome is not incidental. I would go further and say that it is thanks to Rome that I didn’t know what a girl was until I was about 16. The game is the very definition of immersive. Each faction has a king or faction heir, whose various relatives are your generals, who lead your armies, govern your cities and keep everything ticking over. I followed these generals like they were my own children, nervously watching the relative virtues and vices they acquired. Each general can acquire a retinue, which affect his skills at law enforcement, administration and military effectiveness variously and I appraised these characters like a father seeing who his daughter had brought home. My favourite was a young nephew called Gaius Antonius, who while managing my eastern cities and destroying the pesky Parthians, travelled with a courtesan, an actor and an architect, which sounds like the worst start-up line for a joke ever.

Managing Rome is an exhausting business. As well as developing your cities, upgrading the various Civlisation-esque technology trees, you have to keep the plebians happy with gladiator fights and racing games. You send diplomats off to make trade agreements and alliances with the factions you’re not currently razing to the grounds, and spies and assassins to see what they’re up to. Meanwhile you have to develop a navy to stop your port being blocked and trade plummeting. If you’re playing as the Romans, you have to keep the Senate sweet by fulfilling various missions and requirements.

But it’s in the battles themselves where Rome truly excels. The top-down focus of the Mediterranean swoops onto wherever your army has pitched itself for battle. You have to take in account the various geographical features: beaches, bridges, deserts, pine forests, a city if you’re besieging a place – and set your troops up accordingly. Your general will make a (sometimes not-so) heroic speech and into battle you go. At its peak with hundreds of fighters slugging away at each other, artillery crashing all around you, walls tumbling down, ambushes coming out of nowhere, there is nothing truly else like it. I still remember my finest battle – I was playing as a Roman faction against the Carthiginians, whose armoured elephants were about to rampage havoc among my troops. Luckily pigs, when set on fire provoke the elephants into stampede, which they duly did – back into the Carthaginian troops, allowing my trusty spearman to mop up the remains.

Rome is a game I have never really stopped playing. Trying to beat the game with all the various factions is the first one, then trying to build an empire stretching from Scotland to the Arabian Desert is the next. I spent hours at school daydreaming through lessons, deciding where my empire should strike next – few games can provide that level of obsession. A few months ago I reinstalled it and spent a happy few weeks as the Britons laying waste to Gaul and Germany with chariots and war dogs. It does have its flaws – a slightly broken diplomatic system where the CPU either loves or hates you, and an absence of naval battles are the main two – but you forget those as Gaius Antonius with his strange sidekicks wins the day again.

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