"Despite a shaky start, after five years of developer updates and community feedback, Total War: Rome II is a worthy successor to Rome: Total War in almost every way."
Singleplayer.
Co-op Multiplayer.
PvP Multiplayer.
When Total War: Rome II was first released in 2013, like many PC games from that era, it performed worse than its predecessor on PCs.
This was due to companies such as AMD and Intel refocusing their efforts on producing CPUs with an increased number of cores instead of increasing the clock speed and single-threaded performance of those cores.
As a result, many releases from this era performed poorly, especially those in which the developers relied on modern CPUs for greater single-threaded performance instead of focusing on multithreading.
While this refocus proved the right course of action for gaming as a whole, titles such as Total War: Rome II and Total War: Atilla (which was already in development) were caught with their proverbial trousers down.
Combined with the unfortunate reality that Total War: Rome II lacked the quality-of-life improvements, performance, and enhanced diplomacy of earlier releases, fans were rightfully unhappy.
After almost a decade, Total War had returned to Rome, yet it was not the Rome we remembered.
Thankfully, The Creative Assembly did not leave Total War: Rome II in this sorry state. Instead, it pushed out a series of major updates, addressing complaints and making it even bigger and better than players had originally envisioned.
Additionally, Thanks to healthy base game and DLC sales and increasingly favourable community feedback, The Creative Assembly was able to continue to improve Total War: Rome II for just over five years, ensuring that by the time they moved on from it, their reputation and the game itself were worthy of Rome (Total War).
While the campaign maps featured in older Total War titles were very impressive for their time, the level of detail in newer titles is in a league of its own. With often dozens of factions of various sizes, from minor tribes that hold a single settlement to massive, sprawling empires, each turn offers an abundance of diplomatic and tactical options for players.
While I am a huge fan of this and love how the addition of smaller factions enhances (and often complicates) diplomatic relations between larger empires, I will admit that some players may feel overwhelmed trying to manage relations with over two dozen separate factions, each with its own goals and ambitions, not to mention rebel factions that spring up from time to time, each with its own set of goals and territorial ambitions.
A downside of this system is that you may be dragged into a war against your will due to a client state deciding to start a war with a client state of an ally or neighbouring superpower, or worse still, decide it feels like picking a fight with your long-time ally, the Spartans, bringing an end to over 100 years of peace between allies and client states.
For those interested, you better believe I sided with my long-time allies Sparta over the Venti, who never really liked me, to begin with, and only agreed to be my client state after I defeated them soundly after they declared war on one of my other client states, in what can only be described as a moment of insanity.
Unlike Rome Total War and other Total War titles from that era, Total War: Rome II requires a lot of player interaction to keep things running smoothly, such as keeping populations happy and fed, upgrading buildings, managing regions, issuing edicts, and, most importantly ensuring that slums (which are a drain on food, morale and income) do not spring up in vacant lots.
In addition, conquering settlements where another culture is dominant requires destroying or converting every building before it can be used, which doesn’t make much sense from an economic or militaristic standpoint.
While I understand the need to rededicate temples or construct faction-specific buildings, why would any occupying force destroy useful structures such as archery ranges, granaries, fishing docks, and stables when they could have used them instead?
Ultimately, it’s not a game-breaking issue. Still, it is rather immersion-breaking and forces the player to be more hands-on when managing larger empires than some players may find enjoyable.
In our recent review of Total War: Rome Remastered, we discussed how broken the diplomacy system was in that game, how alliances were essentially meaningless, and how AI factions would declare war for no apparent reason.
Thankfully, that is not the case with Total War: Rome II, in which diplomacy is a game unto itself.
Through clever and deliberate diplomacy, allies can be used as a shield against aggression and as a second front when dealing with aggressive factions.
In a recent playthrough, I made alliances with every Greek faction to the south and east of Rome and kept those alliances intact throughout the entire 250+ turns it took to win the campaign.
In addition, many smaller rivals and upstart kingdoms were quickly beaten into submission and joined my growing list of client states which formed a buffer between myself and more powerful factions until I was ready to deal with them,
This allowed me to take over Europe while helping my allies in Africa and the Middle East to deal with any factions that could have posed a problem if left unchecked.
When I finished my time most recent campaign, the vast majority of the map was either owned by me, my allies, or our client states, with the exception of a handful of small single region/settlement neutral factions who not only could not pose a threat to Rome but for the most part had either favourable or natural feelings about Rome due to careful use of diplomacy and strategic military interventions, ensuring that most nations that remained were either allies or indebted to Rome in some way.
One aspect of Total War: Rome II that is not an improvement over older titles is the way that auto-resolve struggles to predict results for a wide variety of battle scenarios in a consistent manner; in my most recent playthrough, auto-resolve wrongly predicted multiple battles, including:
These are just a few examples of how badly Auto Resolve predicted the outcomes of battles, and that is a problem, considering the way the campaign map is handled in titles such as Total War: Rome II means that it is impossible to fully garrison each and every settlement, due to even smaller regions having three or more settlements to defend, resulting in frequent battles, that would make playthroughs extremely if players were forced to play each battle out in its entity manually.
Don’t get me wrong—the real-time battles in Total War: Rome II are incredible and undoubtedly some of the franchise’s best historical battles.
However, I like to pick my battles carefully instead of being forced to fight manual battles against every random army or minor settlement that stands in my way of victory.
While it’s still possible to only play manual battles when they are unique or interesting and auto-resolve the rest, I must do so knowing that I am likely losing more units than I should and occasionally winning a battle I should have lost due to how the auto-resolve option calculates the results for each battle.
On this note, for those who want to jump straight into battles without dealing with the campaign map and associated logistics, the main menu offers a variety of instant action modes, such as historical battles, quick battles, and custom battles.
In addition, despite Total War: Rome II being released over a decade ago, people are still playing multiplayer, and even at off-peak times, it’s possible to find players hosting and joining games, which is frankly remarkable and speaks volumes about the quality of Total War: Rome II and the dedication of the Rome Total War Community.
Total War: Rome II looks and performs well on a wide variety of hardware.
When running at maxed settings on my Radeon RX 7700 XT build and using a 1080P resolution, I maintained a rock-solid 80FPS+ during intense battles, which is fine with me for games of this kind.
While performance is very much based on the settings/resolution used and the power of each player’s respective hardware, I see no realistic scenario where a player could not find a graphical setting to ensure a stable 60FPS when using any gaming PC built within the last 10 years.
Total War: Rome II has a lot of DLC, and for some veteran Total War players, it was a little offputting to see a Total War game with so many post-launch premium DLC.
However, considering how much content the larger DLCs add and how even the smaller DLCs add a considerable amount of content for a relatively low price, I fully support the DLC model used by companies like The Creative Assembly and Paradox, as it allows them to continue updating the base game with new features and fixes long after development would have otherwise ended.
In the case of Total War: Rome II, this monetization model allowed the developers to support it for over five years, ensuring that it moved beyond its lacklustre beginning and became one of the best historical Total War titles of all time.
As of 2025, almost every Total War: Rome II DLC frequently goes on sale for around 66% off, which is a bargain considering that many of the campaign DLC often go on sale for less than $6, while unit pack DLC such as the Daughters of Mars Unit Pack, retails for as little as $1.49 during seasonal sales.
Total War: Rome II is a 4x strategy video game developed by The Creative Assembly and published by Sega, it was released on 3 September 2013 and retails for $29.99.
Total War: Rome II is available exclusively on PC.
Total War: Rome II offers the following matchmaking options:
The following peripherals are officially supported:
Total War: Rome II is rated PEGI 16+ and contains:
Total War: Rome II is currently the best way to play a “Roman era” Total War game without resorting to community modifications.
While its lengthy campaign structure and more in-depth gameplay mechanics may not appeal to all fans of the original, it is one of my favourite Total War games, and even after owning it for many years, I am still enjoying my time with it.
I fully recommend picking up Total War: Rome II; however, it does go on sale for as much as 90% off multiple times a year, and unless you are desperate to play it right away, I suggest adding it to your wishlist and picking it up when it goes on sale, and use the money you saved to purchase a few of the DLC campaigns (which also frequently go on sale), as they really expand upon the game and increase replayability tenfold due to the number of new units, factions, victory conditions, and mechanics introduced with each DLC.
We found Total War: Rome II to be a good game, meaning it is likely to be enjoyable for most players, despite having a few areas that could be improved upon.
