

With over two hundred unit types and an extended campaign map this means that a campaign is a long, time consuming endeavour, yet equally a richly challenging and enjoyable one. All in all the Rome Total Realism conversion boasts seventeen playable factions, with the Romans condensed into a single faction rather than being spread over three families and the Senate. Gone are the rather silly units like the war dogs and incendiary pigs, to be replaced by a veritable horde of re-textured and more historically accurate troop types. The changes in Rome Total Realism gear it much more towards the hard core players and fans of the original game, Medieval Total War, with its slower meat-grinder battles. Rome's original Egyptians look like Stargate extras (left) - Total Realism reacreates their proper uniforms with historical accuracy (right). The latest revision of the mod, 6, was released on January 1st 2006 and is available to download from the team's site. Finding a project on this massive scale that has been seen through to completion is rather like striking gold. When dealing with player-made mods this is not something to take lightly, as a huge number of projects fizzle out and remain unfinished. Rome Total Realism has the advantage of having been completed and further refined for some time. Two of the best currently available total conversions for Rome: Total War are the Europa Barbarorum and the Rome Total Realism mods.


With over 300 mods available at the Total War Centre, the range of tweaks, adjustments and extra units available is vast. It is by no means a perfect game (particularly to hard core fans of the series who loved the historical attention to detail of Medieval Total War), but you can't please all the people all of the time. Rome Total WarIt is perfectly conceivable that there are some people in the world who don't rate Rome Total War as a classic strategy game.
