Customer Reviews

Rome: Total War (Prima Official Game Guide)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

So you spend 50+ dollars on Rome Total War and you've been completely sucked into the game. You've read the manual and done the tutorials, and you've learned the game well enough - but you still find yourself wanting to know more - after all the manual never teaches you everything. Yup... you've been here before with many other games, and you know what to do. It's time to drop MORE of your precious Denari on a Strategy (game) guide. First things first, let's ask a very important question:

DO YOU NEED THIS GUIDE?

Rome total war, as complex and vast in scope and depth as it is, is a very accessible game. The developers took all the depth and strategy and put it in a very simple package. The tutorials do a nice job introducing you to the basic game concepts and getting you comfortable with the game. The manual, as far as manuals go, is quite good. And if that werent enough to help along the newbies, there's in game advisors that do everything short of playing the game FOR you. So with all that help do we need to spend the extra dough on this guide? Well the answer is could be an affirmative if you are either A) a complete newbie and feel like you need more help even though there is so much built right into the game, or B) you really absolutely need to know as much about the nitty gritty core of the game mechanics as possible. And of course if you really love the game then you'll probably want this as well.

The Guide Itself

Now that we know who needs this guide, we can talk about the specifics. Strategy guides, as all gamers know, are so often just rip offs. This particular guide is of poor quality for the money. It's in black and white (no color!), images arent very good (1000 words? these pictures are worth 500 at best). And the guide reiterates a lot of what's in the manual. There's lots of tips, but the guide doesnt do well in the way of being comprehensive. No province profiles, no analysis of campaing map strategic points and stuff like that. What it does have are plenty of important numbers and facts. A complete run down of all units and buildings and admittedly a wealth of information that WILL come in handy.

About 187 pages of valuable info are present but only about 40 or so (<25%) are actual tips, tricks and descriptions of the game systems. The rest are unit profiles, tech trees, and general reference info - still helpful but the medieval total war guide did a better job over all. I cant find a run down of the combat system or the moral system or anything of the sort in this book! So the numbers on those unit profiles are meaningless.

The back cover of the book says "Fully Detailed Campaign Map". Try and find it in the book! What they meant by this was they threw a 7 x 4.5 inch black and white picture of the campaign map on the last page!! The image has terrible contrast and it's black and white and really small. You cant even make out city names that's how bad it is. Considering the game comes with a 1 1/2 foot by 1 foot fold out color map what the heck good is this? More than that the total war website has a province profile in flash that is FREE.

And that pretty much demonstrates what this guide is all about - getting our money. In the end, this is a "typical" strategy guide made to get our money, not made by people who really loved the game. It's full of tips (some of which are so basic it's funny, but some of which are valuable), information, and other stuff, but little more than you'd expect to find on your basic fan site. Id recommend this to people who really love the game and anything to do with the game, and absolute newbies who really need more help and are too lazy to go looking online. Anyone straped for cash or expecting a guide that was as good as the last one might want to check one out in the store before shelling out the money.

This guide is rather disappointing. It is not a strategy guide as much as it is a manual. The chapters it has on battle maps and campaign maps brovide little information that isn't available in the game's manual. The strategy guide does have a nice catalog of all units and buildings, which is helpful.

I had hoped this guide would provide a lot of information on how to play the game and get through certain situations. It is nice to know what a certain unit does and what its exact statistics are, but before I am interested in that, I would like some basic information on how to fight a battle. Knowing that fire arrows make the ememy peer their pants is interesting, but it would be nice to know when to use them, when not to use them, how accurate they are compared to regular arrows and such.

There are many examples that need explaining on the campaign map too. What can I do to make sure my family tree grows? If I do not have enough family members to put a governor in every town and a general in every army, is it better to have towns without governors or armies without a leader?

None of these questions are answered here. The closest this guide comes to really guiding the reader is in the section about historical battles (although those chapters are very short). Overall, I recommend you go to www.totalwar.org and ignore this guide.

Don't waste your money on this guide, it's full of fluff, needless information, and false advertising. The back of the guide gives five bulleted statements, intended to make you want to buy Prima's offering:

* FULLY DETAILED CAMPAIGN MAP
* IMPERIAL CAMPAIGN TIPS AND STRATEGIES
* BATTLEFIELD TIPS AND STRATEGIES
* VALUABLE UNIT AND STRUCTURE STATISTICS FOR ALL FACTIONS
* WINNING TIPS AND STRATEGIES FOR HISTORICAL BATTLES

The first statement (despite claims to the contrary in another review) is misleading. It is obvious from the context that the statement is talking about the guide and not the game. That's what the back cover in a case like this is suppose to be, an advertisement for the information inside! Sometimes they give summary blurbs, sometimes bulleted information, but whatever the case, it is talking about the guide in your hand, not the game in your computer. But the guide most certainly does NOT have a "Fully Detailed Campaign Map". As others have pointed out, the game itself comes with a color map that measures 12 by 18 inches; and all that is in the guide is a blurry, very small, 7 1/2 by 4 1/2 inch map in black and white. Ironically the map on the back cover of the guide (the part you can see anyway), which is not meant to give information so much as serve as part of the advertisement, is actually a lot CLEARER than the map in the actual guide. The real kicker is that they put "Fully Detailed Campaign Map" first in the order, and in a much larger font, than the other bulleted statements. As though this were the guide's main selling point! Incredible.

The next statement said "Imperial Campaign Tips and Strategies". As others have said, though, you will be hard-pressed to find any of this in the actual guide. Real tips and strategies would have been information like:

"Besides a penalty for having a different culture, the further a conquered city is from your capital the more unhappy the citizens will be. Therefore, if you have a family member who has attributes which help him keep public order, place him in this type of large, foreign city."

Instead, what we get is a lot of repeating what the manual said, with some elementary additions that most people who play strategy games would know anyway. And in a great game like Rome, you can't even give them the benefit of the doubt by saying that maybe the info is for people new to strategy games. Rome gives all the information necessary for new people to know what to do in situations like that. For example, in a case like public disorder, you can right-click on your buildings and see exactly how much they can improve the order, you can easily change the taxes and instantaneously see the difference it makes on happiness, and you can go to the city's details and find out the exact reasons for unhappiness in the city. It even tells you how much of a problem each factor is causing, like saying "Squalor: 20%; Culture Penalty: 50%; etc." Now, a REAL tip would have been to explain why, for example, having 80 soldiers can sometimes have the same effect on unrest as having 160 soldiers. Is the ability of a garrison to pacify the people based on the "tier" the city is on, the population, the types of soldiers, a mix of factors, or what?

The third statement is: "Battlefield Tips and Strategies". This is similar to what I said about about the imperial tips, but Prima is a little better here. Some of the strategies, while simplistic, are at least good to repeat. There is also some good information here, like the explaining of the different formations, or listing all the factors that can effect troop morale, but this good content unfortunately does not go on for very long. They do have something called "Ten Tips For Victory," which gives ten short statements about good strategy. While the tips aren't anything particularly deep and are pretty basic (stategically speaking), it is at least an attempt. If only they would have put more of an effort to going outside of Instruction Guide mode more often in other areas, I might have given the guide two stars.

The fourth bulleted statement said: "Valuable Unit and Structure Statistics For All Factions". I'll first say that I was somewhat let down that they didn't have a chart with all the unit information on it. They spend over fifty pages giving information about the units, but none of it is new. It is basically the same info that the game itself gives you by simply right-clicking on a unit. So in the end, all this information in the guide comes off as nothing more than filler. If the information had been compiled into a chart, it at least could have served the purpose of being a quick reference when comparing the strenths and weaknesses of various units. For example, you might be in the middle of a battle, and have several units with axes (which are good against armor), so you would want to know the status of the armor on various enemy units so as to determine who best to attack next; a graph could have given this information to you within seconds. But as it is, you are forced to first find the right faction (they are not really set apart very well), and then look up each unit's armor one by one.

This fourth statement is also misleading. It does NOT have structure statistics for all factions, as it claims. In fact, it has structure statistics for only 11 of the 19 factions, with the rationale being that you can't play the other 8 factions. Well, first, this is only half true because you can conquer a foreign city and therefore will take over their buildings. So knowing the statistics of their buildings (even if you can't start a game as that faction) could still be relevant. Of course, you could just right-click on the building to get it's statistics, but then the same argument would make almost ALL the information in this book superfluous as it's almost all in the game. This is not to say that a guide has no purpose at all. One of the few things that a guide can provide is a way of comparing and contrasting different buildings, units, etc.; unfortunately Prima didn't seem to want to go that route.

Whatever the case may be, in the end, Prima decided to exclude the structure statistics for 8 factions, so it is misleading to say that the guide contains "Valuable unit and structure statistics for all factions". They should have inserted the word "playable": they have statistics for all playable factions.

The last bulleted statement said that the guide contained "Winning Tips and Strategies For Historical Battles," and it is only in this area that the guide rises even to an acceptable level. Unfortunately, it is too little and too late. By the time you get to this section, you have already went through 165 pages of mostly fluff, filler, and information that was in the instruction booklet that came with the game. The sad thing is that even the information that they tried to give is incomplete. They had a section on the unit statistics of barbarian mercenaries, for example, but then left out information about half the mercenary units in the game! There is no mention of Libyan Mercenaries, Samnite Mercenaries, Mercenary Hoplites, Mercenary Peltasts, Barbarian Mercenaries, or other such units.

Rome: Total War is a very good strategy game. It will probably be the game I play most until Age of Empires 3 (and especially Civilization 4) come out later this year or early next year. But a good game does not equate to a good guide (as the other guy seemed to think, for some reason). So my conclusion is that it would be best to skip this game guide and spend your money on something else; Most of the information you need is already in the game, and the rest you can figure out on your own.

I have to agree with the other two reviews... this guide tells me NOTHING that I couldn't have found in the manual. The sad part is that, when I looked online, I easily found two game guides (at IGN & firingsquad.com) that are VASTLY superior to this one. And they're free.

Since unit statistics are now available from in-game windows, what's the point in half-filling this "guide" with them? The only reason can be padding. As for the tips, they're laughable.

I'd heard great things about the M:TW Guide, which is why I bought this one. Don't bother. Visit IGN.com or firingsquad.com instead.

Rome Total War is a great game, perhaps the best in the Total War series and, maybe even the best strategy game released since the first Age of Empires game. I love the game, but, the Prima Guide leaves MUCH to be desired. The guides is completely in black and white, the "detailed campaign map" advertised on the book cover is a small, black and white, blurry little version of the giant fold-out color map that comes with the game. 3/4 of the book is dedicated to giving stats for all the units and buildings in the game, and the rest of the book is split between a description of the game (basically a slimmed down version of the game manual) and a guide to the historical battles. Hints, tips, and strategy guides are nearly all covered in the game manual, or are simple common sense things that any gamer can figure out on their own. The unit descriptions, that take up most of the book, are also found in-game, in full color, with more detail. In the end, the Prima Guide is hardly worth the money.

While this guide is not a complete waste of time, there is no compelling reason to pay for it. All of the relevant information can be found online at various fan sites. Hang on to your dough and save it for the Rome:TW expansion packs we know will be coming along!

This is the biggest waste of paper I've encountered in a long time. There is nothing useful in here that you can't find in the manual or in the game, unless you just can't seem to figure out how to beat one of the Historic Battles.

The only reason to buy this is if you've misplaced the manual that came with the game.

This guide is utter piece of crap. 90% of this guide is covered by manual and in-game tutorial. The guide's soldier count isn't even correct. Most of the unit count listed in the guide is half the amount in the game. For example, Hastate is listed as 40 soldiers per unit, but in-game it's 80 soldiers per unit.

This is probably the worse Prima "strategy" guide I purchased. It's so bad; it prompted me to write my first ever online review. Don't waste your money on this crap. I want my money back!

This is a complete waste of time, and a way to get easy cash from the producers and distributors of this game.

I bet with everyone that the guy who gave it 5 stars probably is one of CA (Creative Assembly) cursed staff. Just look at the way he quoted magazines "Oh wonderful graphics" "Best game ever" bla bla bla and all the crap you can wonder.

Of course, the magazines players and testers come to fall in the eyecandy category, and when they see good graphics they categorize it like the game of the century. Total Disappointment.

I hope you learned from this reviem.

Why bother buying this guide !
when playing the game
you have two Roman advice guides to help you.