It's hard to resist the temptation to attack allies to unify provinces

Apr 2, 2014 00:16 GMT  ·  By

During my first campaign of Total War: Rome II – Hannibal at the Gates, I tried to basically launch an ancient form of blitzkrieg against the Romans playing as Carthage, which ended in disaster after I lost my main commander, Hannibal Barca himself.

For my second campaign, I chose to play as the Romans in order to see their own starting position and one thing that struck me was the fragmentation of their core provinces and the way this setup went against the core concepts of the strategy title from The Creative Assembly.

The company has grouped cities into regions, allowing players to get some cool bonuses when they owned all the settlements included in one of them.

At the start of Hannibal at the Gates, Italy is a mishmash of Roman and allied cities and my first instinct was to simply declare war on my Latin relatives in order to create a more unified state, which would be in a better position to take on Carthage.

The choice to consolidate or simply expand is an interesting one for the Roman faction, especially given how quickly the Carthaginians are expanding in Iberia and the number of mercenaries they seem to be recruiting.

Because of the way the map of the new campaign is shaped, if the foothills of the Alps are secured, Rome can then focus on the south and take Sicily before invading the African mainland and Carthage itself.

It will be interesting to see how the AI chooses to approach the Second Punic War and whether my enemies will take the historical route or whether they will try something new and interesting in terms of strategy.

My complaint at the moment is that The Creative Assembly might have simplified the scenario a little bit too much by excluding Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean from the equation and by making both factions equal in terms of diplomatic power.

The city states and the Macedonians played a role in the actual conflict and Carthage would have a much better chance of winning the fight if it could use allies to threaten Rome from the East as well as the West.

Given the current setup, Rome is in a pretty good position to secure its starting provinces, pacify the Gauls to the North and then simply take one settlement from the Carthaginians at a time without having to deal with any other incursions.