I only played the Prologue and Iam into 5th turn of a Rome campaign yet there are some things who instantly caught my attention.
This is not meant as a comprehensive review...just some random things which jumped into my face straight away

On the cheesy side I have
1. The Map - the biggest issue for me
Extremely dissapointed by the scope of the map
Italy has even fewer citys than in RTW. I have not counted all regions but it looks about 20 less than in Rome which had a max of
198 settlements, 1 unexplored and 1 Water if I remember correctly. So saying Rome 2 has more than double the amount of regions of Shogun 2 may be technically true but its an advertising smoke bomb...for RTW fans this must be a huge dissapointment especially given the fact that the 200 regions hardcode cap for RTW frustrated ambitions of many great mods...from RTW:Total Realism , to SPQR, Roma Surrectum II and others.
If the regions cap is hardcoded again I swear I throw Rome 2 out of the window.....or maybe not but it would be extremely annoying
2. Citys
Campaign map citys are totally out of proportion
I understand that there is no real relative proportion to the size of the map but this is just too much
3. UI
I hate the ultra modern simplified approach taken here. It just doesnt fit with the ancient time and does not add to immersion...quite the contrary...same goes for the building UI...looks extremely generic
4. Campaign Map
While generally beautiful the world looks dead...in RTW roads were populated with small trader carts...the more carts the bigger the trade income...same with merchant ships and trees moving in the wind on the map...it gave a nice impression of a living enviroment
5. Graphics (Colors & Brightness)
Why does everything looking so pale ?..Its like there is constant fog...errrrrrr
7. Neapolis ?
WTF ? Where is Capua ?
8. Battles
Almost quicker than vanilla RTW...I understand that for the generic customer this is a must but its terrible
9. hypothetic
With so many factions...is there any possibility that other factions grow big enough to present any challenge ?

On the sunny side I have
1. Amount of Units
Awesome...of course only if they are not just generic clones with different textures but same stats all over again
2. Amount of Factions
Fantastic...was hoping for somethig like this
3. Unit size
Can be raised without problems for pathfinding and cohesion (as far as I have seen)...great
just the ships have to be fixed as one half of the unit cant not disembark from 2nd ship when AI uses it
4. Max amount of unit to be commanded
Nice improvement...love it...when rasing max number of units for single army under 1 general this starts to be real fun


All in all there are some nice improovements over RTW (which I think can be expected after 9 years) and a very annoying step backwards
when it comes to the scope of the world map.
I havent bothered with family tree, techs and other aspects yet so I cant say anything on the matter right now.

Thoughts, opinions ?