Ancient Empires
My humble review
Even though I have remained a consistent and dedicated fan and player of total war games, life has rendered it impossible for me to help out with the mods. Though the mods are the only reason I keep on spending whatever free time I can get these days.
Ancient Empires is not only a great work in progress, it is one that needs to be completed, as soon as possible.
It’s the kind of mod that is the wet dream of all total war fans. It is a dream that promises it may come true in time.
I have played around with the battles, but I feel it is not long enough to say any more than that its good, it is certainly much, much better than my shock when I first played Rome II.
Playing a battle here feels like fighting a battle at least. You can almost have a rehearsal of history with the excellent way things have been balanced so far.
And there is so much more to praise about this mod. And I can’t wait to play a single player campaign. Which is why the campaign will be the focus of my review.
Campaign pros and cons
The pros
The family trees are mostly immersive beyond anything I have ever seen so far. The biggest turn off of the total war series for me since medieval 2 has been the way that the family tree was treated. Instead of it being improved it was plunged into a quagmire of bugs in empire total war, it was rendered nearly pointless in Shogun 2. Then Rome 2 came out without it altogether. Attila total war brought a lesser version of it back. I say lesser because of one single question.
‘Whatever happened to the family names, whatever happened to their being inheritable as it is in real life.’
Such are the kinds of changes that suck the energy out of any desire to carry on a campaign. It has become incredibly hard to care about an agent, a general, let alone a unit in an army. I am very impressed by seeing that a baby rules Egypt, as this was the reality. And I would love to reprise such roles.
Ancient empires has offers such an impressive list of promising and awesome features. The character portraits are just awesome.
The cons
My first campaign was with Rome of course. I plaid on normal difficulty. I played for 13 turns, and managed to conquer a few cities in north Africa including Carthage, however the biggest problem I had was that even after 13 turns I still had no way of ensuring a proper supply of food and Income at the same time. And in spite the fact that I made numerous trade agreements, and maintained only my original army, public order remained mostly out of control. Even though it remained not so dangerous, in fact by then all I had to do was to move my army to where I expected a rebellion and then crush it and move on.
All in all I experienced only one ctd that forced me to backtrack to an earlier turn, a few naval unit cards were also missing in the Carthage roster. Aside from the inability of cavalry to remount I encountered no battle bugs. City unique designs are awesome save for a few floating chimneys here and there, the city centres are also often full of invisible obstacles.
My second campaign was with Carthage. I plaid on normal difficulty.
So far the only problem I have is the absurdly high native discontent.
The UI looks great but the season indicator is a bit confusing.
The family tree has a few characters that appear on both sides such as Bomilcar. I’m not sure how that works. Baalat is also listed as a wife, but has no husband.
That’s it so far, I hope to be able to mention a few more things as the campaign progresses
Note I’m using the June 29th update so some of the issues may have been fixed, though its not mentioned in the change logs.