Oh god I had to reformat, lost my saves. I had a very hard campaign so close to victory as the Tokugawa.

A wise owl once said: "back up your saves before you reformat"

Seriously though that's harsh, I found the Tokugawa to be one of the hardest clans to play as.

Marius reforms was indeed before its time and revolutionary in many aspects not only with each unit (infantry, cavalry), but also the administration of an army and the system of cohorts sort of battalion or squadron with an eagle symbol.

Yes, I believe that it is. One of the reasons that everyone in my campaign hates me is because they broke the alliance with me.

Been playing Rome for just over a week now, Loving it.

Started with romans and won a long campaign. I played most of the bigger/interesting/crucial battles myself, but for most minor ones and city attacks, i usually just Auto-Resolve, and it works fairly well/accurately

Im now playing as the greeks, and dominating everyone. But auto resolve svcks ! I can outnumber them by thousands, and ill probably win a "Clear victory" but i lose as many if not more than them in the process.
Where as if i play myself, i can be outnumbered by thousands and still only lose a few hundred.

Wouldnt be so bad, but for every battle, no matter how small, i need to adopt the same strategy of spear circle/squares with archers in the middle, or else the hoplites just get outflanked. Greeks could really use a sword type unit.
Just gets a bit tedious for every battle when i should be able to finish it off quickly with Auto resolve and move on

But, i do love watching waves and waves pile up in from of the spear wall

Edit- Oh, and sometimes the Hoplites go a bit wonky and start breaking formation / running about themselves. Bit annoying when it leaves a gap in the line

I usually counter this by hiring mercenaries, usually Thracian ones, that can maneuver around the flanks to protect them. If those are out of the question try this: Instead of lining your phalanx up in one straight line, take the end unit on each wing, and drop them back a little. It should look like this (excuse this poor attempt lol):

_------_

Those underscores being the unit that drops a little back. This way they can sort of turn and protect the main body of hoplites while avoiding being outflanked. This assumes you have at least 2 units of cavalry though. If you don't have at least a general or two in your armies of hoplites, then yeah, you're gonna get outflanked every time. Some cavalry will make sure you can check any enemies moving around your sides.

I hate phalanx camping against the AI so I had use this alternative.

Fall of the Samurai is my favorite so far. I can't believe how well they've handled "modern" units and technology. I can't wait to see if there's a more modern-era total war coming down the pipe.

We're in same boat so to speak and I've playing Rome a little longer, but this time I tried to play with very hard setting both on the campaign map and on the battle field and it wasn't unrealistic imo.

When I begin to play with the hardest settings I decided to play any faction in both the imperial campaign and the barbarian invasion, but I agree the auto resolve feature sometimes really svcks and I can't understand how in earth an enemy can won a battle when I've a lot better units and in the same time outnumbered my foe. On other hand I do have some remarkable victories via the auto resolve feature, so I figure it should be equal then between the AI and the player.

Your general's quality has a big impact on auto-resolve as well. You can win (or lose) against the most impossible odds, as long as one general has a lot more command stars than his opponent.

Yeah I know but sometimes that doesn't count no matter what army I've to fight my foes.

Yeah I remember being the Greeks on rtw, and I has this one general with the maximum star rating and only a half stack army went on to conquer nearly the entire eastern half of the map, save for Egypt an this one Amazonian province at the north which had chariots, which was so hard.

Don't forget Pontus they also have chariots, which can sometimes be a real nightmare.

Yeah they were a bit of a challenge, but these amazonians were something else, I remember there being something like only 4 chariot units and 2 infantry but it was almost impossible to auto resolve it. They decimated my army :'(

My only problem with RTW is you can only play Rome, thank goodness for the Barbarian Invasion expansion. I love heavy Eastern cavalry, specifically cataphracts, though i typically play Huns.

I know there is http://www.twcenter.net/forums/downloads.php?do=file&id=2069 that allows you to play the Rebels and recruit both the Amazon chariots and the http://www.twcenter.net/wiki/Rebels_(RTW_Faction)#Types_of_Rebels in the imperial campaign.

Once you complete the campaign you unlock more factions. You can also change all factions to playable in the game folder. Makes things a lot more intresting playing as the senate, at least for the change of colour! just don't press the senate tab ever, the game has an stroke

You can actually change a file so that you can play every faction except for the Rebels and the Senate, and even then there are probably mods to let you play those!

And there are a handful of unlockable factions that you get to play as if you defeat them individually in the campaign or if you finish an Imperial Campaign.

What are you talking about of course you can play http://www.twcenter.net/forums/downloads.php?do=file&id=1013 in the imperial campaign and here is more information about http://www.twcenter.net/wiki/HowTo:Unlock_All_Factions manually.

If you want to http://www.twcenter.net/forums/downloads.php?do=file&id=832 in Barbarian Invasion then this is a neat http://www.twcenter.net/forums/downloads.php?do=file&id=762 which I've been using for 2-3 years now.

Currently on my game H/M Campaign/Battle I am the Brutii holed up in Caralis region. I've given away my other regions to the other two roman factions and now for the last 100 years i've gone star forge mode to build a couple infinite fleets 'Of course my people are a RBE :3' then when the time is right we shall burst out onto the world and take everything *insert evil laughter*

Managed to build up 15 full armies sitting there now along with 5 or 6 full fleets as naval support. Just waiting for the civil war to start. Once it does the world shall be mine!!!!

I usually only start the Civil War with 6 full armies. Can't afford much more than that.

I've never played a Total War game, but I'm really interested in Roman history. I saw that Rome TW is only $10 on Steam and you get another game with it for free. The only games I've played that are even similar to Total War are AoE II and AoM. I'm just curious how much I could relate to the game.

tbh, if you are truly into history, you'll rage a bit at vanilla Total War games There are plenty of mods that make things more historically friendly if you wanted though.

I'd say they're pretty historically accurate. More so than any other game than I've played. Rome:TW, that is. I mean, they're weak, but not terrible.

It's "overall" historically-accurate, depending on which one we're talking about but the whole premise is that you can rewrite history so if you're into that kind of thing you'll love it. Not too similar to the whole AoE series, there is no building and mining on the battlefield (you do that on the campaign map) and you command WAY bigger forces (talking thousands here) with more advanced commands. It may seem overwhelming to AoE players at first (I know it did to me) but once you get into the series, you'll realize they're the best strategy gamed ever made.

Well I'm not sure of any game that tries to be historically accurate? Maybe Paradox games, and those are far better in terms of history then Total War games. But that's not the point really. It's still fun to beat the stupid out of Rome as the Gauls or the Greeks