Rome/BI differences

Hi there. I use to play Medieval with Viking Invasion. I recently got Rome/BI together in the Gold Edition. I updated the game with the 1.6 patch. I jumped into Rome and played the Prologue and then started messing around with the Campaign to learn how things worked. I then read the manual for BI and loaded it up and was surprised. BI is 1.6 and Rome is 1.5. When Vikings came out you basically loaded the game as Vikings and had access to the old campaigns using the new game system changes. Maybe I'm missing something, but if I want to play the Rome campaign I have to load Rome and don't get some of the changes in BI like being able to recruit a General? I'm already noticing a shortage of family members and while I can understand that from a family side I agree that Generals should be able to be recruited up from the Army for a cost. What I don't get is why this seems to be in BI only. I don't see where I can play the first campaign from BI either, but someone please tell me it isn't so.

I think you understand things right, but I would not sweat it: I never recruited a general in BI. BI is basically a standalone campaign - you should be able to run it just by sticking your BI disc into your computer. I found it quite a refreshing change from RTW - the Western Romans, in particular, I found fun. You can see a write up of a PBM campaign we played as them:

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=60372

If you want more of BI, I strongly recommend Goth's all factions mod. You can find it on the Rome Total Realism forums.

If what you are looking for is an improvement of the vanilla RTW campaign, I can't recommend too highly Rome Total Realism: Platinum Edition and Europa Barbarorum. They take the original RTW and give it a complete makeover. It's still recognisably the same game, but is much richer in historical detail and has more rewarding gameplay.

Thanks. I'll check out the mods.