Confession time

[bondovic]

The end result is that battles feel more like an arcade game....and they're usually over in a mere 5-10 minutes. During the time I played Rome, I never once had an epic battle where it took me half an hour (or more) to fight out -- the outcome was nearly always decided well within the first few minutes of combat.

I know! There's no grind in the battles. Terrible. What's the use of building a fancy army if you're only getting a couple of minutes of watching them fight?

In addition to the previously-mentioned fantasy units, a lot of units in RTW were simply very unbalanced. Chariots were overpowered, cavalry was generally *way* overpowered, and even archers get far too many kills with their arrows. It's ironic that infantry -- the backbone of not only the Roman army, but many of the barbarian tribes as well -- ends up taking a backseat to most of the other unit types.

And once you get War Elephants it's just stupid how boring it gets. Those behemoths can trample any army into the mud. I actually beat the entire Brutii faction with nothing but 3 of them, my general and 3 units of Arab Cavalry. "Whoopie."

After that I decided the game was unplayable.