my first TW game was rome. i played that for a year or so before i found the glory that is
EUROPA BARBARORUM

and now i play no game unmodded. except of the FPS genre.
last summer i got ETW, which i played with Darthmod (it was a must, the AI was so bad in vanilla) until last month.

very recently, i started up EUROPA BARBARORUM again.
and i dont regret one minute of it. in fact i even made an AAR about my campaign as the Casse- see link in my sig, [/shameless advertising].