Call me Blanche duBois, but personally I feel that "realism" is a vastly overrated concept. I can understand why those folks who have actual educations and who've devoted chunks of their lives to studying the period in question get all bent out of shape at the Romans deploying ninja, or gladiators wearing arena-style armour on the battlefield. And I can understand why those same people get a bit sniffy when people say that they like screeching women, or the druid units, or head-hurlers. But the nature of the beast is that at some point you're going to have to draw a line and say "I can accept exactly THIS much unrealism (is that a word? It is now)."

Because, y'know. It's a game. Entertainment. Unrealistic by definition. And personally, I'm vastly more interested in the game mechanics/units/whatever being fun than I am with them conforming to someone's fairly arbitrary notion of "realism".

I really don't care that it's ahistorical that my generals ride horses, and that they're more difficult to kill than the common herd. I don't care that an army could move much further in six months than the campaign map seems to suggest that they could. I really, really don't care that some of the provinces have the "wrong" names. I want the game to feel authentic, in the same way and for the same reason that I want a period movie to feel authentic - but if slavish devotion to realism cuts into the fun, then give me enjoyable fantasy, please.

"Well," say the makers of the mod, "it's not been developed for people like you, but for folks who prefer historical accuracy over balanced gameplay."

"And that's fair enough," I reply.

It's a shame, really, there are lots of little touches to RTR that I like, but at the end of the day I couldn't get past the plodding pace of combat, the complete vulnerablility of one of the games most valuable resources (ie, generals) and the wealth of changes that have been made for pedants rather than players.

Bottom line, if you're someone who had kittens over the way the Egyptian units look in the game, you'll probably eat Total Realism up. If you're someone who's just looking for a more challenging version of the game, then give it a whirl but beware - part of the increased challenge felt a bit arbitrary to me, like game mechanics have been specifically and needlessly added to make your life more difficult (in much the same way that Doom III was made more challenging by the developers deciding you couldn't use a gun and a flashlight at the same time). Personally, I just couldn't get on with it and despite the horrible temptation to give the Britons a whirl, I'm sworn off Total War again until the patch.

Sorry to ramble on a bit, I just hope that was a little bit more helpful to someone than "It's great" or "it's rubblish".