Yeah, the bugs. That was a major disappointment in some ways, and in others also a technical accomplishment. Part of the problem is the scale of a Total War game in and of itself - these games are huge, come in two parts which with most other developers would end up being two complete, seperate games, and on top of that include some very complex game mechanics on both the campaign and battle sides.

We changed our working methodology quite a bit for Rome, and it paid off to the extent that the Rome bug database ended up being smaller than the Medieval one (while the code was substantially larger), the hardware compatibility was generally excellent and the number of crash bugs and severe problems very low. What kinda bit us in the end though was that a relatively low number of chunky mechanics and AI bugs and a few largeish technical issues (the load-save one for example) slipped the net... but in the greater scope of things, 50 or so bugs is not many

It was unfortunate that our publishing agreement was quite restrictive with respect to patch creation, and that a few of the bugs that did get through were so substantial.