Hey everyone. I decided to join because I don't know much about strategy games, but I definitely want to start playing them. Hopefully everyone can help me out. Thanks.

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Welcome to the .Org an let me say that you made an excelent choice by choosing a TW game.

What game do you want to play?

PS before posing questions randomly, read the excelent guides on the .Org first. They will clarify the basics and some strategies that you always should keep in mind.

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Are you thinking about starting with TW games, or just generally RTS games?

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Well, games like Rome: Total War are far more complex than other strategy games.

Generally, it is a good idea to build economy at the start before building troops, because if you have a failed attack with a bad economy, defences and no troops stationed in you base you get massacred. Both in RTW and RTS games.

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Another soul for the Dark Gods. Ha Ha Ha...

er, yes. Hello darkone

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My friend won't shut up about how great Rome Total War is, so I'm definitely looking into that. More specifically, RTW: Gold Edition because it includes both the game and the expansion pack. He recommended it to me awhile ago, but I didn't think too much about it. But I've been reading up on it, and it seems really interesting to me. And I have yet to read a bad review or opinion about the game.

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You could borrow the game off a friend or play it at their house before buying it.

By the sounds of things they should have some experience, so they can introduce you to it.

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Welcome to the.org darkone and shall you have a millon posts.

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Well, if you get hooked to TW series, you're pretty much done with standard RTS games...which is not a bad thing:)

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Welcome to the .org darkone!

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Welcome to the org. darkone. You said you were new to these games you might want to start with MTW or STW I think it would probably be easier but thats just my opnion

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I think the opposite: RTW's 3D campaign-map and combat seems much more accesible for new players than the risk-styled MTW campaign with rather difficult bitmap-battles.

And welcome darkone!

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To the original poster - you have come to the right place. I don't think there are better strategy games than TW, at least if you are interested in wargames and/or military history.

I think RTW: Gold edition would be a good buy. Graphically, RTW is much improved on the earlier TW games (I recently reloaded STW and was amazed at how much more basic the soldiers are) and so is probably more immediately appealing to a newcomer. I agree with The White Knight that the freer style campaign map is also easier to handle than the Risk-style one of the older games (got my butt handed to me when I retried STW).

The RTW Gold edition gives you the expansion pack added in and it is a very nice expansion, IMO. Barbarian Invasion adds a whole new era of history and some interesting variants on the standard RTW factions (you can play a declining WRE or a footloose up and coming Hun horde, for example).

I would recommend starting off as Roman (say, Julii) in RTW. You get some nice strategic direction from the Senate missions; you have powerful troops and there is a little extra chrome for the Romans (longer prebattle speeches).

One thing to bear in mind also is that there are some amazing mods for RTW if you start to find it gets old or is too easy. Rome Total Realism and Europa Barbarorum both make the gameplay and units more historically accurate, as well as more challenging.

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Thanks for the great welcome guys! One last question though... How good is RTW online? I didn't even know it was a online multiplayer game until I read it on the games site (www.sega.com/romegold). I love playing games online, and hope that the online community for RTW is still going strong. I have a feeling like this game is going to consume so much of my time.

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I've never played RTW online myself because Gamespy isn't working on my PC, but it must be incredible if people choose to play it over the very addictive, challenging and fun campaign game (single player only). My advice would be to play single player first, because the online battles are much harder to play: no pausing, so massive battles require much more strategy like distracting the opponent.

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I would recommend starting with Shogun. Its pretty simple for a strategy game. there is only 15 units or so. There arent that many buildings either. The campaign is fun and relatively easy. That is how I started playing these strategy games and now I am hooked.

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