Personally I'm waiting till the gold edition or even in a year or two's time when the game + 1-2 expansions comes out in a single cheap package.

I don't think I'm as picky as some folks and Rome 1.5 and BI post patch are both really fun for me. That being said pre-many patches Rome was not so great.

I'm happy to play Rome for a while still as there's also a heap of good Rome mods I havn't tried yet. Once M2TW is in it's final most bug free state and their are a bunch of great mods around for it then I'll buy it.