Originally posted by Rascal
...but look at the facts here. The Romans were a superpower unlike the world had never seen before. They conquered almost all of the known world and dominated it for hundreds of years. They are not overpowered in the real scheme of things, they were in fact that powerful. Nobody could withstand a full scale Roman invasion for very long. They lost battles and legions and left some regions alone for lack of profit, but when they rallied their armies all fell before them. Game balance only goes so far and thats what difficulty levels are for.
I object this view for the simple reason that Rome didn't started as an superempire - it started as a bunch of little villages around a larger village that were trying to protect themselves from raiding Gauls and other local competitors such as the Samnites and the Greek City states in the South.

The Romans were expert at assimilating other cultures and peoples and that was a major strength and reason for their growth, that was slow, difficult and far from predestined. In many cases they were "drawn-in" to the conquest game that they didn't really intend to play until some advanced point.

The vanilla game fails to portray all these struggles and ups and downs because it lacks subtlety in the details - it sets forth to the predestined conclusion that is the "from our time" view of Rome as a superempire.

I also very much doubt that you get play-balance by the higher difficulty levels and playing the other factions.

Many Thanks

Noir