Yes, I know it's been out for a while, but I've had a Mac at home until last week, so I did not buy the game and missed out on Rome Total War.

However, I was a fairly regular poster in MTW days, though I did notice I hadn't logged into the forums since 9/30/04.

I started off with England in my first Grand Campaign, single player.

1 - several settlements went governor-less? The rulebook says I need a general to govern a settlement, but I can't figure out how to name one? In the old MTW, you just named the guy with the highest acumen as your governor and dropped the governor's scroll/papers onto him and presto, you have your governor. The "advisor" woman told me to name a governor in one settlement to help with public unrest, but even when I changed it to "automanage" one was not named? Am I just missing the scroll?

2 - merchants/trade. In the old game, you just built trading posts, merchant, etc and trade would happen automatically, and would increase as your fleet expanded around the map. However, even though I was expanding my fleet of cogs (and later a few Holks) and spreading them from Sweden through Portugal, I didn't really see similar? I had merchants on various items - wool, wine, etc - should a merchant just stay parked on one item, or does he move around and keep gathering them? It seems he should just stay parked? Especially since every time I moved a merchant out of English territory, he got put out of business by some French merchant... Do I have to get my fleet a bit farther around Spain to see the trade values go up, or am I barking up the wrong tree? (meaning, wool near London isn't valuable, but if you have a ship down near Morocco or Italy, it might be?)

3 - why did the game change from 1 year turns to 2 year turns?

Thanks