Retrospectives
Rome Total War Alexander -Retrospective
In June of 2006, Creative Assembly released Rome Total War Alexander as the final expansion to Rome Total War. The expansion takes place during the campaigns of Alexander the Great, […]
In June of 2006, Creative Assembly released Rome Total War Alexander as the final expansion to Rome Total War.
The expansion takes place during the campaigns of Alexander the Great, detailing his conquest of the Persian Empire. Whereas the base game and Barbarian Invasion detailed clashes of people, and whole historical periods, RTW Alexander focuses on just the ten years of Alexander’s conquest.
How does Total War handle this much tighter historical focus? Not too well. Barbarian Invasion’s campaign built on that of Rome Total War, showing the eventual consequences of the base game’s obsession with rampant imperialism and expansion. In the Imperial Campaign you built things up, in Barbarian Invasion they fell apart.
That being said, I’m not so sure what RTW: Alexander’s campaign is about. You’re conquering an empire, yes but you’re not really building it. Its campaign is more of a mad dash to the Indus River than the conquest of an ancient and powerful civilization. You aren’t trying to synthesize cultures or build a new state as Alexander did historically.
RTW: Alexander often feels more like a tech demo for the main campaign than it does the final expansion for the now legendary Rome Total War. The map is awkwardly shrunk down to fit the 100 turn limit and the factions feel barren of any new interesting units or mechanics.
Instead of building on the strengths of vanilla Rome Total War, as Barbarian Invasion did, Alexander tries something entirely new for the Total War series, and it mostly fails.
If vanilla’s main focus was on the sprawling campaign then Alexander places it squarely on the battlefield. I think that this in and of itself is fine, the problem is that Alexander fails to do anything new or interesting with its battles, at least in the campaign.
Alexander’s Campaign
The shifts to the overall campaign come in a few key ways. Instead of a map of the entire Mediterranean world, you’ll be limited to Greece and the Persian Empire. On paper this is a great change as the narrower focus will allow CA to add more settlements and factions to this region to make it feel more alive.
Sadly the opposite happened, despite its smaller region RTW Alexander features fewer regions than were in the same area of its base campaign. This puzzled me for the longest time, it couldn’t have been a technical issue, RTW already ran fine with more provinces. There were no new mechanics or more factions. There was just less.
Until I realized why the map had to be so cramped and small, the developers had shot themselves in the foot by their own design choices.
You see RTW Alexander’s campaign only allows you to play as Alexander, and only gives you 100 turns to complete his campaign. Again, on paper this is good, it makes you think about each battle you’re fighting because you’ll always need to be advancing to conquer the 30 necessary regions to win the campaign.
You can’t be bogged down by unnecessary movement and long sieges as you race east. So the campaign map had to be awkwardly shrunk down so that you could reach those 30 regions in a reasonable time.
It’s not a great solution. Why not just give armies more movement points or make some cities surrender to Alexander when he arrives? It’s just lazy design and makes it seem like the developers ran out of time and weren’t able to do everything they wanted with the expansion.
I think the map of Greece is the best representation of this. There are no Greek allies for you to coordinate, in fact, there’s not really any Greece at all. There are seven settlements in Greece in the main campaign(including Epirus and Macedonia). In Alexander, you have two settlements in that same geographic area.
Besides, the restrictive turn limit and simplistic campaign map Alexander must have at least kept the religion system from Barbarian Invasion right? I mean part of Alexander the Great’s whole thing was that he wanted to merge Persian and Greek culture, and his conquested Hellenized the Eastern Mediterranean.
Nope, that’s all gone, since the turn limit is in place there’s no time for any of the frills of empire management or diplomacy despite those being some of Alexander the Great’s core concerns.
So the turn limit is a trade-off, less interesting empire management but each action and battle has more strategic weight, they matter more.
This might be interesting if the AI was competent enough to try and stop you, but it feels like the Persian AI are more inept than in the base game, which I don’t fully understand because it should have fewer variables to work with. Perhaps It’s just that since you’re only dealing with one main enemy it’s more noticeable when they are making terrible moves.
It surprises me more so since most of the reviews at release criticized the campaign for its difficulty. In fact, it was many reviewers’ main criticism of the expansion.
I’d say, yes the campaign is difficult but not overly so, and I think that level of challenge is probably the most interesting thing about the campaign. You have no time to sit back and build up; you have to go out conquering with the limited resources you have.
One interesting thing that this campaign does is logistics. Since your main armies will likely be far off to the east, you’ll have a good deal of trouble reinforcing them as you go from battle to battle, and are pulled further and further from Greece.
Most Total War games have never really done campaigning well. Armies fight without regard for supply or logistics. Modern Total War games have brought this into greater focus, with a supply system in Three Kingdoms especially, but the earlier games like RTW never really bothered with it.
Having to send up reinforcements from Greece or the cities that could Greek produce units was interesting to try and keep your armies at strength while marching through a foreign and hostile land.
It often feels more like a puzzle than a Total War campaign, you have to plan your moves exactly right to get to the end before turn 100. You’re not managing your ambitious generals, not dealing with the task of combining Hellenic and Persian cultures, no instead you’ll just be conquering.
So if not the campaign, then what is the focus here?
Historical Battles
The main focus of the expansion is the string of historical battles that detail the major clashes of Alexander’s rise.
Both RTW and BI both had Historical Battles but they were always more of a fun distraction than the main focus of the game. They often acted as semi-historical challenge scenarios, such as Cahhrae or Teutoburg Forest. They were always fun if a bit short. It’s clear more time went into the Historical Battles here, making them more of a mini-campaign than anything else.
Brian Blessed narrates the set up to each battle, which was unsurprisingly excellent voice work. His narration sets up the context for each battle and does a good job of hyping them up.
The battles offer some interesting play, you’ll be severely outnumbered in each one and will need to use clever tactics to win.
What fails here is the scale of the battles. Alexander’s armies are often smaller than the 20 unit army cap, making them mere skirmishes compared to what you’ll be fighting in the campaign.
This isn’t just to make Alexander feel smaller, Persians will sometimes bring multiple armies to the field, such as Gaugamela. Those Persian armies could have been beefed up and Alexander could have been given a full stack of units.
My best guess is that this is for performance reasons, as having too many units on screen could cause some computer problems. But isn’t this why Total War has graphics and unit size settings?
Regardless, both their disappointing size and the mediocre RTW battle AI leave these historical battles feeling shallow. Clashes like Gaugamela and Issus should be some of the largest in the series so far, they should be the laurel crown that ends your time with Rome Total War, instead, they’re smaller than most campaign battles, and that stinks.
Creative Assembly clearly tried to improve the battles even going so far as adding a tournament battle mode and even allowing you to play each of the six historical battles Alexander fought against human opponents.
Fighting these battles against actual people does elevate the experience and like most Total Wars, is the best way to experience the battle system. It still suffers from scale problems but the battles actually feel like interesting clashes now.
Factions
There are eight factions in this expansion but as I said, only Macedonia is playable in the campaign. There is a good variety between their unit rosters though.
With Persia and Macedonia especially being an interesting combination. Macedonia relies on its unstoppable phalanx of spearmen to push through the enemy while their cavalry protects the flanks. The Persians focus on archers and light cavalry, with their elite Immortals holding the line where needed. This forces the Macedonians to close quickly or risk being overwhelmed by the Persians fire.
The campaign also introduces Indians who use a combination of weak infantry with extremely potent elephants as their main units.
These factions are great in multiplayer as their strengths each allow them to play off each other but the AI cannot take advantage of these differences.
Conclusions
In some ways, Alexander was a dead-end for the Total War series. Never again would they have such a restrictive campaign. Even Warhammer II’s Vortex campaign mostly let you do what you want.
In another way, I see a lot of the decisions made in the maligned first Total War Saga game, Thrones of Brittania, to be the heirs of this type of campaign making. Restrictive, somewhat arbitrary, and cramped.
Rome Total War and Barbarian Invasion knew the strengths of the series and succeeded because of it. Alexander was an ambitious experiment in another type of Total War campaign, it asked if the battles could be the core focus of the experience, and the campaign was just fluff, and it failed.
Rome Total War is a legendary game, and Barbarian Invasion is often brought up alongside its greatness but Alexander is not. It’s noteworthy that when Creative Assembly made the sequel they made Rome II as a sequel to RTW and Attila Total War as a sequel to Barbarian Invasion.
Alexander never received anything like it, and I can’t say I blame them. I don’t hate the race-to-30-provinces campaign mode but it clearly didn’t work and took away far more from the campaign experience than it ever added.
This article is part of a series on the Total War Series you can find the other articles in the series here:
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