The general idea is that you get a bunch of people, pick a faction, then have one person start playing the game until the in-game faction leader dies, then have that person send the save file down the line until the game finishes.

Really simple, really fun, and totally worth the hours of screaming and yelling when the next person in line totally screws up your long-term plans by auto-calcing the battles instead of playing them out like a man.

The only issue being that everyone has to have the same version of RTW for the save file to work, hence the poll.

Links to some info on the Mods.

Terrae Expugnande
Rome Total Realism
Europa Barbarorum
DarthMod

So, anyone interested?

 

Europa Universalis: Rome was here, Rome: Total War is a faggot.

That said, Total Realism is the superior choice.

Edit: Okay, to clarify my position here... Rome: Total War is a fun game, but the AI is to simple for succession games to be any fun or any challenge. It'll just be a matter of trying to decide who to stomp first, and there's no real choices to make beyond that.

The Paradox games would be better, especially as a lesser power - the always-shifting political landscape in those games makes for a constant challenge with myriad choices to make, unless you do something boring like starting as England and rushing for America.

And I gotta disagree with pegging player control to ruler lifespan - even if the option of manually designating an heir isn't taken, rulers can start anywhere from age 16 to well over the age where yearly old-age checks start getting rolled. One player might have control of Rome for a good sixty years, while the next might only have it for less than a decade.

 

An underrated good feature of R:TW is the ability to choose your faction heir.

Shame CA ditched it in their more recent ones. It's easy enough to get around the ruling-for-ten-years quandry. Just ensure that the heir isn't ancient.

 

From memory, by the time the Roman Empire was truly on the up-and-up, every city was so profitable that spending a single turn in one would dump fifty traits along the lines of 'Fatty' and 'Manslut' and 'Big-Ass Coward' on any given leader, and being within line of sight of a sea vessel would immediately slap him with the morale-decimating Huge Homo trait. So the only way to have a faction leader that wasn't an overfed oversexed overpaid homo was to wait for some promising young general to be married or adopted into the family and immediately start grooming him for leadership.

...which, from what I understand, is pretty damn historically accurate. Well played, Creative Assembly.

 

It's what makes succession games so much fun, imho, but it is a valid concern.

If someone had a short time to play-say less than 20 years?-I would not be against them continuing to play as the next faction leader.

 

I picked the game up on the steam sale recently for 2,50€ and am currently playing the normal standard campaign.
It seems very easy. I'm playing less than a third of Rome and I'm in the process of completely stomping Carthage. This shouldn't be happening.
Will there be hard events later that spawn huge rebellions? Should I have started on a harder difficulty level? Or should I just use a mod?

 

The vanilla version of the game is really easy, even on the harder difficulties, which is part of the reason why there were so many mods made for RTW.

 

I'm up for it if it's Rome Total Realism. DarthMod just never clicked for me so I'll probably skip out if that one wins.

 

May as well start this now...

So which faction should we play as? I'm pretty much open to any of them.

 

I'd guess the trademark of this title: Rome.

 

Welp, looks like RTR is the winner.

If anyone is still interested, post now so we can move forward with this. Also, suggest a faction for us to play as; I pick Macedon.