FAQ#

This page answers the common questions about Total War: ROME II in one place, compiled from the Emperor Edition and verified official material. For campaign mechanics, faction choices, editions, and old-PC optimization, we give criteria you can check against the actual game rather than boilerplate; anything unverifiable is explicitly marked “the game is authoritative.”

1. Editions and Buying#

Which edition should I buy#

The Emperor Edition released on September 16, 2014, free for existing owners, bundled with the free Imperator Augustus campaign pack. It does not include all paid content — check the store page’s “Available DLC” list before buying.

Expansion Pack List#

The verified expansions (ordered by type and release date):

The criterion for buying expansions: do you want a completely different opening scenario, or more playable factions in the grand campaign? If you only want to complete one grand-campaign route, the Emperor Edition is enough; for historical scenarios and cultural-unit variety, buy by theme one at a time.

Language and Achievements#

• The game has no Simplified Chinese; it supports nine languages — English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Czech, and Turkish (source: the Steam store language table);
• The game has 188 Steam achievements (source: the Steam store page); the itemized list defers to the live Steam achievements page.

2. Factions and Openings#

Which faction suits a beginner#

Beginner advice: pick Rome or Egypt first — both systems are complete with high fault tolerance, letting you learn the core loop of public order, food, and province management with minimal risk of collapse. Challenge multi-front factions like the Seleucids and Parthia after you’ve mastered the basics. The friendliness ratings are editor experience; the game has no official difficulty ratings per faction.

What to do in the first 30 turns#

1. Stabilize the opening front (Rome’s war with the Etruscan League, for example), keep the army within what the economy can bear, and prioritize positive income;
2. Stabilize the first province’s public order, sign at least one trade agreement, and keep to a single front;
3. Once food and treasury are both in place, fill the army toward full strength (20 units) and start the first round of active expansion.

This rhythm is editor experience, not official data.

3. Core Campaign Systems#

Why public order and food keep going wrong#

Every province you take with a large cultural gap strains public order short-term; food is continuously consumed by buildings and armies, and going negative triggers famine that drags down order and reinforcement. Expansion speed must keep pace with digestion; to judge whether to pause, watch four indicators:

How to use resource points#

The campaign map scatters strategic resources — iron, horses, marble, olives, and more. Once occupied they serve two main purposes: affecting some units’ unlock conditions, and generating trade income as trade goods. Exact distributions and per-turn outputs have no verifiable complete data here — the in-game campaign map display is authoritative. The one universal operational rule: per your unit route (heavy infantry, cavalry, or trade), prioritize controlling the resource points in that direction, then fold surplus points into the trade network.

4. Combat Mechanics#

Auto-resolve or manual battle#

Whether to fight manually — the core criterion is not how good you are, but whether you can absorb this battle’s manpower losses:

The game publishes no auto-resolve win-rate or casualty formulas — outcomes defer to results; “auto-resolve pays when you heavily outnumber” is the reliable qualitative conclusion.

Formation and Engagement Essentials#

• Flank protection beats frontal strength: pikes, phalanxes, and heavy infantry all need mobile units covering both wings, or a rear attack collapses them fast;
• Missile units behind the infantry — once the front is torn open, missiles have almost no resistance;
• Never charge cavalry head-on into pikes — frontal charges into phalanxes cost enormously; swing to the flank or rear, then charge;
• Focus missile fire on enemy elites and generals, don’t spread targets evenly;
• Morale-debuffing general abilities should fire at the moment of contact, pairing best with flank attacks. Exact abilities defer to the in-game skill trees.

Siege and Naval Essentials#

• Break walls first: use a Siege Tower or Battering Ram to tear open walls or gates before committing main forces; ladder-climbing units are extremely vulnerable during the climb;
• Starve them out: besieging drains the garrison’s supplies, and its strength degrades step by step once cut off;
• Street fights are infantry work — cavalry’s advantages clearly shrink in narrow streets;
• Boarding actions depend on unit melee strength; strong land troops are equally strong once aboard; ramming is the direct ship-to-ship tool;
• Blockade vs occupation: blockade suffices to cut supply and trade; landing and occupying is only needed to remove the threat entirely. Forcing a landing without sea control leaves supply lines trivially cut.

5. Victory Conditions#

The official manual defines three victory routes, each faction with its own conditions, all checkable in the campaign’s “Campaign Objectives” panel:

The criterion for choosing your route: which side your faction’s unit system and geography lean toward. Factions with all-round line capability and central positions go Military; trade-rich, fast-growing economies go Economic; decide the rest by panel conditions and play preference. Don’t spread fronts blindly before the goal is clear.

6. Saves and Difficulty#

Legendary vs normal difficulties#

On Legendary you cannot manually save — only the end-of-turn autosave exists, making bad decisions hard to rewind; the AI is also more aggressive on the campaign map and the battlefield. If you take on Legendary, pick a high-tolerance faction like Rome or Egypt, play steadily, and avoid over-expansion.

Why reloading sometimes can’t save a campaign#

Many campaign losses aren’t caused by one battle but by several turns of compounded public-order collapse, negative food, and blind expansion. A single reload means nothing there — go back and check whether you’ve been doing three internal-affairs overdrafts at once: recruiting, building, and absorbing territory simultaneously.

7. Mods and Community#

Which mod directions are worth trying#

The community’s most famous historical-authenticity mod is Divide et Impera — it greatly expands unit variety and historical research, and really exists on the Steam Workshop and in the Total War community. Before installing, check the Workshop page for compatibility with your current version and installed mods.

8. Performance and Old-PC Optimization#

This game’s maps and large battles aren’t kind to old PCs. Here’s the diagnose-the-bottleneck-then-fix approach, not boilerplate:

• Find the bottleneck first: if the campaign map stutters but battles run fine, the bottleneck is usually strategic-map rendering; if frames drop only when many soldiers share the screen, the bottleneck is more likely unit counts and CPU load;
• Unit scale is the number-one factor: the unit-size setting directly decides on-screen soldier counts. On old hardware, drop to medium-low first, watch the frame change, then decide whether to raise it — don’t just pile on visual detail;
• Tune the settings tied to soldier counts first: shadows, reflections, and unit detail scale directly with rendering load and are worth cutting first; anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing are relatively gentle on frames and can stay where reasonable;
• Always verify with a big battle after tuning: judging frames from the main menu or small skirmishes misleads — validate with a grand-campaign battle at near-full strength (20 units) on both sides;
• Assess mod complexity: historical-authenticity mods usually add unit types and sizes at extra performance cost — reserve headroom before installing them on old PCs.

9. Common Misconceptions#