Rome: Total War - Barbarian Invasion Preview - E3 Coverage
Loyalty is a new attribute added to RTW characters (onto the existing Command, Management, Influence) that probably has the most apparent gameplay effect out of the four. A warlord (or any character, for that manner) that has low loyalty and a huge army is just a couple turns away from rebelling and taking the entire army with him. You can help improve a character's loyalty by "Honoring" them, basically giving them a pat on the back for being a sweet conqueror or whatnot.
Watch out, that's some hot demo action right there.
If characters rebelling is troublesome, the addition of religion to contribute to the rebellion of an entire city is downright painful. On top of Squalor, Unrest, and all that jazz, religion makes for some rather complicated management of cities, all of which have a certain number of Christians, Zoroastrians, and Pagans in their populations. Governors can have an affinity for a particular religion, which - if its of the dominant religion in a city - can placate a population, or - if it's not - cause quite a lot of unrest in a city. Clergymen can be sent to your own cities to gradually convert a population to the needed religion; conversely, they can be sent to enemy cities to convert populations to religions not of their governors to make things more difficult for your opponent. Regardless of conversion, however, most cities gradually move towards Christianity as the game goes on; historical accuracy is cool.
...I lost that battle.
With 85 new units, 20 new factions (with the drasically unique Barbarian factions), and an entirely new campaign setup, Rome: Total War - Barbarian Invasion looks like it will be at least an adequate addition to as scrumptulescent a game as Rome is. Since Spartan: Total Warrior guarantees we probably won't be seeing another strategy title from Creative Assembly for a while, this strategy gamer is hoping that it will indeed be good enough to have the Total War name.
Like with AoE III, I took pages upon pages of notes from my demo/interview at E3 and obviously wasn't able to put all of that information in this article, so here's all the most interesting stuff I found that's not addressed above:
New factions can emerge from rebellious cities (Ostrogoths emerge from the Goths, for example)
Sarmations obviously have excellent cavalry, but also have rather vicious female troops.
It's possible that new songs have been added to the sountrack.
New Barbarian retinues added.
Religious relics added, function as retinues.
Western Roman Empire is the most difficult faction to play in the campaign map.
You can control whether or not reinforcements are controlled by the AI (immsensely helpful, the lack of this was one of the only things I hated about vanilla.)
All soldiers have been retextured (look better.)
Naval warfare hasn't been improved.
Most of the wonders have been destroyed on the campaign map, which is historically accurate.
You can fight battles at night, which affects morale and the performance of troops.
