It’s hard to believe that Rome: Total War is almost four years old, let alone that the Total War series is not new anymore. Shogun: Total War debuted in 2000, was an instant hit, and Creative Assembly has never really paused since. Aside from a couple of ill-advised forays into action gaming (Spartan: Total Warrior and the recently released Viking: Battle for Asgard), CA has focused its efforts on making their crown jewel series shine.

You can divide the Total War games into three eras based on the engine used. The 2D Shogun and Medieval were followed by the 3D Rome and Medieval 2. Empire will use an even more advanced engine. But Rome did more than just introduce a new look to an already attractive game. It made some fundamental changes to the way the campaign played out, changes that made the series better in many significant ways.

Though I think that the traditional division of strategy games into RTS and TBS is pretty silly, there’s always a weird problem of definition with the Total War games. Many people want to stick them in the real time strategy box for some reason, even though it’s an awkward fit. The battles are real time, but that’s it. And those aren’t “strategy” as much as they are a mini war game that is derived from your actions on the campaign map. I would argue (in the face of people smarter than me) that the Total War games are primarily turn based. And, battle engine aside, almost every other improvement to the game you saw in Rome was focused on making the turn based campaign more interesting.

Take the map. All the games use provinces to divide the map, the first Total War generation used province movement, sort of like Risk or the EU games. Rome has a map with free movement through forests, roads and fields meaning 10,000 separate battlefields. Instead of remembering which provinces have river battles, you can plan to use rivers or mountain passes to block an enemy advance. Terrain isn’t something you work with just in the battles now, it is something you can plan for on the fly.

The “mission” system is probably the biggest step forward, though. The Roman factions (Julii, Scipii and Brutii. Ugh, by the way. Those should be Julii, Cornelli and Junii.) have to deal with a Senate that gives orders and rewards those who fulfill them promptly. The Senate’s whims could clash with your plans. You might not want to attack Macedonia yet. And maybe Sardinia just isn’t much of a priority for you. The rewards for completing the missions were often pretty good – elite units, cash – and the penalty for failure was usually just a stern warning. Most importantly, the missions served to direct your energies.

And of course, there were the character traits and retinue of followers. Introduced in Medieval, traits were taken to a new level in Rome, influencing just about every aspect of the game – likelihood for office, taxes raised, city unrest, fertility, and military competence. The level of personalization in the game made user created narrative much more compelling. I think every long time Rome player can tell you a story about that one general who could be counted on to turn the tide of battle, or the promising talent who slowly went mad after years of butchering civilians in the East.

Though the Caesar series has, over the long run, been more successful, Rome is probably more important in terms of both framing and reflecting how people think about ancient warfare. There was advance promotion in the form of the brilliant British historical game show Time Commanders. The 3D battles made for better than average teasers and trailers with elephants throwing legionnaires in the sky and onagers pummeling city walls. Few strategy games have been as well marketed to and well received by such a range of gamers.

Its popularity is one reason why its gross historical errors bother so many people. Ptolemaic Egypt is rendered a holdover from the Pyramid builders, scythed chariots notwithstanding. Wailing women, head throwers, war dogs and druids march beside warbands, principes and phalangites. Siege weapons become commonplace pieces of field artillery. Elephants and scythed chariots are the WMDs of the battlefield.

Like Age of Empires, Rome is a cartoon version of ancient history, and it is one that privileges variety of experience over historical fidelity. After the Seleucids and Carthaginians, how many pike, horse and elephant armies do you need? So make the Egyptians some sort of unholy marriage of Ramses and Stargate. How do we differentiate the Germans from the Gauls and Britons? Can we get some women in here?

But focusing on the things Rome gets wrong obscures the brilliance of the entire model. Yes, the battles move a little faster than they do in earlier Total War games, but that’s designed to get you back to the campaign map as quickly as possible. The variety in units and army composition means that you need to adjust tactics a bit and not just rely on massing your heavy infantry.

In many ways, the battle engine in Rome is the inverse of the wargame model in the Great Battles games. You can use historically appropriate tactics to win, but you don’t need to. This is partly because the AI is very weak. It will waste time deploying after a battle has started, will split its line of spearmen to hunt down isolate skirmishers and will send its general straight into the jaws of death. But it’s also because this game is not “that sort of game.” Remember in Gladiator when Russell Crowe led a cavalry charge through a dense German forest? That’s what kind of game this is. Wholly improbably and wholly engrossing. And much better than Gladiator.

But don’t let the historical errors overshadow the historical facts. You need to keep your phalangites in a straight line. You need to guard those flanks. The testudo gives you protection but you lose mobility. Roman heavy infantry could take down almost anything in a straight fight. There is certainly no shortage of bad lessons here, but there are good lessons, too. Rome is certainly not a great simulation of ancient warfare, no more than it is a great simulation of ancient politics.

The great weakness of all the Total War games has been the diplomatic model, and Rome‘s remains terrible. Good relations are difficult to keep up and, as if fully aware of how weak the AI is, you almost always have two enemies at once. “Total war” is an appropriate title since most wars end in near total conquest. If you want peace, you must first finish the war.

One issue I have with Rome: Total War is the end game. The Romans get a great end game – one faction gets too big for its britches and you need to fight it out for the rule of the Eternal City. No other faction gets anything as cool or even a Senate to challenge them to missions. That’s probably why you have to unlock the other factions (or edit a data file) in order to play them – the Romans are the star and they have all this stuff for you to see there. (Similarly, Medieval 2 starts with only the Catholic factions available. All the better to show off the Pope.) So while the non-Romans get some neat units, they don’t get any overarching goal beyond conquering 50 territories.

To Creative Assembly’s credit, they fixed this somewhat in the Barbarian Invasion expansion. Success for each faction was contingent on conquering specific territories. It wasn’t quite as compelling as crossing the Rubicon or the Nile or whatever river you had to cross to invade your former friends, but it was something.

Though it was the third Total War game, you can make a strong case that Rome is the most important strategy game to come out in the last five years. It married cutting edge graphics with some serious strategy wonkery and even if it had little real effect in bringing people to history, it undoubtedly brought people to the genre. Though the Total War series was certainly respected before Rome, it was this game that I think lifted the series into AAA+ territory, making CA a brand name in both design and technology.

For our purposes, it also had the effect of being on the leading edge of a raft of ancient themed games. By my (not entirely scientific) count, the five years from 2004-2008 have had twenty ancients games released, including expansions and sequels. That’s as many as were released in the entire decade from 1992 to 2003 – and a quarter of those were Impressions city builders. Thanks to Rome, the ancient world has become the second choice setting for historical strategy games, mind you a distant second choice to WW2.

On the negative side, Rome has set a very high mark for ancient games that follow it. You need to compete with either its spectacle or its variety, because if you try to compete in both you are going to get your ass kicked. Modders for Rome have tried to improve on it, but for my money have failed because they either get the pacing completely wrong (Rome Total Realism and its dozens of cities) or innovate in ways that highlight how weak the strategic AI is (Europa Barbarorum). Rome: Total War is not perfect, by any means, and some days I prefer the elegance and simplicity of Annals of Rome, but it has raised expectations for whatever comes next – both for better and worse.

On Wednesday, I’ll wrap up with some thoughts on the ancient theme in general, missteps along the way and what games tell us (and don’t tell us) about the ancient world.