ROME TOTAL WAR Is a perfectly Balanced Strategy Game With No Exploits - But EVERYTHING IS BROKEN

oh my goodness imagine being just this poor squad of light infantry being physically pushed off of the point that they're defending by an unstoppable wave of angry doggos my goodness i mean this is just this is just a thumbnail right here it's just it's perfect hello there ladies and gentlemen and welcome to rome total war this was one of my first ever strategy games which made me go my goodness this gaming malarkey is absolutely incredible now naturally rome total war is a beloved game by me in my honest opinion this is one of the greatest games in existence and if you haven't played it you're really missing out on something special now naturally that means in today's modern graphics it doesn't hold up very well but you know it's charming okay it's a charming game ladies and gentlemen and with the charm comes a vast quantity of bugs because my goodness this game whilst it is an experience it's not a perfectly balanced experience i can tell you that much i know that's right i lied in the title rome total war isn't a perfectly balanced game with no exploits no if anything it's quite the opposite it's a game with quite possibly one of the largest collection of exploit imbalanced features that i've ever seen and i absolutely love it for it now we're going to be playing ourselves a little bit of this game and showing off some of its greatest features but before we start when you think of rome total war or any total war game set in history you probably think that it's actually a very accurate game with lots of well thought out and balanced features that reflect history at the time well then again you'd be kind of wrong because if you were to follow history through the eyes of rome total war you're gonna end up with some strange things for example if you play as the romans you effectively are playing three different chapters of space marines the red ones the green ones or the blue ones and don't even get me started on the parthians okay take a look at the puffy infection guys why is an entire faction's lineup and unit roster wearing bright pink i'm just gonna have to point out that buying clothe dye in order to dress yourself up in bright pink at the time was a little bit more expensive than the average peasant could afford but sure if you want to feel 240 peasants or wearing bright pink costumes then go for it now welcome into the game we're playing as the red faction of effectively the roman space marines and these guys are stupidly powerful because they're mostly fighting barbarians now when it comes to fighting barbarians there are a million strategies you could use you could use advanced technologies crazily advanced formations maybe long ranged weapons or instead what if you just used dogs like lots of dogs like we're talking a large mass of dogs to the point where if you saw this large amount of dogs in public you'd probably actually swear fealty to them because at this point they have more power than any of us ever will so just what is this strategy that i'm going to be pulling off today well it's really something ladies and gentlemen so make sure you sat back relaxed you have a nice warm cup of tea in hand and you're ready for one of the most broken strategies any strategy game has ever seen it's a dog only army now war dogs are a pretty weak unit because if we take a look at their statistics here total defensive free and an attack of 10. that's not the best however we're not fighting with regular chumpy war dogs we're fighting with quintus julius's mad boys allow me to demonstrate to you the mega war dog bam now it's got a defense of 9 and an attack of 16. this is a mega war dock it only costs 48 gold to upkeep meaning it is ridiculously cheap it moves ridiculously fast and it frightens all nearby units it does a stupid amount of damage this here is an upgraded praetorian cohort a pretty decent late game unit and look at that it does 14 melee attack this unit of war dog here does more damage than a praetorian cohort this is a terrifying army and one which whilst statistically wouldn't win any auto resolve fights is about to decimate the gaulish army that just tried to ambush us will be facing off against 1 500 men with an army comprised of 1 000 dogs this is going to be perfectly balanced oh god let deployment start now um we zoom in we can kind of hear the bugs of the dogs and things are about to get very spicy we're just basically going to want to group up every single dog we have and blob them into one basically dense location and then well for the rest of our army we can kind of just sit back here and observe the dog brigade right so the enemy reinforcements have arrived but i don't really think we need to worry about them and instead it's time we release the hounds right pounds away go buy good sausages you'll be fantastic i believe in you now of course we're not actually that early into the game and i've actually just basically power leveled the roman faction using peasants to build one really powerful city allowing me to get the forges necessary to give war dogs armor i don't know why the war dogs are wearing probably more armor than these topless men over here but for some reason these dogs are packing the latest in chainmail technology all right so what are we against forget some light topless spear boys and some more light topless spear boys and oh my goodness income the dogs right now immediately the dogs will start attacking and they'll start doing some great damage now dogs can't really be hit as soon as they get hit they're pretty much killed instantly however these aren't your regular dogs these are dogs with the ability to take down horses let's take down their commander why not there we go that's the first unit routing because it's fleeing from battle lovely stuff as soon as one unit starts fleeing they all start fleeing there we go that's the next unit around it oh my goodness there's another one going oh the enemy general is routing basically meaning the enemy army is going to stop running away as well honestly the dog only met her very powerful stupidly powerful in fact the only downside of the dog-only matter is um once the dogs start chasing something they're gonna keep chasing it i mean these guys aren't going to technically rally back but yeah uh not very fast yeah okay you guys are just gonna break again oh my god just look at them this is an entire squad of 144 men running from a couple of angry dogs and now the entire enemy army is routing look at it go it's just terrified i mean to be fair if you're in a fight and you're facing off an enemy which is famed for swords and shields and nice decent bits of cavalry and you're like okay fine let's bring our spear boys to take down the cavalry let's bring some horses to fight the infantry but no he doesn't bring that army he instead brings an army of over 1 000 dogs that's when you're gonna start realizing hang on a second this battle is not being fought very fairly now sadly the dogs have now started running off of the bear which does make them a little bit of a pain about it but oh well oh well it's not like we're gonna lose this fight anyway no the dogs are not coming back they're not coming back at all right that's fine oh and there we go another enemy general is dead uh that's hopefully gonna just route the enemy army again yep that's um exactly what's going to happen they're attacking some war dogs over there no these are just the peasant handlers they weren't built for combat oh they attacked my war dog man oh wait no the dogs are coming back oh my god the dogs are coming back they were not happy to hear that their owners were getting attacked and so yep now the enemy's routing oh right let's head this battle that was perfect so enemy managed uh around about 60 kills there we've managed in turn uh 1252 all off with the back of a whole bunch of dogs now technically more dogs did die but dogs just instantaneously respawn after the battle making them an immortal army of super soldiers which are pretty much a nightmare to kill because they'll route your army before you can actually even fight them back oh what a lovely glorious battle okay now we're gonna put the dogs to a further test this is our lovely dog army but this time it's fighting a siege battle not a siege defense a siege attack that's right we're going to be using dogs to attack this settlement it's not a common strategy i will say that most people don't use attack dogs for settlement wars but that's exactly what we're going to do because we can now all we have to do is just group the dogs up once again break down the front door and then immediately send in a horde of angry doggos and these angry doggos trust me they are very angry these are dogs that have just realized that when their owner pretended to throw the ball he didn't actually throw the ball and he had the ball in his hand the whole time but they've absolutely fed up with it and they really want revenge now so that's exactly what we're seeing from these doggos right now we're going to be able to break down the reinforced gates and of course the uh wall as well this will happen nice and quickly and of course once we break it down no we won't be attacking with our garbage infantry we're going to be using the doggos right so we'll just keep all of those men sat there and time to set the hounds right hounds you know what to do here come the hounds here come the hounds i'd be terrified if i saw this we broke down the wall as well perfect and here come the dogs in through the front gate they go it's a terrifying prospect to see but you know it's up to these ghoul swordsmen heavy infantry you see they say victory is a distinct possibility however uh the dogs do just keep coming they they are not stopping there is an endless wave of them here uh defeat is now a distinct possibility it's not looking good for these swordsmen they are getting slightly frightened but they are a little bit impetuous uh so things are okay oh my goodness just the sea is coming in now it's um it's terrifying they are not going to win this i'm afraid no all right let's just bring our horses inside the walls as well for fun just to you know really hype up these dogs do a little rally the troops here that'll really spice things up a bit oh and the enemy swordsmen have just routed and the dogs are just gonna keep going uh they're not gonna stop oh my god they're just gonna keep going there's a barbarian chieftain warlord there what of a lovely heavy cav unit theoretically perfect for fighting dogs but no no it's actually terrible at fighting dogs right now i've got my general charging in here just because most of the enemy army is now just routing because they can't actually fight the dogs however the dogs they're not gonna stop um the reasoning is simple because as soon as a unit routes in a siege defense it runs back to the town center and then once in the town center it becomes unbreakable the only issue is the dogs will never stop coming now theoretically if we didn't win this siege in our first attack we could quite simply retreat and so far we've had zero casualties because dogs dying just immediately respawn so you can redo sieges as many times as you like break one hole in the wall unleash 1 000 dogs kill about 2 000 men and then retreat and do it all over again with a brand new wave of dogs it is not fair it is not balanced but it is very entertaining oh my goodness imagine being just this poor squad of light infantry being physically pushed off of the point that they're defending by an unstoppable wave of angry doggos my goodness i mean this is just this is just a thumbnail right here it's just it's perfect there we go they're they're all dead um you can tell because the frames dropped to 2 fps so in that entire fight we lost 10 soldiers and we killed 637 men and won a siege which the auto resort said we probably should not be winning glorious stuff what a fantastic win there of course the ai diplomacy in rome total war is famous for being um pretty spicy because for example the ai of ghoul here now wants us to pay them 2 000 gold and hand over all of the cities which i've taken in this war now i just want you to know that is not a sound military idea for us considering we are absolutely smashing them oh my goodness lovely we're actually being attacked by proper army now this is an army of over 2 000 men now deciding to defend their settlement against our mega doggo stank right let our deployment start now we're at a pretty fun spot because we can deploy right in the corner of the map here with our actual army and then just deploy as many dogs as feasibly possible up here as well okay well you know the unit placement is not the best in this game um because sometimes it will just break right okay we're going for the phallus uh strategy here of just men to the left right and a forward protruding object right we'll wait for the enemy army to actually pull up close to us and then we're going to do a mass charge of doggos into them now this is an actual proper enemy army in front of us this is over 2 000 men against a much smaller army here theoretically we shouldn't be winning this however the power of the dog knows feasibly no bounds and the issue is attacking us with a massive wave of light infantry is not going to actually help you heck they've even got some range units thrown in there for good measure right it's time release the doggos and away they go ladies and gentlemen full speed ahead for all of the dogs now straight into the enemy front line they go of course the enemies are wrongly believing that they actually stand a chance here now of course in order to protect our dogs for future battles we're going to be running all of the peasants back was the dogs immediately broken the front line there there we go that's the first unit breaking and there we go that's the second unit breaking the enemy general is now dead on the floor oh my god let's bring the dog handlers back come on we got to keep you safe at the back oh well the enemy army is just breaking like paper against our men i'm throwing in a couple of cavalry charges for fun just to really mop up some of the enemy heavy infantry so that we don't have to worry about them later now the dogs are currently just chasing after a stack of two soldiers and honestly that's fine there's not really much we can do to stop the dog ai at this point oh and there we go the enemy general is now dead as well perfect stuff oh wow the entire enemy army is just completely routing on the spot against us well this is a great sign my goodness what a glorious success for us now of course dogs are also brilliant at mopping up almost every single routed unit on the map because they run at such incredible speed they will just literally pick up anything we can't really see it very well but there is a wave of almost a thousand dogs just running around just walking into various routing units and just evaporating them on the spot my goodness almost none of the enemy army is going to survive no 30 men survive only 30 men made it off the battlefield the dogs killed 2 000 men oh my god what a battle that was it's just not fair dogs are not fair at all they're not balanced in any way the best thing is even when we do take losses with the dogs you can just spend a very small amount of cash just healing them all up it's remarkably simple so there we have it ladies and gentlemen that is how to completely and utterly destroy the balance of this game with a stack of just dogs they are so stupidly broken absolutely absolutely insanely broken now of course that's not all that rome total war has to offer in terms of game breaks because coming up next we have the incredible scythian horse archer meme build which once again the ai has feasibly no counter to and it's even easier to pull off in the early game so make sure to refill your cups of yorkshire tea and hop on down to the comment section to praise the war doggo before he bites off your hand which would make it impossible for you to either like or subscribe to a video ever again let's go see what syphia can do we start out as the scythians these are effectively semi-nomadic horse peoples running around the regions of ukraine and russia and the various steeps in terms of strategic control and historical significance these guys are pretty much brushed under the rug because more exciting things were happening over here in rome but what were the scythians good at well they were good at horse archers which is why we start out the game with a whole bunch of these lovely guys statistically speaking they're not very good they can't fight in close combat well at all they're not very good at charging however what really makes them quite powerful is the fact that they're an archer unit and they're on the back of a horse and they're also one of the bloody fastest units in the game this makes them terrifyingly powerful because they are almost impossible to catch meaning the ai cannot defeat a band of syphian horse such as because they can't touch a band of scythian horse archers they have incredible range and incredible damage making them one of the most powerful units in the game now in terms of opening move for a fraction of entirely horses we basically want to throw ourselves into the lovely region of campus gateau here this is a frey soon city and frase doesn't exactly have that many friends in fact they don't even have that many cities i think they only have two meaning they'll be relatively easy to knock out so we're immediately just gonna jump on out of our city with our faction leader we could actually recruit ourselves an additional scythian mercenary this would be basically just yet another bonus horse archer and you know we might as well and then as soon as we go around the corner we can actually pick up a melee unit a fraser mercenary so this is brilliant because we actually do need a melee unit to actually seize your region and as fun as using peasant mobs are generally best to actually have an army with you so we're going to attack frey's next turn as soon as we have a few more men and until then we just need to basically fix up all of our lovely cities luckily the frasier army has decided to walk outside of their large town which is perfect for us because that's going to allow us to just walk straight on over to them and hopefully bait them into a fight outside of their own city walls and oh my goodness they've accepted lovely stuff now we could auto resolve this and win but we're instead going to fight this manually the reason is simple we're going to be attacking an army of mostly infantry on open planes using archers and horse archers this is not going to be a balanced fight alright let's start our lovely deployment so the enemy is going to be appearing over there logically i just want my infantry and archers to just sit around and not do much and instead we'll have our horse archers cause lots of lovely chaos on the flanks oh my goodness the reinforcements are coming from our rear this is perfect stuff oh my goodness this is absolutely great news as long as the enemy in front of us decides to stay perfectly still we're in a prime spot to decimate the enemy reinforcements before they even arrive so how are we able to decimate enemy reinforcements well it's very simple we have horse archers these are archers on the back of horses that can go nice and quickly they move very quickly they generally don't get stuck on objects and the benefit of them being able to outrun everything basically means they won't ever get attacked because they're just so quick so what do we have happening over here well our horse archers have begun firing these are one of the few units in the game which can actually run and shoot at the same time so naturally they're going to start attacking the various bodyguard units of the reinforcements and of course if they start charging at us like this heavy infantry unit is we can just start running in the opposite direction because all of our units have skirmish on meaning they will just run away from the enemy resulting in this very interesting chase where a heavy cavalry unit is never going to catch up with our actual army the same can be said for this unit of unarmoured flaxman charging into cavalry yeah these guys are not going to have a good day because well you guessed it they can't actually catch up to the unit they're fighting and equally being topless in the snow with long knives is not going to protect you from lots and lots of shooty arrows now it turns out the main frasium army decided to even attack us as well and well that hasn't gone very well for them they're actually starting to retreat so i guess our charge is going to have to begin wow they've just straight up fled the field of battle what cowards oh what lovely stuff the cowards they've fled but uh that means we've clearly won the battle we did sadly lose one horse to a friendly fire incident because you know these units have friendly fire and it's very easy to accidentally shoot yourself in the back so there we go we lost one single horse dude and we defeated a nice large portion of their army so they're never going to be returning now after that fantastic fight we're in a lovely situation to attack the retreated army in their own little settlement now we could of course auto resolve this in fact it might be a good idea so bam it's auto resolve time oh my goodness we lost that come on you said that i was gonna win that i'm devastated right we're fighting that ourselves damn it ai auto resolves you're so bad now if you've ever played this game yourself make sure to give me a shout because i'm honestly amazed by how little rome total war gets talked about nowadays it is such a lovely game it's full of charm it's full of in-jokes it's full of references it is just pure nonsense humor and i love it it's absolutely fantastic right it's time for us to start this lovely battle so trying to siege natural settlement from the enemy a little bit more exciting and spooky because the enemy now have defenses on their walls what we're going to do is send a lovely battering ram in to knock down those walls and also send up a unit of horse archers to start attacking the various enemy defensive units on the other side of the walls and you know we can actually also match up with our various peasant archers because they are lovely affordable disposable units now once again the perks of having range units are that you can shoot at enemies that can't shoot back like say all of these lovely militia hoplites once again i sat in a prime spot to be shot at lovely stuff that'll teach you for trying to defend your own settlements our lovely stuff they thought they could bring out some arches of their own to fight ours but of course enemy archers aren't going to win against our archers because we have simply so many of them equally if you want to make this additionally cheesy you can just set loose formation to all of your troops so that that way they're almost impossible to hit now loose formation on horse archers are just absolutely broken because it means they can dish out so much damage to enemy formations and they will never get attacked because they will outrun everything i don't know who allowed them to be added into the game because they just don't fundamentally work they're as fast as light cavalry units meaning you can't catch them so the only way to kill them is with logically i don't know a ranged ballista but that's not very efficient at taking out fast moving cavalry because cavalry can dodge ballistas anyway we've almost made our way through the wooden gates and then once we're in the city it's pretty much over for them there we go we've made it in all right now what we'll do is we'll have one of our units enter the city and this will cause the ai to panic and send something to defend yeah there we go and now this will allow us to once again get lovely shots onto the enemy archers you know let's switch to flame arrows this will be fun oh you peasant peltists so far we haven't been hit by anything but we have just committed a war crime by lighting peasants on fire right now what we're going to do is cheese the uh town center mechanic by having our lovely archers sit behind a nice defensive wall and lob arrows over at the enemy's heavy infantry actually why not the enemy's general bodyguard unit why not yeah that would be fun yes we now get to pepper the enemies units in their town center uh whilst they're not going to attack us because the enemy has evaluated that our fret is too high and they don't want to attack us oh and here come the flaxman lovely heavy infantry now sadly they're not going to win although a couple of my ranged cavalry decided to charge into them oh well that's fine right let's send the general bodyguard in let's finish up this fight oh and lovely we've slain the enemy general and immediately his forces have routed so that's a victory for us lovely stuff we did lose quite a few chod infantry mostly general bodyguard units and our lovely mercenary sacrificial infantry unit but beyond that that was a lovely first siege now i want to kind of finish off the actual armies of phrase i'm not too sure whereabouts they are so we're going to pick everyone up excluding my lovely faction leader and take them on a super fun adventure to go see the world now we have just discovered a real phrasing army this is a proper one look at it it's led by the legendary skylist and it's a pretty meaty boy full of a whole bunch of units are actually gonna have to retreat and wait for additional reinforcements to arrive now we're about to fight a pretty evenly balanced battle against some rebels and naturally we're about to make this evenly balanced battle into something which isn't very fair right so we have five units of syphian horse archers here and a lovely general bodyguard although we're not really going to need to use it as we're about to start with our lovely classic patent-pending strategy of just rushing down the enemy with horse archers it's just a rebel army so it's not like we have much to fear although they do have a large amount of range which means we're going to hit the pattern pending everyone into loose formation strategy and here we go we can now open fire upon the enemy forces lovely stuff but oh no the rebel captain is charging us whatever shall we do well we're just gonna run in the opposite direction that's what we're gonna do oh these poor rebel larvaes they just don't stand a chance they're not even shooting back these archer units just gonna stare at us poor nigel and his 150 cousins all coming out here with their bows and arrows all right come on you guys can shoot back any day now any day the issue is the ai does struggle to shoot back for the sole reason that because the horse archers move around so much they just don't know what to do it's now raining arrows from the skies and uh things are not looking too great you know we're just gonna charge down one of the peasant archers sorry guys this is a general bodyguard unit so it's gonna decimate you we're now gonna shoot the enemy general bodyguard unit in the back uh which will do increased damage because that's how the game worked seriously it's actually quite ahead of its time if you shoot a unit in the back where it doesn't have a shield it will take more damage it just makes perfect sense honestly these developers were really ahead of their time in terms of game design there we go the enemy general's given up now he's not gonna last very long though oh this poor guy oh my goodness look at it right away it's still raining outside you know you can't run very fast there's only three dudes left in your bodyguard right i guess we just select everything and have them attack the one remaining archer units of 50 dudes oh my goodness this isn't even fair also these aren't even very highly expensive units the scythian horse archers pretty damn cheap only 110 upkeep per turn that is surprisingly affordable oh anyway um they managed to kill 62 units we killed 455. i'd say all in all glorious success of a battle there and what's great is every time you do a fight there's a chance your commander can improve so our lovely factionaire here just picked up good commander making him even stronger now what we're going to do is just march straight on down to the enemy capital city hopefully we'll just be able to mop them up very quickly and i'm pretty sure we're ready for our siege on the syphian capital here this will be a glorious success now in terms of our factions powers and weaknesses it's actually weak against late-game armies like for example the romans once they get online towards the end of this game they have massively heavily armored units which are terrifying however by the time we reach that point of the game we're able to recruit mercenary units which can perfectly counter whatever the romans decide to throw at us anyway it's time for us to start this lovely battle we have a ridiculously large army i mean just look at it it is terrifying no one would want to face this but most importantly i've brought two special bonus units these are war dogs all right let's start this battle by knocking down that wall moving up some infantry behind it they've got some missile cavalry as well lovely stuff two can play that game i see we've got some flaxman here lovely these are topless dudes without any body armor which means flaming arrows absolutely perfect for dealing with them or actually just anything really a strong pointy stick will take out flaxman now i do feel sorry for the ai because the issue is the game is telling the ai that it needs to defend this wall but at the same time it really can't there's nothing it can do it's just going to get peppered by arrows if it tries to put any unit near the door and there we go that door has now just been broken through now there's a whole bunch of angry pelters here as well as some militia hoplites and i do kind of want to decimate them before we actually get into the city so i'm going to get all of these lovely men get them into a loose formation and send them straight at the walls all right now the chaos can begin a whole bunch of pelters which can't shoot back as well as a bunch of retreating militia hoplites yep this is fair and perfectly balanced all is fair and broken in rome total war is that the saying i'm pretty sure that's the saying oh lovely stuff lots of perfect damage admittedly we do get shot back here by this little tiny tower box but i mean it is it's only decimating the occasional horse and that's a sacrifice i'm more than willing to take why my archers engaged in melee combat why did they win in melee combat that's the even greater question what went wrong there now in comes the enemy's peltes cavalry lobbing spears the only issue is um we throw a lot more back than they can actually dish out meaning this is a guaranteed win here sorry guys but lightly armored men in t-shirts riding horses with sticks and pointy ends is not going to win against the massive army that we have i mean it's just insane the fact that we can have horses sat on top of these hills back here still throwing arrows in oh and they just can't be shot back at so they always win it's terrifying what you can do in this game where are the dogs going because the dogs just keep attacking they don't ever stop they don't ever return to the handlers they just gotta keep on running around the battlefield it would appear that they have glitched themselves on the terrain here yep okay this game it's not perfect it's got its issues quite a few of them effect but we still love it it's a precious game no look the enemy cavalry is trying to charge us right well release the doggies they'll be able to completely break our garbage militia unit but they won't be able to break a massive battle force of war dogs yes now that's a guaranteed success oh my goodness my poor little men i kind of left them undefended so they've accidentally been charged by a metric ton of cavalry but it's okay we can fix this situation just by you know shooting from beyond the walls an unreachable position where the general bodyguards cavalry is never going to wander to what i love about the horse archers is even though i'm currently relocating my army so technically they shouldn't be able to shoot they still can um yep they're fine they're just trying to run through the gates at the moment but normally when units queue up to go through the gates they become completely useless but no these guys can still shoot shots which is brilliant honestly we just kind of need to sit them in the walls they don't even need to go anywhere and they'll still manage to break most of the enemy's army oh and lovely the enemy general is dead so that's gonna cause most of their army to route which is perfect because when an army is routing you can just kind of charge down their units anyway we took more casualties than i'd like to mostly due to my own mismanagement but i'd say all in all a glorious success of a fight all right and here we go i think this is perfectly fine we have the final enemy unit sat in a tiny box where they can't escape just getting peppered by massive reigns of arrows falling from the sky and lovely stuff a great and glorious success for all of our men and that's the entire fraceuans defeated off of this map and there we go frace as an entire faction is now destroyed lovely stuff greece wants to go into an alliance with us sure why not my friends because at this point as fun as it would be to go down into greece and fight them there is honestly no need for us instead whilst we could fight macedonia it makes much more sense for us to go up to daesia and sweep through all of the germanic tribes why on earth do we want to find the germanic tribes well unlike most factions in the game the germanic tribes have not invented clothing yet meaning they're surprisingly easy to take down anyway we've got a slight rebel issue here because there was one living family member remaining on the map so we're going to send an army of two horse archers over and sure it says we're actually not going to win this one we are it's 57 men versus two squads of horse archers which can outrun said 57 men it is physically impossible for us to lose all right you know what to do go fight the rebels and then once they're in range the enemy general unit is just gonna stand there oh welcome to death my friend you're being attacked what are you gonna do about it enemy general you're gonna do something or you're just gonna sit there on your horse with your funky looking sword and just yep yep that's exactly what you're gonna do groundbreaking ai ladies and gentlemen truly groundbreaking yeah okay for its time this was actually incredible the fact that you could have ai which would focus on flanking and doing interesting fights it put up a little bit of a challenge on the maximum difficulties but that was mostly just because it was continuously cheating but you know it adds to the charm anyway income all of the arrows this is gonna take a while because they're a heavily armored unit and i can't be bothered to flank them so we're just gonna sit here and let all of the shots raid on there we go and we have now performed the horse archer sandwich basically meaning the ai doesn't know which way to face us with its one unit and we have now won the battle yep this is uh completely perfect because if it chases the army on the right it will just outrun it and be chased by the army on the left and if it chooses to turn around and face the army on the left the army on the right will shoot it in the back and so it's just going to choose to run back and forth against both of these stacks and catch none of them this is high high quality gameplay right here the enemy army is routing there we go good job what a great fight that was we did excellent you know we're going to be taking our army on a lovely fantastical adventure back up north to go and invade the dacians i think why not that'll be good fun i swear sometimes i don't fully understand how this game works for some reason the barbarian cavalry unit here has lower upkeep than this peasant peasant upkeep 100 gold per turn barbarian cavalry 90. archers 170 to upkeep they're not worth it look at the scythian horse archers 110 you save so much money by having scythian horse archers and they dish out so much more damage oh well the ai does work in mysterious ways which i guess will never fully learn now fighting the day soons is going to be an absolute walk in the park the reasoning is simple the day scenes here have some units these units are falsemen they have incredibly good attack stats and you know their total defense is good but their total defense comes from their defense skill meaning how good they can parry swords rather than their physical armor because as you can tell gerald here hasn't actually worn clothes in the last 70 winters this means that sure whilst most folksmen die normally of pneumonia they're also exceedingly vulnerable to any ranged assault alright it's now time for us to attack days here here we go time to go to war this will be lovely and spicy all right here comes the legendary siege of perilycillium which features one set of archers and two sets of flexible versus a massive cavalry horde of 2000 horse archers yep one person's gonna win this war and it's gonna be me oh they've put a whole bunch of men near the front door oh dear right let's go break down those wooden gates but at the same time let's just go line up a whole bunch of horse cavalry near the walls and uh see how the ai responds and here we go the shooting will now commence a whole bunch of archer warbands versus superior ranged cavalry hmm who could win this fight well the archers don't think they're gonna win so they've immediately started running away well it's off to a flying start i'd say great stuff let's go break down this front door there we go we've broken through the walls lovely stuff so let's send a nice large quantity of our troops inside the walls just to spook the remaining men sat on top of the top because i'm pretty sure we can stand here and shoot to the town square no we need to move up a little bit more very well horsies move up just a little bit more and fight the 300 strong stack of topless dudes oh my goodness look at these lovely topless dudes topless dudes what are you gonna do you're getting shot at what do topless dudes do and such reckless hate has been thrown their direction well they're just going to walk slowly into the path of the arrows um this is going to have a bold choice oh and apparently this one horseman has decided to charge headfirst into them good stuff and uh the rest of them still start running away now at high speed yep in comes our lovely retreat oh and actually that was the general and they're routing oh goodness oh yes income the arrows here they come oh they're just looking brilliant absolutely fantastic there we go glorious success the battle is ours very few casualties that's one of desu cities now belonging to ours now here's a fun thing what you can do is you can actually bribe enemy armies so apparently this army of men just wants 1500 gold and now they will no longer exist so there we go an entire dacian army which just existed there just vanished for 1 000 gold heck you can even bribe entire cities here oh sadly this guy's not going to take it but sometimes you can force entire settlements to flip right we're now going to defeat the dacian capital and its defending high king with his nice army of his own the only issue is of course his army won't be able to get outside the walls and we can shoot over the walls basically turning any city into what should be a fight to actually break through into a fight of shooting fish in a barrel all right let's send all of our lovely men up all right horses you know what to do open fire my lovely horse archers cause chaos yes good defeat the enemy warlord heavy cavalry before it can even fire and of course move out of the way of the annoying turrets which are going to shoot you oh and sadly the squad of foxman has uh almost entirely collapsed before the battle has started as is tradition here we go lovely stuff we managed to break down the front gate meaning we can now just walk straight inside of their settlement which is perfect because inside there we can no longer get shot at all right perfect i've moved our massive blob of horse archers inside of the enemy walls what do we have here to fight well we have some decent light infantry as well as some uh well there's just the general unit lovely stuff so i guess all we need to do is just walk up a little bit closer man open fire you know what to do it's 230 lightly armored units yes they have a shield but it's not really going to do much and of course you guys are failing to actually use the skirmish mode right i'll have to micro you myself oh my goodness it's actually working they are actually taunting enemy units and running around in circles although they have just been caught by the enemy general unit ah that is smidge frustrating oh nope we killed the enemy general good stuff all right that's gonna make finishing this off a fair bit easier and lovely stuff there we go glorious stuff we only lost a hundred men in that lovely siege now losing 100 men in the siege in the year of 259 bc is absolutely incredible oh and sadly our faction leader has died what a shame i mean it's perfectly fine it was very much expected to happen and if anything it's made our brand new faction leader even more powerful so we're going to be taking our brand new faction leader and send them out of war because look there's an enemy faction leader just in front of us lovely stuff i mean i don't even know what the dacian army is up to at this point just sending lightly armored stacks of chod into deadly battles against cavalry yeah this the poor ai just wasn't designed to fight like this the ai was designed to fight against romans using nice little dense clustered formations of ranged units sat behind frontline infantry and then charging the frontline infantry to try and get to the range units that is what the ai was meant for the ai was not designed for whatever the heck we're doing all right here comes the fighting oh you're poor guys oh flight infantry would not design to cross open fields against archers oh no no no you're even getting attacked at the flank you're getting attacked from behind nothing's going well for you light infantry nothing at all i mean look this guy even brought his favorite little flag to work okay it was bring your flag to work day this guy spent an entire week painting his flag now he's gonna die what a poor little guy if only he had not joined the dacian empire and instead joined the really pimping scythian empire which is ninety percent cooler than any dacian empire all right i'm sending the dogs in for fun because the dogs have a habit of breaking every little bit of morale so in you go doggies look at them charge okay here comes the cavalry right now hopefully yep the cavalry for some reason uh famously can't defeat dogs because they just trip over them or get body blocked by them making dogs the perfect speed bump against literally anything because now the heavy cavalry is focused on the dogs and so he's gonna get absolutely massacred by our ranged oh my god what on earth even is this fight this isn't even a fight it's just a general's body guardian getting attacked by really angry doggos and there we go the enemy general is defeated lovely stuff so they killed nine units we managed to kill um a lot glorious success i'd say very very profitable as well anyway ladies and gentlemen i'm afraid that's all i have time for today i hope i've showed off one of my most favorite games of all time because rome total war it's lovely i strongly recommend you pick it up especially when it's on sale it's incredibly cheap for the amount of fun you're gonna be getting out of it as always if you have indeed enjoyed today's video then make sure to give it a like as it does massively help us out and as always if you have any suggestions as to what games you'd like to see me break next then hop down to the comment section and give me your suggestions because i'm sure there are a million games that i've never heard of which are just absolutely perfect and waiting to be decimated by a little bit of british magic and a whole bunch of yorkshire tea as always a massive thank you to each and every one of my majestic patrons who make these videos all the more possible seriously thank you very much without you i wouldn't be able to play really old games like this and show them off to an audience of people who maybe weren't even alive for this game's release because yeah this game it's an absolute gem it gets thrown under the rug especially thanks to the massive flop that was rome total war ii although the game has actually improved since release because that game's sour kind of legacy its predecessor in rome tiltable kind of gets forgotten about so it's definitely worth picking up and giving it a try anyway as always i've been this bit from brit if you want to have a video to watch then i strongly recommend this one on screen now and if you're not subscribed do consider it because why not it's absolutely worth your time and anyway i'll see each and every one of you in the next one have an absolutely lovely day and goodbye for now

Channel: The Spiffing Brit

Views: 996,611

Rating: 4.9581814 out of 5

Keywords: The, Spiffing, Brit, rt game, perfectly balanced game, rome, rome total war, rome: total war, total war, total war rome, everything is broken, rome total war is broken, rome total war is perfectly balanced, rome war, perfectly Balanced Strategy Game With No Exploits, rome total war exploit, total war exploit, strategy game, strategy game exploit, strategy exploit, total war is broken, funny, exploit, breaking rome total war, rome is broken, rome gameplay, campaign, rome guide

Id: N3lwOipRJv4

Length: 38min 32sec (2312 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/newtonism]

I can't believe I used to think this game looks great lmao

[u/AgentMahou]

All credit goes to The Spiffing Brit. Spiff has an excellent YouTube channel and you should all go check it out!

Link to his channel

[u/RoboRock5]

Next time put spiffing brit in the title because he deserves the credit