My playtime was on the "enhanced" version - Dynasties. I'm not even going to bother playing this - based on how buggy and unfinished the Dynasty edition is, I'm not going to waste my time touching a base game that's gone even longer without updates.

And it's not going to receive any more. The game flopped and CA did the bare minimum required of them legally based on what they sold. They've moved on, like they always do, leaving a mess behind them. Utilizing the court in the Dynasty edition requires saving and reloading every turn. My faction was missing half of the military buildings until I installed a community bugfix. Factions will inexplicably spend 30 turns marching across the map to take land in random corners, creating hideously disjointed empires.

Battles are absurdly one-sided. You'll either win absurdly fast in a chain-route after a minor skirmish or you'll lose to the same thing. Even compared to Warhammer, the fight ends before it begins.

The endgame "challenge" is the same as every other Total War -- magically spawned armies when you hit an arbitrary turn number. Wow, groundbreaking, innovative, certainly not identical to how they've done it since 2006.

The same terrible AI that cheats through its teeth on the campaign level to play comically poorly on the battle level.

This is their newest game, but you could have told me it was released in 2014 and I'd have believed you. It's like Rome 2 was vaguely described to the developers and their goal was to do most things marginally worse.

Thank god they bravely removed the blood to charge $3 for it, or I'd have been mentally scarred by the battles.

Maybe there are more mods that fix this. I don't know. Maybe the answer is to spend another 12 hours of my time to get a separate campaign on a high difficulty to late game to see if that was any less tiring. I don't care. There are better games -- there were better ones in the Humble Bundle I got this in. I'll play those instead.

ITS GREAT, First time player, its just fun , having a great time with these battles- cant wait to try others in the series

Bought it on sale, seeing the Pharaoh choke eating his grapes when we start the campaign set the perfect tone for this game. 10/10 would choke again.