From my very limited experience with 0.5 and more recently 0.6 the mod feels absolutely amazing. I would compare it to DEI for Rome 2 (if you have played it) and the other great mods of the Total War series, the scale, the economy and unit balance, everything is just top notch and we aren't even close to 1.0 yet.

TL;DR - Great.

Played an unhealthy amount of Rome 1 back in the day and a bunch of RTR, various versions, with it. In remastered with RTR:IS 0.5 I played imperial campaigns as Rome and Seleucid. Didn't get too far into Seleucid before 0.6 came out.

Have started a new Seleucid campaign in 0.6.1 and I'll say the experience has been quite different. Having several full army stacks and a positive budget to start was a huge change. In 0.5 the Seleucids started out with a negative 20k income that took a lot of disbanding and tax juggling to claw back from and a pretty small starting army (just one) in Anatolia to work with for expansion. The culture/religion system is quite different and I'm still working to figure it out, though it actually seems more straightforward than before.

Access to regional military units (Arab, Asian, and Anatolian mostly) is cool. It felt like they were meant to be recruitable before but I never had the option except for mercenaries. Buildings seem mostly the same, although the culture/religion buildings are gone having been rolled into the recruitment building.

Minor factions, that would have been rebel towns before, is cool. Having the ability to be diplomatic or alternately ninja unattended settlements is great fun.

Overall, the mod seems much more *done* than it did previously. Haven't been far enough along to get unique events, reforms, or the like, but I'm hoping to see some soon.

I am having a full fledged campaign as Epirus and it's just the right blend of easy vs speed of growth vs challenging for me. Playing on easy/easy. (bull rush Macedon at start of game)

I bought this game for this mod only, and apart from the massive campaign map, I see no reason why I would ditch DEI Rome 2 for this.

it feel amazing to me the economy is better so far then the last version i love the new factions i had to go with Rome first always have but the Kush kingdom very interesting Saba and Nabatea nice units but i need to explore more keep up the good work it is very much a jewel for the strategy genre cant wait to see the final product.

Too many civil revolts, public order is too harsh on the player even on easy difficulty

Originally posted by Death_Jester911:

TL;DR - Great.

Played an unhealthy amount of Rome 1 back in the day and a bunch of RTR, various versions, with it. In remastered with RTR:IS 0.5 I played imperial campaigns as Rome and Seleucid. Didn't get too far into Seleucid before 0.6 came out.

Have started a new Seleucid campaign in 0.6.1 and I'll say the experience has been quite different. Having several full army stacks and a positive budget to start was a huge change. In 0.5 the Seleucids started out with a negative 20k income that took a lot of disbanding and tax juggling to claw back from and a pretty small starting army (just one) in Anatolia to work with for expansion. The culture/religion system is quite different and I'm still working to figure it out, though it actually seems more straightforward than before.

Access to regional military units (Arab, Asian, and Anatolian mostly) is cool. It felt like they were meant to be recruitable before but I never had the option except for mercenaries. Buildings seem mostly the same, although the culture/religion buildings are gone having been rolled into the recruitment building.

Minor factions, that would have been rebel towns before, is cool. Having the ability to be diplomatic or alternately ninja unattended settlements is great fun.

Overall, the mod seems much more *done* than it did previously. Haven't been far enough along to get unique events, reforms, or the like, but I'm hoping to see some soon.

How do you even manage all those settlements? The main reason I haven't got this mod yet is because it seems like alot more to micro manage with all the new settlements. The map is also pretty hard to see things on.

Originally posted by Texan214:

How do you even manage all those settlements? The main reason I haven't got this mod yet is because it seems like alot more to micro manage with all the new settlements. The map is also pretty hard to see things on.

It is easier than it looks like thanks to the Settlement List screen that allows you to order settlements by recent activity. You can start by focusing of settlements with the most income or the last income at first, then in successive turns, you just order by activity and focus on the ones that you haven't touched yet. You get in the groove really fast, it's only overwhelming the first handful of turns or so.

Originally posted by Texan214:

How do you even manage all those settlements? The main reason I haven't got this mod yet is because it seems like alot more to micro manage with all the new settlements. The map is also pretty hard to see things on.

It is a fair bit of micro, but as BudgieGaming pointed out the settlement list screen is your friend. At the start of each turn, I fire that list up and sort by public order. Fix any order problems less than 70 by lowering taxes, moving troops/generals around, hiring mercs if absolutely necessary, upgrading the main settlement building, and building order buildings with short build times. Then I sort by income and try to build those high value settlements up even more since there's usually a reason their income is so good (good farmland, trade goods, mines, etc). The turn reports are also very helpful for keeping track of what you were doing on previous turns.

It's a little work to put in every turn, but takes a lot less time than manually fighting a battle. Even a short one. And the Seleucids have a rocking empire if you can keep your powerful neighbors from all jumping you at once.

The real trick is long term planning with an empire that huge. Making sure you have troops in an area that's going to need it way before it actually needs it since the travel times are so long. Even agents take many turns to get from one end of the empire to the other, so once something is staged in a particular region, it mostly stays there.

Evan.... I may have misread you but you really think that our games are crashing due to the fact that we don't know how to play ROME total war ??? As far as I'm concerned...I've been playing there since 2004, ...AND 5 times in a row my game crashed.

Regarding the gameplay I wanted to point something out. When I play as a small Greek faction (like Athens, Sparta, Achaean League, etc) and I use extreme mode, I always find it easier to take all my armies and conquer Crete. I think it would make the game a bit more challenging to make Crete harder to conquer. I'm not the best Total War player, but having Crete so easy to conquer just makes the gameplay for many small factions too similar. Personally, I am always tempted to take the easy route and I end up playing the same campaign.

Also, like someone has already noted in the comments, I too have found out that the Temple of Hera for Sparta does not upgrade weapons to gold tier (I don't know if this is a bug or not).