Not that good

It is not that well thought out. Many of the navigational directions given in the tutorial are for microsoft keyboards and don’t pertain and/or don’t work. You can progress by fighting battles in a compaign. You build infrastructure and you build troops but although you are given controls to manipulate these, they don’t fully work. The game does what it wants to do and ignores your input. At some point in a campaign you cannot create more troops or infrastructure, the game just goes to sleep on this and you cannot win.

There is little “intelligence” given about your opponent. You approach a battle with no idea of your own strength or your opponent. For example, you try to move two of your warships into battle, and although they are large warships, the game tells you too late that you have only 25 men total on board, an unbelievably small crew, while your opponent has hundreds of crew and show up from nowhere seemingly.

Like so many Apple products this seems an unfinished translation. It does not hold a candle to some of the war games/strategy games that you could find on microsoft computers 20 years ago.
On the plus side, it did not crash and is visually interesting.

But it is over 4mb in size and takes a long time to download. I am a computer systems programmer by trade and I was just not impressed with this game. I scratch my head and wonder why others give it such rave reviews. I suspect insiders wrote the rave reviews.

You work from a map in a campaign. You conquer towns on the map. The towns have tedious menus to build troops, buildings and retrain/reenforce existing troops. But mostly the game does not let you build and add troops quickly, if at all, as you move from turn to turn. Many controls don’t work. You are given advice to build a type builing or infrastructure but the game will not let you do it. At one point I built an “Army”, a pitiful 800 men is an “Army”, and it flat disappeared. Conquered and built up towns which are well within your zone of control, even near Rome, somehow after many turns are subject to revolt for some reason and you may have to break off what you are doing and spend much time and effort retaking a town you already own. Enemy armies appear out of nowhere and attack your towns. The armies you create are limited to small size for some reason. It is hard to overwelm an enemy army. If you fight a hard battle you may not be able to reenforce, retrain your battered army. The game often does not let you repair your army or your town.

The game is just tedious to play. It takes too much time wrestling with poor menu navigation to get things done. I thought it was NOT play. It was tedious work with too many random fails and glitches.

Smote the mote about Rome: Total War - Gold Edition