So the campaign map had to be awkwardly shrunk down so that you could reach those 30 regions in a reasonable time. You can’t be bogged down by unnecessary movement and long sieges as you race east. Again, on paper this is good, it makes you think about each battle you’re fighting because you’ll always need to be advancing to conquer the 30 necessary regions to win the campaign. You see RTW Alexander’s campaign only allows you to play as Alexander, and only gives you 100 turns to complete his campaign. Until I realized why the map had to be so cramped and small, the developers had shot themselves in the foot by their own design choices. There were no new mechanics or more factions. This puzzled me for the longest time, it couldn’t have been a technical issue, RTW already ran fine with more provinces. Sadly the opposite happened, despite its smaller region RTW Alexander features fewer regions than were in the same area of its base campaign.
On paper this is a great change as the narrower focus will allow CA to add more settlements and factions to this region to make it feel more alive. Instead of a map of the entire Mediterranean world, you’ll be limited to Greece and the Persian Empire. The shifts to the overall campaign come in a few key ways. I think that this in and of itself is fine, the problem is that Alexander fails to do anything new or interesting with its battles, at least in the campaign. If vanilla’s main focus was on the sprawling campaign then Alexander places it squarely on the battlefield. Instead of building on the strengths of vanilla Rome Total War, as Barbarian Invasion did, Alexander tries something entirely new for the Total War series, and it mostly fails. The map is awkwardly shrunk down to fit the 100 turn limit and the factions feel barren of any new interesting units or mechanics.
RTW: Alexander often feels more like a tech demo for the main campaign than it does the final expansion for the now legendary Rome Total War.
You aren’t trying to synthesize cultures or build a new state as Alexander did historically. Its campaign is more of a mad dash to the Indus River than the conquest of an ancient and powerful civilization. You’re conquering an empire, yes but you’re not really building it. That being said, I’m not so sure what RTW: Alexander’s campaign is about.
In the Imperial Campaign you built things up, in Barbarian Invasion they fell apart. Barbarian Invasion’s campaign built on that of Rome Total War, showing the eventual consequences of the base game’s obsession with rampant imperialism and expansion. How does Total War handle this much tighter historical focus? Not too well. Whereas the base game and Barbarian Invasion detailed clashes of people, and whole historical periods, RTW Alexander focuses on just the ten years of Alexander’s conquest. The expansion takes place during the campaigns of Alexander the Great, detailing his conquest of the Persian Empire. In June of 2006, Creative Assembly released Rome Total War Alexander as the final expansion to Rome Total War.