Rome: Total Realism - Major Changes

Major Changes

• Seventeen playable factions. The original game only offered eleven playable factions, with all but the three Roman families needing to be unlocked by completing the game as a Roman faction. As of version 6.0 gold, the faction roster removes the Britons and Dacia, condenses the four Roman factions into one, and adds Illyria and Bactria. The Mod also renamed several factions to improve historical accuracy, such as giving Spain its classical name, Iberia.
• The majority of the units on the tactical map have been given new skins, and several new units have been created. Two hundred new textures and models have been added in total. "Faction colours" have been removed. In Rome, armies were colour-coded by faction, for ease of playability: all of the Egyptian units wore bright yellow clothing, Julii wore red, mercenaries green, rebels gray, and so forth. In RTR these colours have been abandoned, and most soldiers wear rather similar shades of grey, yellow and brown, the colours of undyed cloth. This reflects their probable historical modes of dress, as at the time, dyes for clothing and ornamentation were extremely expensive.
• The statistics of all units have been adjusted and rebalanced. The effect is to increase the length of battles, by reducing the rate at which soldiers kill enemies, and the effectiveness of most missile units has been decreased. One of the most prominent of these changes is increase in the viability of cavalry, especially when charging. This better reflects cavalry's historic role as an influential member of a classical army due to its mobility and the impact of its charge. It is also modelled with much longer lances than those portrayed in Rome: Total War, which were too short for a realistic charge.
• New "Area of Recruitment" gameplay mechanic. In Rome, there was virtually no restriction on the units a faction could train in a given province: for example, Carthage could train exactly the same units in their capital city of Carthage as they could in their distant colonies in Spain. The exceptions were that Roman First Cohorts could only be recruited in Rome; Spartan hoplites could only be recruited in Sparta or Syracuse; and elephant and camel units could only be recruited in provinces that have those animals as resources. In RTR, the units that can be recruited in a province depend in large part on the province itself. Gallic infantry, for instance, can only be recruited in Gaul, but can be recruited there by any faction which controls it. Still, all factions do have their own typical units that can be recruited in any of their territories once the appropriate buildings have been constructed.
• Redesigned campaign map. The map was extended east towards India. This shows the historical extent of the various eastern powers, such as Parthia and the Seleucids, the borders of which stretched far beyond the edge of Rome's campaign map. In Rome the Parthians' starting position was split in half by the Caspian sea, with no eastern expansion possible; since a very early war with the Seleucid Empire was extremely common, it made Parthia one of the most difficult factions to play. Due to the absence of Persia and modern day Iran, the Seleucids were also extremely restricted by their small Mediterranean, Babylonian and Asia Minor territories, which often led to them being destroyed by Pontus, Egypt and Armenia early in the game.
• New, optional music from two composers, including a version of Ailein duinn used for the credits.
• The RTR website also hosts other mods which stack onto the RTR package; these are also fan-made, but are not officially supported by the RTR designers. The mods make other changes, such as adding factions, changing the game years to four turns/year (rather than two), changing animations and formations, and integrating changes from Barbarian Invasion.