If there's another army within reinforcement range, they'll join in. When two army avatars meet, they square off on the map and you're given a choice to auto-resolve the battle, fight, or flee. Secondly, the battles I've had in Rome 2 have been bigger and more dramatic than any I've fought in a previous Total War game - in any game, ever, in fact.

Firstly, the new interface condenses all of your building work into neat boxes that let you see exactly what needs upgrading where, making building management far faster and easier that previous Total Wars. These are excellent changes for two reasons. Allied and client states (who will sit quietly and pay you a tithe every turn in exchange for their lives) contribute to your settlement count for victory conditions, and you can poke your pro-active pals in the right direction with a new diplomacy option that lets you target settlements you want taken. Alliances are now extremely worthwhile as well.

The map has been designed with these stances in mind, so you can dominate large regions with clever use of choke points. New units are now recruited by generals in the field, sparing them the long walk from their barracks to the battlefield.ДЄrmies are also more flexible thanks to a variety of stances, which can let them move extremely quickly with 'forced march', create a wooden outpost at their location with 'fortify', or lay an ambush on the strategic map. Construct a high-grade military training building in Rome and the troops you unlock can be recruited from anywhere within the Italia region. Territories are now grouped into 'provinces' which can be boosted by production-boosting edicts if you own them entirely (useful for swift social engineering in the face of food shortage), and your cities' buildings now have province-wide effects. It's a significant shift that affects everything from how armies are constructed to how territories operate on the strategic map. The legions they command are also persistent entities that can gain stat-buffing 'military tradition' affixes over time. Now troops cannot move at all unless they have a general, and the number of generals you can have is limited by the size of your empire. Previously, you could raise tiny armies of a couple of troops and a leader would be picked from their ranks. That's why I felt a twinge of guilt about poor Crassipes. When your armies meet resistance, you dive into a real-time battle and command the troops personally. You must guide your chosen nation to glory by managing cities, conducting diplomacy, plotting espionage and moving armies to conquer new settlements. Total War has come a long way from the papery maps of Shogun, but its form is the same. What a beautiful board it is - an intricate papier mache caricature of Europe, decorated with landmarks, rivers and exaggerated topography. But will they talk of the fleet barely a mile away that sat still and watched the great man lemming his way into the history books? Do they realise that the patriot they adored was sent intentionally to his death? I wonder what that would do if they knew that the fate of Crassipes and all the armies and settlements of Rome were not beholden to the gods, but to one bearded games journalist moving them like pawns on a vast playing board. They'll talk of how he burned the gates and took the central square, and how a dozen Averni javelins ended his illustrious command of Legio I Italica there. They'll talk proudly of how the great general threw himself against the walls of Massalia. The Roman senate will weep for Crassipes.

Rome 2 auxiliary units