Rome: Total War

• Be the Romans. This is a no-brainer.

- Hire mercenary hoplites to bolster your forces. Let them do the dying. Roman infantry is generally too valuable to be sacrificed lightly.

- Heavy infantry in the center, light infantry on the flanks. Always fight on the defensive. Cavalry should be in the rear, and should sweep out to protect your flanks and attack theirs once the battle is joined. Don't throw away your general, because if he dies, your morale drops like a rock.

- Don't be afraid to maintain a second line of reserve infantry behind. You can order your first line to disengage, and while it won't be pretty, you can often save a tired unit by having them run through your second line. Just don't forget to order the reserve unit to fill the gap.

- Flanks are extremely vulnerable. Keep yours clear, always pummel your opponent's. This is especially true with hoplites. If you're charging the front of a hoplite, you're doing it wrong, and will die.

- Always have a unit or two of light cavalry to run down fleeing survivors and skirmishers. Don't let the enemy retreat with intact units. Try and kill them to the last man if you ca - especially archers and other annoyances.

- The artillery you can bring with your units is next to useless against walls, but fuck if it doesn't kill enemy soldiers like the dickens. Scorpions on a hill can fire over long distances, with fair accuracy, and skewer whole columns at a time. Once they get experience - which they will quickly, if you don't let them die like a retar - they'll fire faster, further, and more accurately. You can have a battle half-over before the melee starts.

- When fighting Carthage, bring skirmisher - Velites, specifically. Use them against elephants. They're cheap, so it's worth losing a unit of them to cause to rampage a unit of elephant - especially when those elephants are still among enemy troops.

- You can try the manipular formation (line each of Velites, Hastati, Principes, Triarii, each falling back through the other when tired) if you're a masochist. I'd recommend Principes in the center, Hastati on the flanks, and Triarii in reserve, with Velites as skirmishers. Get archers if you can find them, because they'll outrange your Velites. Post-Marian, your units will homogeniz - while simultaneously growing in effectivenes - meaning that you can pretty much just build big lines and crush the hell out of them.

- Oceanside cities are incredible for your economy. If you can get your hands on the Aegean Peninsula and Italy, you'll be basically set for cash. Keep upgrading your docks and roads. Identify cities with strong farming or mining bonuses and focus your farm/mine upgrades there.

- I don't think they ever fixed the issues with overpopulation: eventually, your cities will grow so huge that they'll have massive negative happiness scores and will become basically unmanageable. You can either dick with the game files to fix this or abandon the city, let it revolt, recapture it, and then massacre the inhabitants. It's not pretty, but it's sometimes the only way to keep a city under control. Toward the later stages of the game, you can find yourself doing this about once every five years for cities like Rome or Athens, who tend to grow very, very quickly.

- Plan your conquests one at a time. If you can expand consistently in one direction, you'll avoid the efforts of shifting around your powerful stacks and managing reinforcements in several directions simultaneously. Veterancy bonuses are incredibly potent, and having several legions of upgraded gold-chevron troops in a single stack will make you very difficult to overcome.

- Speaking of veterancy, if you're Rome after building your first Imperial Palace you will undergo the reforms of Gaius Marius, which will turn your Republican tripartite armies into Imperial Legions. Your former troops will no longer be buildable or reinforceable. It sucks, but the troops to which you gain access following the event are stronger than those you used before, and you'll gain from it in the long run.

- Divide and conquer. You can often bait enemy armies and slaughter them piecemeal. Try not to fight enemy armies where they can pile on you, because even with Rome's so-so AI you can get overwhelmed, especially if attacked from multiple directions by Roman Legions or Hellenic Hoplites.

- Always have some cavalry in your stacks, even if you don't use it at all in the line of battle. Your infantry will not be able to effectively run down its fleeing counterparts, whereas cavalry will ruin shit. If you can rout an enemy army and kill off all their missile units while they retreat, you can walk all over them in follow-up attacks.

- Speaking of which, two attacks in a single round will allow you to destroy an enemy stack. The first attack will cause them to retreat; the second will kill them.

- Don't let AI reinforcements enter the battle with a general about whom you care at all, especially a king/emperor or other member of the royal family. The battle AI will rush your general and his bodyguards into the thick of battle and you will lose a seven-star commander and you will hate all programmers ever. If you absolutely can not keep reinforcements out of the battle, charge the enemy before your fellows can get there. Your legions can be replaced; your generals largely can not.

- Ship-to-ship battles almost always come down to number of ships and veterancy. Build lots of ships if you plan to fight on the sea and sacrifice half of them in battle to turn the rest into veterans. They can be reinforced like ground units, so keep them at full strength as best you can.

- Pin them in the center than roll up the flanks. There is no circumstance to which this is not applicable. It's certainly the quickest way to beat hoplites.

- Hire bloody mercenaries whenever and where ever you can. Seriously. Don't worry about the price of maintaining them, just keep hiring them and zerging everywhere. You will never really need to BUILD any units for your main conquest obliteration force if you keep doing this, seriously.

- Murder the fuck out of your own people at all times. Seriously. If you are having trouble maintaining order and getting revolts, simply move your men out of a city on the verge of unrest, let them flip, march them right back in and then execute everyone you can. Small populations = Easily controlled; if you really want to conquer the world repeatedly murder towns as much as possible.

- To be entirely honest when playing this game I never tried to do it the right way and build units civilization style as the building construction just takes too long. It's all about one rolling force of hired mercenary scum conquering the world while the rest of my force just scraps with whatever the AI sends your way and murders the every loving crap out of everyone who starts to not like me. Just keep some Generals in the group and you're good to go.

- Don't bother with diplomacy. The AI sucks, it never helps you even if it says it will, it will sign peace treaties and attack you in the same turn (this isn't realistic, it just doesn't give a shit) and so forth. Extort them for money or territory if possible then burn their houses down. It's pointless to try anything else.