A brand new update for Total War: Rome II was released today, via a brand new, free content pack that was downloaded automatically to all copies of the game. The August Warriors Update adds unique units such as the Hex-Bearers, Amazonian Riders and Scythian Noblewomen to several playable factions, and includes a significant upgrade to the Suebi roster.

That was not the only update or change to the game- the Daughters of Mars Unit Pack is also available for purchase today, bringing fearsome new warriors to the game, and who add a swift and deadly mix of fighting styles and abilities to the fray.

Total War: Rome II was released exclusively for PC last year. Its launch was a bit of a disaster (think Battlefield 4 on a smaller scale), though the developer and publisher both worked overtime to bring the game back to the standard of quality that is expected from the series.

The Creative Assembly has announced the first major expansion for Total War: Rome 2 – Caesar in Gaul. The expansion will offer a new campaign along with new factions, set between 58 to 51 BC across 10 provinces from Gaul to Britannia.

With the short number of years, players will have 24 turns in each along with seasons that alter the environment. There will be four factions here: Gallic Arverni, the Germanic Suebi, the Belgic Nervii and Rome. The Nervii, Boii and Galatians will also be available for use in the main campaign, along with some new auxiliary and merc units.

Creative director Mike Simpson stated that, “We’ve released a number of DLC packs and free content updates for Rome II, but this is our most substantial so far. We’ve always planned to focus more closely on some of the key conflicts of the ancient world, and Caesar’s war in Gaul is the ideal place to start. We’ve also improved the game considerably since launch, and that process continues as we move onto substantial feature and gameplay improvements”.

Caesar in Gaul will be available on December 12th on Steam and retail for $14.99/£9.99/€14.99. Stay tuned for more details and check out the new screens below in the meantime.

Sega also revealed that it had made a profit of ¥1.11 billion ($11.24 million) in the consumer sector and Total War: Rome 2 will be the biggest title in the series thus far.

You can check out our review of Total War: Rome 2 where we praised it for the combat, animation and attention to detail. Of course, the game has its flaws in terms of AI, some of the systems paling before just plain murdering your enemies and the lackluster story. But it’s still a compelling game and made all the better with the updates. Stay tuned for more details.

Total War: Rome II has received a new DLC, the Nomadic Tribes Culture Pack. The Nomadic Tribes Culture Pack features a variance of updates and new content that can be utilized in single or multiplayer campaign modes, and also in custom multiplayer battles. Let’s take a look at the new features.

There will be new playable factions; specifically The Roxolani, The Massagatae, and The Royal Scythians. The Roxolani are traders ad melee fighters, the Royal Scythians are ranged military, and The Massagetae are farmers and defenders. Each of these new cultures will have their own unique traits and objectives.

These new cultures will also have the use of a new military tradition, Nomadic Horde, which increases the unit range of the army, fighter moral, and reduces the cost of cavalry.

The DLC will feature new buildings, new food, research, stables, and more. Additionally each new faction will have their own complete history which you can uncover by playing as them.

"This hulking mass of real time strategic battles and turn-based empire building is as complex and war-mongering as its predecessors, and definitely does justice to the Total War name."

Despite the trailers leading up to it, Total War: Rome 2 is most assuredly not the sprawling epic saga of the Roman Republic’s rise and fall, filled with intertwining betrayals and family drama. You begin in 272 BC and essentially span over three hundred years of the campaign, capturing areas and provinces, your armies coming into contact with tribesmen and developed cultures alike.

Make no mistake: Rome 2’s scale is the biggest in the series till date, with 117 factions in total, each boasting their own unit types, skill trees, tactics and more. While some factions may be more war-minded, like the Barbarians, others may choose to focus on conquering through diplomacy, such as the Roman Republic. Keep in mind that you’ll go to war as often as you’ll play nice, so it’s always interesting to see how the Romans would collide with the Hunnic tribes for example.

The combat is easily the most appealing aspect of Rome 2. The campaign map is now divided into provinces which consist of a capital and a few settlements. You can go about capturing settlements alone or just take the whole kit and caboodle, which has the benefit of furthering economic development and quelling civilian unrest. As you bring armies out, you’ll need to assign Generals to their ranks.

"Your units could easily ignore an entrance in front of them and choose the long way around when it comes to annihilating an enemy. They may suddenly wig out when fighting foes and stand there, not knowing what to do."

It seems like a decent idea to remove micro-management, but when you consider that you need to individually hunt for your generals’ names through the web of sub-menus and the frustrating interface, it becomes an annoyance. Your turns will consist of managing your empire, balancing bonuses and focusing on production and economy along with the war effort, and the utter antiquity of the interface leaves just doesn’t help at times.

At least you can choose different stances such as Forced March and Defensive Stance, which enables your army to either keep pushing through enemy terrain or set up camp and defend. You can level up your army to gain new skills, with your General also gaining skills separately, and assign different soldiers to your ranks for a mix of cavalry, garrison, and more. It’s all a bit daunting at first, especially considering that you have many different sub-types for a single unit type. Rome 2 solves this by limiting the units in an army down to 40, along with a cap on the number of Generals you can have.

When you enter battle for the first time, you’ll be treated to some of the most grandiose war sequences till date. Total War: Rome 2’s approach leads to larger armies in fewer numbers but with a massive scale. Each unit is individually animated with its own stances and flashes of horror on seeing its allies being murdered.

The visuals are simply breath-taking in this regard, and it stands to reason that this is the most aesthetically beautiful strategy game currently out there. From the 30 different types of cities to the individual helms and armour that units bear, Total War: Rome 2 is a visual feast befitting its grandest ambitions.

"Despite the trailers leading up to it, Total War: Rome 2 is most assuredly not the sprawling epic saga of the Roman Republic’s rise and fall, filled with intertwining betrayals and family drama."

And while it doesn’t quite outline the true grimness of war, even with several decades worth of Zerg rushes, Tiberium gathering, Orc-slaying and whatnot, you’ll still sit back in awe as entire blockades cut themselves down to size, simply for the sole purpose of victory. Perhaps the greater tragedy is in seeing such seas of humanity swallowed up whole in bloody swathes of murder and disembowelment.

Or perhaps it’s in the path finding and general stupidity of the AI. Your units could easily ignore an entrance in front of them and choose the long way around when it comes to annihilating an enemy. They may suddenly wig out when fighting foes and stand there, not knowing what to do. At times, some units just dropped dead without a single enemy being close to administering the killing blow. It’s hilarious at times to find a soldier fighting a phantom as other units seemingly tussle with live soldiers.

It’s not enough to bring the game down but it does stick out every now and then. For all the brilliance that open foot war brings though, the naval battles leave much to be desired. The path finding issues are seemingly multiplied and seeing your units fall over themselves just to board craft becomes infuriating to no end.  Patches from The Creative Assembly over the past few weeks have thankfully worked to mitigate these issues.

The immense scale of Total War: Rome 2 does come back to bite it in the ass at times. The diplomacy in the game feels nicely complex in the beginning but you can garner approval ratings without much effort. Even if your Senate feels the need to rebel, you can buy off or tie up with generals to outright crush any rebellion you may face. The whole exercise of expanding your empire also feels redundant when you consider that you could just attack neighbouring territories, consolidate your position, and stamp out any resistance and then move on to the next tier.

"Make no mistake: Rome 2’s scale is the biggest in the series till date, with 117 factions in total, each boasting their own unit types, skill trees, tactics and more."

Having three types of agents is great and all, but when most options either have one engaging in war or holding a brief ceasefire, it all seems for naught. It doesn’t help that most of the missions in the game cater to the war aspects. Make no mistake – you’ll have a blast in Siege mission, even with the AI seemingly smacking into each other, but it felt like some potential was lost here.

All the promise of intrigue takes a backseat to a straight-forward empire-expanding game. If you have an ambition to crush whoever gets in your way and become the sole Roman ruler, succeeding where Alexander failed, then Total War: Rome 2 will cater to your power fantasies in spades. If you seek a more diplomatic, story-based approach filled with twists and turns, you’ll be slightly disappointed.

Maybe The Creative Assembly will expand on those aspects further in Rome 3 – we know they’re currently working on all the bugs – and help elevate this franchise further beyond the healthy throwback to classic strategy titles that it’s become.

This game was reviewed on the PC.

“Without that help we wouldn’t be able to turn around the patches as fast as we have been doing. We’re achieving in weeks what, on previous projects, took months. It’ll still be weeks rather than months between patches though, and we’re going to continue to patch the game regularly for the foreseeable future.”

These patches will address overall stability, and the time between patches will increase as changes in balance are tested. Though the fifth patch has already gone live, the developer is currently working on a seventh patch.

“I’m not going make any detailed claims about what we’re going to do in the short term. The best way – the only really credible way – we can let you know what we’re doing is by delivering it in the game. But rest assured that we’re constantly reading the TW forums and a variety of others, and the feedback you’re giving helps us to prioritise the issues we deal with, as well as getting a sense of which features work well, which are not liked, and which features from previous Total War games which weren’t designed into Rome 2 are missed.”

“Rome II will be the biggest game we’ve ever released, in terms of scope, gameplay features and sheer weight of content, but even then we’re just scratching the surface of the Roman period, an era so rich in diversity that it’s easy to foresee releasing relevant content for years after Rome II has shipped.”

In addition to the paid DLC, Creative Assembly also plans to reward their gamers with free content from time to time:

“As with Shogun 2, we will continually improve the game’s compatibility, optimisation and integral features such as AI and gameplay balancing post-release, and plan to add to that with new control schemes and additional free formats on other operating systems,” continued Russell. “We are also very proud of how Shogun 2 is our most moddable Total War to date with over 500 user-made mods on Steam Workshop alone. We hope to support Rome II in a similar fashion. In addition to free content, gamers can expect to see Culture Packs that add more playable factions and unique units, Feature Packs that add gameplay or wide-ranging aesthetic changes, and Campaign Packs that add entirely new story-based campaign expansions.”

In addition to their comments on the post-release DLC, Creative Assembly has also released a video detailing certain aspects of the game, viewable above.

As the follow-up to the developer’s hugely popular Total War series, Total War: Rome 2 sees players taking on the roles of several different races and cultures with the Republic in a state of turmoil. This means siege battles, ambushes and fighting across 173 regions with 117 different factions and different unit types besides the new Warscape engine that makes battles more realistic than ever. You can choose to do battle, be diplomatic or simply insert spies into situations and destroy your enemy from the inside.

Published by Sega, Total War: Rome 2 is set to release on September 3rd 2013 for PC.

In the Let’s Play series of videos leading up to the release of Total War: Rome 2, Creative Assembly’s highly anticipated new entry in the famed Total War series, and a direct sequel to the original Rome: Total War (widely considered to be the best game in the meta-franchise), the game gotten a new video. Like the previous one, this video shows us the Battle of Nile, only from the Roman perspective this time.

Al Bickam and Joey Williams provide commentary, as they walk us through the happenings in the video, as the player tries to conquer Egypt. Check out the video above, and tell us what you think.

Total War: Rome 2 launches later this year exclusively on PC. It is Sega’s second marquee strategy game release for the PC this year, after Company of Heroes 2 (developed by the newly acquired Relic Studios). Stay tuned to gamingBolt for further coverage of the title as it approaches release, including an exhaustive review.

Company of Heroes has received a new multiplayer trailer showing the ins and outs of the game.  You can also check Sonic in action in the new trailer that was released by Sega earlier today.

We don’t have trailers for Total War Rome 2 and Castle of Illusion but we do have screens for them. Check them out below and if you feel impressed, let us know in the comments section below.

We will be covering more of Sega later this week. Stay tuned for more news and updates.

Company of Heroes 2:

Sonic Lost World:

Total War Rome 2:

Castle of Illusion: