I have played Rome II quite a bit.  It is 75% one of the greatest games ever made, and 25% complete mess, somewhat analogous to Elemental, I suppose.  The developers are patching at a furious pace but at present it's not even the second-best Total War title.  That said, while we agree on the lack of documentation or tutorial for the stats and political system, and the skill trees for agents and generals are extremely poorly presented, I think the new UI is a great improvement, overall.  There may well be a solid base game, but we can only hope Rome II's refinement ends up matching the journey to Legendary Heroes.

i absolutely loved medieval total war 2 but empire was already a huge disappointment. dont care much for the japan scenario so i d have skipped shogun anyways but it breaks my heart to read rome total war 2 has soo many issues because thats again a scenario i m very interested in.

oh well, maybe lots of patches, mods and a possible expansion will fix it...

... one thing i really, really, REALLY love in Legendary Heroes is how fast turn times are even on huge maps in the late game - an thats on a middle class notebook. having to wait a minute between turns as some people report from Rome Total War 2 would be a total gamebreaker for me. civ 5 is already very annoying to play for me on the biggest map types / in the end game.

that being said i d love a total-war like fantasy game. total-war like as in "large scale battles" ( unlike MoM/Elemental/AoW/etc. where battles are fought between 3-50 guys on each side ) and "fixed map". not that random map creation is bad, its just that a game designed around a (hopefully!) well balanced map allows for many interesting things games with random maps cannot provide.