I watched my friend play this years ago and have been wanting it for myself for a long time. Steam and their evil sales made it so that I could get it and the expansions for like five bucks or some ****, so obvs I had to snatch it up.
Oh my god is this game awesome. Much of the awesomeness of Civ, but without the steep learning curve that inevitably leaves all of your cities starving to death, and the battles are just epic... like, epic in the appropriate sense of the word. As the Julii, I have taken half of the Gauls' territory, about the same of the Dacians, and am currently engaged in some seriously massive warfare with both at the same time on opposite ends of the ancient world... because my empire is baller-size like that.
So far, my proudest moment has been crushing a 1200-man, Gaulish army with one less than half that size, while sustaining relatively few losses myself. Granted, my victory may not have been so complete had I not managed to catch the enemy general's unit out in the open near the beginning of the engagement, completely demoralizing his troops and starting a chain reaction of routed units, but a glorious win is a glorious win.
Sadly, the Roman general who won that battle was slain in a smaller assault the very next turn. It didn't stop his army from annihilating the Gauls down to the last man, but it was a bittersweet victory. Luckily his second-in-command took control of the army, and led it to many victories against those barbarian scum... despite the fact that, according to his stats, he's basically a useless turd. But he's a useless turd war hero, who is now winning even more victories in the east, against the Dacians, making him quite possibly my most battle-tested general, perhaps second only to my faction leader.
I'm tempted to make him the faction heir, despite him being a turd.