stopped playing Rome: Total War 🌕🌕🌕🌗🌑
Vanilla Rome: TW is benefited by its modability. Honestly, the original game isn't even worth revisiting these days, I think. But install the Europa Barbarorum mod, and you're gonna have a genuinely good time.

Obviously, this being such an old game by now, there are many minor inconveniences here, such as the inability to set build policy across all settlements or the lack of "select all units" button when clicking on a city. I believe strategy is one of the few genres that has been continuously and radically improving, consistently making older games obsolete. And this is one of those cases.

In particular I like how the consequent entries have expanded the empire-management aspect of the game. Rome: TW feels a little lacking in this regard, giving you little to no option for a tall play, which is why I will always prefer games like Civ 5 or Oriental Empires over it. But that's not necessarily a criticism of the game itself. At the end of the day, this is a wargame, and it does the war aspect justice. The actual battles are some of the best in the genre. They're dynamic and epic, yet at the same time aren't too complicated to figure out.