A seriously addictive immersive game, everything that Civ4 should have been. A great addition to the Total War series.
Now after 200+ hours of game play I still can't put it on the back shelf. The Civ side of the game although not as detailed as Civ4 is well balanced and even after loads of 'game' years you still have much to do with regards to tech/building improvement. The benefit of having less of a huge tech tree is that once you conquer tons of cities they are far easier to manage and you don't really have to use the auto-manage feature so much ultimately making the game more immersive and strategic.
The battle mode like all the total war series is pretty awesome. Once you learn to use troops well you can really get a buzz from kicking butt when the odds are stacked against you. But mess things up and the tables can be turned very easily.
The diplomatic and religious elements to the game (priests and diplomats) keep you on your toes the whole game. If you don't constantly work at both then you're going to go to war ...alot.
There are many flaws to this game though the main one being how buggy the cavalry can be, annoyingly stopping a charge just as they are about to hit the enemy unit because one horse got stuck on some scenery, not responding to mouse clicks quickly enough and charging at nothing all the time. Computer AI can be stupid sometimes especially when they just stand there sometimes and completely get wasted by tons of artillery fire before being routed. I've even had to quit the game once because I took out the siege/artillery equipment from both attacking armies and so they just stood off while I waited in the fort. With both armies not being able to attack you'd expect the battle to end but it didn't so I had to quit, an attack be me in the open would just have been suicide (there is an option to have a game timer for siegesbut this just penalises you if you want to sit back and bombard with artillery first). Your artillery also tend to open fire when a whole regiment of friendly cavalry are running past taking out the whole lot.
Most bugs on the battlefield are annoying but don't really effect the gameplay too much though.
On the Civ part the naval battles are dull and pretty pointless although the new empires has addressed this and I look forward to playing it. Other issues are the merchants are stupid and die??? when another merchant takes over their plot. The merchant part would be great if it had more depth, say they setup lucrative import/export trade routes along roads and between cities/ports and made the income from these more important to the gameplay rather than all from city taxes. As they are merchants are useless and the money they generate hardly worth the hassle of you trying to keep them alive.
Graphically I think the battlefield animation could do with improvements but then this game is quite dated I suppose and the difficulty level on normal mode is too easy and should be slightly harder. It never lost a single battle on this level sometimes even when outnumbered 2:1.
All in all though a great game and very enjoyable to play.