This quote from Creative Assembly lead designer for Rome TW 2 is a crushing dissappontment.  "Rome 2 is about making your decisions more interesting, not just making more of them," says Russell, who doesn't believe there's much fun to be had in individually administering all your regions or precisely tweaking all your armies. As a Roman ruler, he explains, your mind should be on where your Tenth Legion is and if they can move to support the Eight Legion, not building another unit of 40 archers or altering a tax rate in eastern Gaul."-published on a Eurogamer interview.  What's he thinking is the core fun about the TW franchise?!  This sounds like the radical new game play will amount to dumbing down the players ability to customize unit make-up of armies and develop individual resources in cities.  Those ablities make the essential degrees of strategic freedom that defines the franchise.  With the strategy core, TW is just a weak action game with lots of units on screen.  The emersive appeal of the franchise rests with the players "ownership" of the path of (potentally alternatvie) history, and the responsive and direct control of units and resources.  The massive dissappointment that was Empire TW and its Napoleonic off shoots was the large number of game elements automated such as development of agents (rogues, priests, etc.) and the numerous campaign impacting events beyond player control.  The crux of early information about Rome TW 2 sounds like the developers have totally committed to abandoning the traditional gameplay model in pursuit of Zynga-style accessability and vaunted "cinematic" visuals.  Bah!  Give me Medieval TW 2!