Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has, from time to time, been known to play computer games to let his escape from the daily strains of being Maximum Leaderly. He recently bought “Rome: Total War.” Well, he bought it about a week ago, but just loaded it Saturday night and started playing.

Now your Maximum Leader is a great fan of all the Total War games. He bought Shogun: Total War and then moved on to Medieval: Total War. Until yesterday night, he would have told you that Shogun was the best game. He would have said that for many reasons. It was so ground breaking and innovative. You get macro-level strategery for your faction and you get unit command on the micro-level when you battle other factions. The animations were excellent. And those cool movies everytime you attacked something with a ninja were cool.

Medieval brought many new features and complexities. But it also added time. It was a longer game to play. It really wasn’t so much a reinvention of Shogun as much as an improvement in some areas that didn’t always need to be improved. Still an excellent game, but its added complexity diminished it somewhat when compared to Shogun.

And then there was Rome. Now the campaign mode of the game looks to be even longer than Medieval. So that might not be a plus. But there are better animations and more angles at which to view both the strategic map and the battle map. Rome has made considerable improvements in how reinforcements are made during battle. Also, the way terrain is chosen on which one fights battles is vastly improved.

Though your Maximum Leader can go on and on about how much of an improvement Rome is over the other games, all the improvements pale in comparison to ONE.

The object of the game (in Rome: Total War) is to lead one of the three great Roman families to become Emperor and conqueror of most of the world. You can choose the Julii, the Brutii, or the Scipii. Each family has members (depicted on a neat family tree) who are your generals, governors, and so on. Your family can also recruit diplomats, spies, and assassins. All these “characters” (ie: family members, diplomats, spies, and assassins) can have retinues. These retinues are sub-characters who add to or detract from certain abilities of the main characters they follow. For example, in your Maximum Leader’s game many of his diplomats have translators in their retinues. Having a translator in a diplomat’s retinue makes it more likely that the diplomat can complete a mission. Some of his family members have siege engineers, poets, priests, exotic slaves, philosophers, and playwrights in their retinues. But there is one retinue that just made your Maximum Leader laugh and laugh and laugh. It was the ONE improvement to which he just alluded.

In the game your Maximum Leader recruited/trained an assassin. This assassin was sent on a number of successful missions. He killed two Gallic diplomats and then a Gallic general. After killing the Gallic general a message indicator appeared on the screen. It seemed that the assassin had acquired a retinue. This was strange as your Maximum Leader couldn’t imagine what sort of a retinue an assassin would have. So your Maximum Leader read the message. The assassin had a cataite in his retinue.

A catamite.

Heh.

There are probably two readers of this blog who will find this as funny as does your Maximum Leader.

For the rest of you loyal readers… Sorry. Inside joke.

Carry on.