I would definitely recommend this game to all Rebellion fans. I really like the multifaction elements with the implementation of diplomat characters and associated missions with the ability to bribe unloyal characters of other factions or if your funds are high enough outright purchase an owned region from another faction. Assassins can eliminate other characters, dips, merchants, religious leader, faction family members; or work sabotage missions on structures. Spys can infiltrate and return garrisons in castles and depending on stats can unlock the castle doors for a seige attempt. All the campaign elements would translate nicely to a Star Wars Galaxy environment, then of course all the battles can fought within the tactical game engine, another astounding piece of technology... using huge unit sizes I have fought some 2vs2 army battles with around 8,000 soldiers on map at the same time. I have a dual core opteron with 4gb of ram and it just chugs along but jaw-dropping all the same time. This was the first game that I bought since Rebellion that I literally spent a period of 24+ hrs with the game running non-stop (it was Christmas break - back to reality now)...

Hell yeah, all total war titles are great games and even greater source of inspiration. I haven't played Medieval II yet, but I loved the minor factions in Rome (and first datadisk).

I love Rome Total War! but i must admit that i always ended up auto-deciding the battles because i was pretty bad at it! the city management by itself was pretty fun.

the only thing i couldn't stand was how all of my "allies" always betrayed me. there was no such thing as loyalty in that game.

Yeah... the allies are pretty much useless, even if you marry a princess they still backstab you no more than 5 turns later. I stop using diplomats except to get trade rights. I been playing on Very Hard Campaign, Very Hard Battlemap settings and it can be mighty tough, but if you last the first 75 turns on very hard then you usually can win the game. I can definitely do far better managing the battlemap myself, I have auto'd some battles I thought to be no-brainer victories for me and the AI scores it for the other guy... pretty much gotta battle manually to win the game on very hard settings.

Battles were perfect in rome. I always ended up with routing the entire enemy army early in the battle and then slaughtering the rest of it's units on the run with my cavalry. Sometimes it was 10 to 1 victory. Battle AI certainly was worse that the auto-resolve algorithm

Btw. backstabbing allies were quite common in the Middle Ages. However the AI diplomacy was still lacking (at least in rome) - protectorates were useless, since the protected nation would sooner or later turn hostile on you and attack your unguarded towns when you least expect it. And sometimes the AI won't make peace with you unless you met their ridiculous demands (even if they were in no position to make any). Kamikaze barbarians

Actually I think it is the other way around... sound battle tactics of yourself in playing the battlemap give the same units much better odds. The autocalc algorthm just looks what ratio of units you have and their stats in paper-rock-scissors fashion and takes into no account any sense of battle tactics.

Again with the diplomacy... I just force the AI to give me a couple thousand florins to agree to peace and then go back to war with them again in a turn or two. lol... guess the backstabbing goes both ways.

In Rome Total War, you basically needed a distration for the enemy to charge at, then cavalry could route... well, everything I encountered. Personal bodyguard units with 20ish cavalry were getting literally hundreds of kills/battle, and did not always lose a single man. [On the other hand, if I only had light infantry, and neglected them a second, half of them died. [That is, the enemies caught up with them.] Otherwise, since I sucked at remembering to build more units, my heavily outnumbered heavy infantry would blunt the first charge, flee, and by then my lighter ranged units were running around, splitting up their forces, and taking a toll on their forces. And cavalry were running down their formations from behind.

Tip: A single phalanx of infantry is USELESS against a faster unit of cavalry... and an AI that parades its spear phalanx one way toward my archers, then turns around and heads for my skirmishers, and turns back, etc, is not the greatest of tacticians.