The Senate will supposedly try to overstretch you sometimes if you’re doing well. It could just be an excuse for bad mission generation, though. Are the consequences for not completing a mission harsh?
No. You don’t get the reward, which is sometimes cool (like a high-quality unit, or money) and sometimes… not. I’ve had them promise to give me “extra special consideration” for senate office appointments, only to turn around and give appointments to every faction except mine. They’re politicians, I guess, so what can you expect? Sometimes their offers are really vague, like “A very valuable reward.” Caveat emptor.
If you continually fail (or refuse to embark on) senate missions, they get pissed at you, and your standing on the senate floor goes down. Failing one mission generally won’t hurt you much. And I do fail the blockade ones from time to time, especially when my fleets are on the other end of the Mediterranean from the port that they want me to blockade.
Though you can get family members in the senate somehow,
That’s the other benefit to completing senate missions–it increases your chances, in general, of winning a senate appointment.
The campaign though, after 4 hours of play, is much better.
I agree. The spotlight has been on the battles, which do indeed look really cool, though they are functionally very similar to Medieval’s, with a few exceptions, like a better interface, much larger maps, and a lot more of them–basically a custom map for every “space” on the campaign map. But the campaign game is totally different from past Total War games. The changes they have made (like going to a more Civ-like map rather than having province-to-province movement) fundamentally change how the game plays (for the better).
I also like the mechanics of settlement management–if you want to control what goes on in the settlement, you need to place a commander there to function as governor (but only while he is in the settlement… if he is in the field–even in the same province–he can’t act as governor). You can turn this option off when you start a campaign, but don’t do it! This is one of the campaign game’s most interesting mechanics. If you send your commander into the field, the town reverts to automanage. You can queue up a laundry list of stuff for the town to build before he goes, but you can’t change the list without bringing him (or another commander) back to the town. So there’s a sort of “guns or butter” mechanism where you simultaneously want your commanders leading troops but also need them to manage settlements. And once you have more settlements than commanders, you have to pick and choose which ones you want to hand-manage. This has the additional benefit of keeping the management portion of the game from growing too onerous.
Now unlike MTW you cannot assault a fortified city without seige weapons, but its not really a problem as the basic ones (ladders, battering rams, etc) can be built on site it just requires you take a turn building them while holding the seige.
I like this mechanic a lot, mostly because it makes more sense. Simple seige weapons, like rams and ladders, are not something that an army would lug around, because they can easily be constructed on the site of the seige. Basically, when you beseige a city, you get a number of build points based (I think–the manual doesn’t explain this well, and neither does the Prima guide) on the terrain. So more trees = more build points. You can also skip the seige equipment altogether and simply wait out the opposing army. Their forces will dwindle a bit each turn from starvation, and eventually they will be forced to surrender the city (or, if they think they can beat you, they’ll sally). If you can afford the time, it’s always better to try to starve out the defenders, because you won’t lose any men that way.
