Building Rome: The full experience of ROME: Total War on iPad

Rome wasn’t built in a day – and for iPad it took a while. Here we describe our journey in a series of five enlightening dev diaries, from our first experiments with touch controls right through to completing the full and glorious experience of ROME: Total War on iPad.

Determined to provide the full ROME: Total War experience on iPad, we explored every game flow to ensure we didn't miss a thing.

One major focus was battle mode. This wasn’t just about making battles as epic on iPad as they are on desktop, but also about making them convenient. Playing ROME: Total War for iPad, you might find yourself on the battlefield during a short commute. (Of course we don’t have short commutes here in London, but we have heard tales of the phenomenon.)

While we didn’t want to spoil players with too much of a cheat option by introducing manual saves mid-battle, we did implement an auto-retrieve. This means that if you leave your app running in the background and it closes due to competing apps, or if you close it through the home button, starting up again will return you to the fray – exactly where you left it.

Speaking of a full experience, we knew from the beginning that we didn’t want to introduce any micro-transactions. These have their place in certain games...but ROME: Total War is not one of them.

We topped it all off with cross-platform save compatibility between Mac and iPad. So if you’re playing on Mac and want to keep playing on your way to work, transfer the Mac save to your iPad for the commute, and then back again when you get home.

ROME: Total War is now available for iPad on the App Store. Advance to the minisite for videos, screenshots, and tips on building and ruling your empire.