Total War: Rome 2 - Empire Divided (DLC)

Empire Divided is a campaign pack DLC for Total War: Rome II that drops you into 270 AD, right at the jagged peak of the Crisis of the Third Century. After decades of civil war, economic freefall, and a revolving door of 26 emperors, the Roman world has fractured into competing power blocs. You pick a side from ten playable factions spread across five cultural groups: the three splintered Roman claimants (Aurelian's Rome, Gallic Rome under Tetricus, and Queen Zenobia's Palmyra), the Germanic kingdoms of the Saxoni, Gothi, and Marcomanni, the Eastern Empires of the Sassanids and Armenia, the nomadic Alani, and the Britannic Caledones. Each faction comes loaded with distinct traits, and the asymmetry is real. The Gothi get reduced cavalry recruitment costs and free level-one weapons for sword units at recruitment. The Germanic kingdoms can initiate night battles and pull 150% bonus income from raiding. Palmyra's Zenobia starts small but compensates with a 20% research rate boost and cult-linked banditry suppression. From a build-order standpoint, the faction variety is the DLC's strongest card. The headline new mechanics are plagues, banditry, and cults. Cults are genuinely the most interesting of the three: free to place, they give immediate public order and sanitation bonuses, but costly to remove and carrying their own long-term penalties per branch. Christianity, Mithraism, and Manichaeism each play differently. Banditry functions as a province-level food tax that scales with empire size, and plagues can spread along trade routes and through army movement. In practice, critics are right that both banditry and plague resolve to a building-slot management puzzle more than a genuine crisis mechanic. You build the counter-building, the number goes down. It keeps the early game tight and forces hard choices in small three-slot settlements, but it loses its teeth by the mid-campaign. The cult system carries more weight across the full run. The five Heroic factions (Rome, Gallic Rome, Palmyra, the Sassanids, and the Gothi) get the most attention. Their leaders cannot die in battle, they carry bespoke event-chain narratives, and their tech trees are redesigned not as scientific milestones but as governance edicts specific to each ruler's story arc. Aurelian's tree charts military reform and imperial reunification. Zenobia's traces her rise to power. Tetricus's reflects Republican political leanings in a republic that no longer exists. That framing is clever and gives each Heroic run genuine flavour, even if the mechanical payoff is stat bonuses you could describe without the historical dressing. The free Power and Politics patch that launched alongside this DLC is worth mentioning separately: it overhauled the political party system across all Rome II campaigns, letting political factions hold provincial influence and secede if neglected. That system actually adds more replayability to the base game than anything in this paid DLC. The honest accounting: Empire Divided is a well-constructed campaign scenario for players who already love Rome II's management depth and want a harder, more chaotic starting position. The opening turns are genuinely stressful. You start mid-flow with territory to defend on multiple fronts, stretched finances, and diplomatic penalties against your natural allies. The Sassanid cataphractarii and armoured war elephants make that eastern faction a high-skill-ceiling pick. Community reception has been mixed but has softened over time, with longer-term players calling it underrated compared to its launch-era reviews. The fair criticism is that it does not reinvent Rome II. If you want the full late-antique collapse experience with stronger thematic mechanics, Total War: Attila does that more completely on its own engine. But if you are already in the Rome II ecosystem and want a scenario with asymmetric faction design, tight early-game economics, and one of history's most dramatic political implosions as your backdrop, this DLC delivers a solid additional campaign with real replay value across multiple faction styles.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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