Good evening you are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakene.

Just a two-man show for you here tonight.

I am joined by my partner and Three Moves Head founder, Troy Goodfellow.

Troy, welcome to the show.

It is always fun to be back, talking about one of my favorite periods of history and least favorite games of 2013.

Oh, no, Troy, what could it be?

I don't know. I forget.

It's the Caesar and Gaul expansion, man. Oh, man, you're right. But you wouldn't know it,

would you? There's a thing about that. No, it's very Caesar, it's very Gaul. It's very, it's very Rome to total war. It's just a different map.

Yeah, and I think that's kind of it. So as we've been talking about it over the course of this week, I reviewed it for a Eurogamer. I don't think the review has gone up quite yet. But as I was playing it, I was really hoping that this expansion could address at least some of my myriad issues with Rome 2.

And to its credit, it does. I think the best thing this expansion has going for it is it shrinks this ridiculously overblown game into something more manageable and addresses, I think, a problem that we both had, which is that in Vanilla Rome 2, that map was so expansive that there wasn't nearly enough friction between the factions.

There was huge wastelands between anybody doing anything to each other. so expansive that there wasn't nearly enough friction between the factions. There's just huge

wastelands between anybody doing anything to each other. This is something that I know you

and I've talked about, and we've talked about some of our friends about looking forward to this

Gallic expansion and comparing it to, we've moved to put this in the context of other

total war expansions. A lot of we compared it favorably in thinking to the Napoleonic Campaign's expansion of Empire,

which was small, tight, very focused on battles, very compressed, unlike the sprawling mess of Empire Total War.

Or even some of the Shogun was a really good game.

They had really good expansions that shortened the time frame a bit,

but gave you really, really cool things to do.

So in many ways, there were focused expansions, but not the same-sized map,

but the experience was much tighter and much faster. So they took a good

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