Expeditions: Rome is a extremely well put together combination of CRPG, Tactics gameplay, and Civilization-like strategy.
The RPG part is pretty dope. There is a lot of dialogue choices you can make and that shit will affect you somehow. Whether its for an upcoming battle, for the next bit of strategy gameplay, or maybe how characters think of you. You have a party of people in this game, 5 of them being typical RPG party members, and then you can add an extra 8 from recruiting, like a XCOM game. They all have dispositions like "Greedy, Honest, Warmongering" and a lot of dialogue options will affect those, either boosting their loyalty to you, or diminishing it. tbh I'm not entirely sure how it affects the main party members, but the extra crew can straight up leave your ass if they hate you enough.
You also start the game by choosing what type of "unlock this tree of dialogue" perk you want, like how Pentiment does it. You do this game in Acts, in which you are leading some war campaign, and inbetween them you go back to Rome and do a lot of dialogue reacting off the campaign you just did, and affecting the next.
The tactics gameplay is super fun. At first, the game is fun, but I did dip into a part where I wasn't liking the classes in the game after a couple hours, then a couple hours later the game got fun again and stayed that way. It's your usual turn based tactics affair, set up your troops, move them, do their attack skills, watch enemies do their turn. It can be annoying how long NPC turns are because there can be A LOT of enemy/ally units in a battle, so that shit can just be a minute of waiting. It also has these missions where you have to pacify a region you conquer from the strategy side of the gameplay, and you have to send in people mostly from your extra party. I don't really like using my extra party a lot because I having to manage them and my main party is a little too much, but it became manageable once I could ignore them with the super cheese I unlocked (even before then I didn't really dislike it too much, but I would much rather prefer to just use my main party). I got one of my characters so beefed up with Unique loot and perk points that he, quite literally, could just one shot every enemy on the first turn he could move. I did miss getting to use all my classes skills, but then game turned into a fun puzzle of how I'm going to allow this guy to kill everyone cause you might need to flank enemies to make their defenses 0.
The strategy gameplay mainly consists of an overworld map that kind of looks like Civ, and lightly managing your army so you have enough battle points that you could attempt to fight and take over other territories. Once you fight, it loads up a battlefield where it randomly pops up 3 strategies that affect your main 4 stats. There are a lot of number threshholds, up to 12, down to -12, that will affect the battle (i.e. -150 manpower, -50 missing soldiers, +25% player defence, Loot at end of battle). You gotta manage these numbers so you dont lose the tug of war bar at the top of the screen and try not to lose too many soldiers. You can also recruit 4 party members to lead your army and they add passive numbers those 4 main stats (they are also affected by loyalty and can just steal loot from the end of the battle if they don't like you).
Overall I think all the gameplay in this game is fun and engaging. I didn't even talk about the writing, which I think is really good. Like you do have the option of being a male or female, and (like another review I saw) I can't even imagine how huge a difference being a male is. It is always hammering that people won't accept you being a female military leader. There is a point where you seriously have to consider marrying a guy because you could lose your house if you don't. Its just such an interesting facet of the story if you are female, having do deal with this stupid ancient bullshit. The party members are all good too, I enjoy all their arcs. So yeah, good ass game.
The RPG part is pretty dope. There is a lot of dialogue choices you can make and that shit will affect you somehow. Whether its for an upcoming battle, for the next bit of strategy gameplay, or maybe how characters think of you. You have a party of people in this game, 5 of them being typical RPG party members, and then you can add an extra 8 from recruiting, like a XCOM game. They all have dispositions like "Greedy, Honest, Warmongering" and a lot of dialogue options will affect those, either boosting their loyalty to you, or diminishing it. tbh I'm not entirely sure how it affects the main party members, but the extra crew can straight up leave your ass if they hate you enough.
You also start the game by choosing what type of "unlock this tree of dialogue" perk you want, like how Pentiment does it. You do this game in Acts, in which you are leading some war campaign, and inbetween them you go back to Rome and do a lot of dialogue reacting off the campaign you just did, and affecting the next.
The tactics gameplay is super fun. At first, the game is fun, but I did dip into a part where I wasn't liking the classes in the game after a couple hours, then a couple hours later the game got fun again and stayed that way. It's your usual turn based tactics affair, set up your troops, move them, do their attack skills, watch enemies do their turn. It can be annoying how long NPC turns are because there can be A LOT of enemy/ally units in a battle, so that shit can just be a minute of waiting. It also has these missions where you have to pacify a region you conquer from the strategy side of the gameplay, and you have to send in people mostly from your extra party. I don't really like using my extra party a lot because I having to manage them and my main party is a little too much, but it became manageable once I could ignore them with the super cheese I unlocked (even before then I didn't really dislike it too much, but I would much rather prefer to just use my main party). I got one of my characters so beefed up with Unique loot and perk points that he, quite literally, could just one shot every enemy on the first turn he could move. I did miss getting to use all my classes skills, but then game turned into a fun puzzle of how I'm going to allow this guy to kill everyone cause you might need to flank enemies to make their defenses 0.
The strategy gameplay mainly consists of an overworld map that kind of looks like Civ, and lightly managing your army so you have enough battle points that you could attempt to fight and take over other territories. Once you fight, it loads up a battlefield where it randomly pops up 3 strategies that affect your main 4 stats. There are a lot of number threshholds, up to 12, down to -12, that will affect the battle (i.e. -150 manpower, -50 missing soldiers, +25% player defence, Loot at end of battle). You gotta manage these numbers so you dont lose the tug of war bar at the top of the screen and try not to lose too many soldiers. You can also recruit 4 party members to lead your army and they add passive numbers those 4 main stats (they are also affected by loyalty and can just steal loot from the end of the battle if they don't like you).
Overall I think all the gameplay in this game is fun and engaging. I didn't even talk about the writing, which I think is really good. Like you do have the option of being a male or female, and (like another review I saw) I can't even imagine how huge a difference being a male is. It is always hammering that people won't accept you being a female military leader. There is a point where you seriously have to consider marrying a guy because you could lose your house if you don't. Its just such an interesting facet of the story if you are female, having do deal with this stupid ancient bullshit. The party members are all good too, I enjoy all their arcs. So yeah, good ass game.