This game is just way too easy. After having to carefully take down England with the iceni I steamrolled all of western Europe and fought my way down to a completely undefended Rome and Carthage. Starting over as a greek state army to maybe give maneuvering and formation more importance on the field (I really doubt it, massively frustrating that they took a time when armies that marched, fought in and held formation were the top of the line and the most dominating and turned that into everybody just losing their shit and fighting in a big blob after a half a second of combat).
Opted into the beta patch and that has cleared up all of my performance problems although the game will still not use any other textures but the lowest quality on the battle map.
Creative Assembly just seems like a woefully incompetent company. The aforementioned texture and model quality is just an example of how it seems like they just don't give a fuck. When your graphical assets, the most forward facing example of the time and effort that you put into the game, are as half assed as the ones that they've put into the successor to their flagship title you know that they either don't give a shit or aren't talented enough to attempt to give a shit, i'm now leaning towards not talented enough with the amount of really simple things that they have messed up. Have you tried to change the banner for one of your armies? It used to not be able to register individual clicks probably because it was probably looking for clicks to pan the selection before the click event occurred. Now it takes an extra click for the selection to register that it has hit the end of the list. This feature is so insignificant that it could have just been cut out and nobody would have noticed but they left an insanely simple broken feature in the game and that's just a big fuck you to your consumers. Cavalry have lost the ability to ride down fleeing units and is now back to the old medieval behavior or either zigzagging around or just following them very slowly. When the big boy development tasks are just as fucked as the intern ones you know that you might have a problem with your development staff knowing fuck-all about actual coding. It's a lot of small things trailing behind a few really glaring big ones.
The AI is probably going to be fixed within a week by a third party, the graphics have already been fixed by a third party. When some unattached guys can grab your code and fix issues in a week that your team couldn't finish over the course of years you have the wrong people working for you.