RTS Struggles

I think I'm done with the Warhammer 40k demo. Personally, I just don't have the patience to:
1. Master the interface
2. Understand, then master all the variables that need controlling

But at the same time, I'd like to start playing around with *something* that isn't a FPS game. So...I downloaded the Rome: Total War demo from Fileplanet this weekend. The Demo contains a tutorial battle, then another, larger battle you might actually play in the game. I thoroughly enjoyed the battles in the Demo, and thought the game would be more of the same...so I went out and bought the full version. To my surprise (and a bit of dismay), the full game contains a lot more management tasks (buildings, troops, cities, the Senate, etc). After playing the game for about 4 hours, and having the AI auto-managing nearly all my resources, I've still only had 3 actual battles. I'm also getting "pwned" by the Macedonians at the moment, who have decimated my entire Navy and left the majority of my Army on the wrong side of the Adriatic Sea. The game has a decent built-in 'advice' system, which seems to work appropriately about 65-75% of the time. The player's manual is a bulky 75 pages...who wants to spend the time to read that (although I think I'm going to now that I'm getting slaughtered)?

Regardless of the difficulty level, this game is very interesting in that it represents a lot of fairly-realistic history. You can play from the point of view of a variety of different houses from Rome. You can quabble with the Senate. You can create alliances (in secret and in public). You have spies and diplomats you can utilize broker deals and acquire information. I'm curious how a game like this might be used in a Roman history class, not as a focus of a course obviously, but as a supplementary component. If the audience is anywhere from 7th grade through to underclassman at a university, this game might prove to be a very good motivator for students to begin learning about Rome's history. An experienced facilitator could really leverage something like this to engage a class and get them engrossed in Rome's history early in a semester.

On a personal note, I've been playing a lot of CounterStrike: Source recently. As a first-time CounterStrike player, I can attest to the addictive power of this game. Way too much fun, especially when you get on a good server. I'm getting ramped up for the Guild Wars World Preview Event taking place this weekend. I'm very impressed with how the Guild Wars team is positioning this game in the MMORPG market so far. For instance, this weekend anyone can go and download the game and play for free for the weekend in a beta-type fashion. No silly account giveaway ploys that make you sit around and refresh a webpage for hours on end, only to find out that all 150,000 accounts vanished when you were in the bathroom for 5 minutes. Guild Wars seems to take the elements that make traditional MMORPG games, and turn them upside down. I'm sure I'll have more thoughts after I play around with the game this weekend.