Whenever a game gets ported from desktop or console over to mobile, it’s not just a matter of plopping the game down on the App Store and calling it a day. Console games are designed for physical controllers and so touchscreen controls need to be taken into consideration, and desktop games are typically designed for mouse and keyboard inputs (many times in addition to phsycial controllers) and so care must be given in terms of the interface as well as the controls as our big clunky fingertips are much different than the precise nature of a cursor. Given the nice big screen of the iPad a lot of those interface transitions are much smoother, but when a game releases as iPad-only there’s inevitably people out there who also would like it on their iPhone. Here, things can get really tricky. That’s why, despite the fact that an iPad port of Rome: Total War ($9.99) arrived way back in November of 2016 and developer Feral Interactive promised an iPhone version this past October, we still have yet to see the game on the iPhone. It is taking a pretty significant redesign to get such a complex, user-interface-heavy game to work smoothly on the smaller iPhone screen. Today, Feral has shared an animated gif of what the new character screen will look like in the iPhone version of Rome.

I have to say that I do not envy the folks at Feral who have to come up with how best to play such an information-dense game on a tiny iPhone screen, but bless those people for doing so. Back in December Feral also teased a few screens of how they dealt with interface redesign going from the Mac version of Rome, to the iPad version, and finally to the iPhone version, so give that a look if you’re interested in this sort of thing. If you’re simply interested in “When the heck can I play Rome: Total War on my iPhone??" then right now the only answer is sometime this winter, so likely in the next month or two. It’ll arrive as a free update for iPad owners and you’ll be able to transfer your progress between devices. We’ll of course give you a head’s up when that update arrives.

Link to Forum Discussion: ROME: Total War (By Feral Interactive)