I finished downloading it the other day - 6 gigs at 100kp/h with an unreliable and constantly interrupted connection - and I enjoyed it.
True, it wasn't as good as Rome was, but it's still interesting.
That said, it has a lot of Empire in it, and I'm not sure that that's a good thing. I had a small graphics glitch in which about a quarter of my monitor, was covered in thin, horizontal black lines. I'm not fussed, because it was pretty unobtrusive, but it doesn't bode well for other bugs and glitches.
I'll probably still pick it up, but I'm less excited than I was.
Also: Those bastards didn't put the cheat engine/debug console back in! I know why they took it out in the first place, but it's still annoying. What's the point of having a grand strategy game if I can't occasionally cheat and pound my enemies into oblivion?