Maybe I didn't give Rome:TW a chance, but after the first five or six battles I was bored of it and started to sim the battles where I had overwhelming numbers.
The focus is definitely focused on your army/tactics as a war simulation, but it felt the same each battle. I like building, so the focus on the army didn't interest me so much.
The risk style campaign world map is about the same between games. The only building you get to do feels fairly simple in the towns. It didn't really feel like I had much to manage at the Civilization level. Just train armies and get them to the battlefield.
I then tried RoN/TaP and enjoy the city building part much more. You are in charge of building, expanding, multiple resources to manage, and fielding an army. It automates a lot of tasks that require user clicking in other RTS games, so your clicks per minute isn't so important. You can rally troops directly to groups and select multiple buildings easily to setup mass productions (home key).
I like all the customizing you can do in a custom game (very expensive/slow tech makes the ages meaningful). There is a nice tech mod to slow the tech gain down even more (i think each age deserves at least a chance at battle, under normal conditions you can tech quickly to at least gun powder age, which is probably good for multilayer or games under 45 minutes). Playing offline I have the time to draw out the game to a turn based strategy game length. If you like an age or hate one you can setup the game to start or stop at any age.
In war you can improve your battle performance by using the same tactics in TW (haven't quite got this part, but flanking is in the game, units have their strengths and counters, etc).
