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Lord of the Isles
09-03-2013, 09:24
Zero Hour + 1:05 here.

Unpacking the pre-load and updating took a little while but not too bad considering lots of people must have been doing the same. I had 37 Gb free on my SSD before preload, which went down to 9 Gb during the uncompressing before ending up with 19 Gb free. So you will need at least 28 Gb free space for the install but once done it uses up 18 Gb.

My Greek states DLC validation code hasn't arrived from Amazon UK yet (some people have been emailed it already IIRC?) so for now I'm without it. Minor annoyance.

I lasted about 30 mins of the Prologue. It was heavily scripted for newbies which is great but I'm ready for the main campaign now. Two immediate worries in the Prologue: I wanted to use Hastatii to attack some slingers who strayed too close but didn't want to waste their pila on such unimportant enemies. But there wasn't any button I could see to turn off fire-at-will for the pila - as soon as I selected then right-mouse-clicked on the slingers the Hastatii threw a volley of pila before attacking. A loss of control for the player unless I have missed something.

And even more worrying: with units selected there was a button in the bottom left of the screen which displayed this tooltip: "Toggle Cinematic Mode: This produces a small combat boost when turned on" or something similar. WHAT??! Pray to Zeus that this is either a mistake or just a prologue-only bit of nonsense.

johnhughthom
09-03-2013, 09:34
In RTW, you had to shift click iirc to attack without throwing pila first, might be the same.

Which factions are playable 'out of the box', you don't have to play as Rome first, do you?

Still unpacking, 2 hours to go. Sigh.

edit: Unpacking actually took 45 minutes in the end. Not as bad as I thought. Installing Direct X is step 1 of 10 though! Usually only 1 of 3 or 4....

edit 2: Flew through the steps after Direct X. Happy days.

Seabourch
09-03-2013, 09:39
An hour left depending on the download rate for me. I hope to enjoy this, favourite of all time has to be the first MTW, the one that got me hooked onto the franchise in the first place, a game which I can no longer play sadly thanks to the infamous bugs.

johnhughthom
09-03-2013, 09:57
I don't really think it's fair to describe incompatability with modern systems as 'bugs', unless you expect devs to be psychic.

benjywa
09-03-2013, 12:58
I had everything pre downloaded on steam
setup took 30 mins
V happy

First impressions without spoilers (my favorite in series is ME2, Shogun 2 was disappointing for me, unit variety meant I spent 10x more time playing ME2 since S2 release)

- Its quite a lot faster that ME2 and S2. The units feel like they are moving at the right pace relative to their size – kewl
- Its beautiful. I like the texturing/ contouring of the terrain
- The momentum thing is ace, if you hit a unit in the side with v heavy infantry you can see them impact and distort the unit shape
- I like the indicators above the flags for morale up or hidden etc
- The tree hiding thing – I must learn to exploit this asap
- when I set up and heard "sons of mars" there was a tingle down my spine

My plan - get a med/med campaign done and then play as the brits... thats right, I am British and blue crazy people appeal to me.
booked 2 days of at the end of the week - abandoning wife and child and moving to mates house for some coop - will keep you posted

White_eyes:D
09-03-2013, 13:48
Played it for about 4 hours so far....when I arrived at the main menu and saw the "Prologue campaign" option, I just ignored it. While some hand-holding is nice, I just wanted to get to the meat of it right away.:rtwyes:

I notice a ton of complaints about the AI but I have yet to see any real issues...in fact the only real big issue I noticed is that the AI seems to be too static when defending and can generally be "bled" to death by skirmish/missile fire.~:handball:

Just so everyone knows (though you may already, I know I didn't) a faction is not destroyed until all its army's and cities are all gone. I thought I would do something sneaky and take Pahavae's(?) last city to stop his doomstack from attacking my weaker/poorer/not walled city but he still went and sacked it anyway.:sweatdrop:

Lemur
09-03-2013, 14:26
It's installed and unlocked ... and now I need to work a nine-hour day with lots of deadlines. Grrrrr. That's my first impression: Grrrrrr.

nafod
09-03-2013, 15:06
It's installed and unlocked ... and now I need to work a nine-hour day with lots of deadlines. Grrrrr. That's my first impression: Grrrrrr.

I'm in the same boat, only I booted it up, looked at the civs available (and their perks/disabilities), and loaded a game as Rome. Of course I didn't have time to do anything, but did notice that the Escape key does not bring up the menu. Hopefully this doesn't lead to more concerns.

hoom
09-03-2013, 15:23
Unit rosters are pretty ace.
More or less direct out of EB/RTR & similar Rome1 mods.
Anglicized names is a bit naff but at least pretty consistent.

Units look the part too, great variety & historical appropriateness of pretty much everything: helmets, plumes, faces, armor, shields, even individual height/build.


AI wise nothing particularly bad playing Custom Battles, tends to hang back & wait for you to do something though -> will probably cause plenty 'unresponsive AI' complaints.
It does tend to suddenly react once you do something to break its torpor eg moving a unit to an obviously vulnerable spot.
Maybe if I checked to make sure AI or me was attacking...


Got my ass whipped in Naval battle.

Land battles have been a bit weird, partly because I tried mostly to get a variety of units to oggle rather than going for useful army makeup but once engaged I seemed to be on the down early, turn the tide & think I'm in mop up mode for an easy win, then suddenly half my troops are dead/routing & it turns into a big struggle to come away with a few severely depleted units.
Might just be I haven't actually played much TW for a long time :sweatdrop:


Some UI glitches eg units not responding to attack commands (I think if group members rout?), sometimes units sticking in drag & drop mode when I tried to click a move order.

Some unit movement issues.
I always have used 'g' grouping eg for left flank cav, left flank infantry, main line infantry, skirmishers, missile, right flank infantry, right flank cav each group with manually set order & depth/width.
Can select one of these groups then drag & drop into new position -> keeps unit order & width settings.

In Rome2 the default 'g' group won't keep your unit order & width settings.
There is new 'ctrl + g' aka locked group function which works similar to the old style & isn't too much of an issue to use.

But you used to be able to select multiple 'g' groups & click a move order & they would move in formation, not anymore. Now it makes a big line formation with all your groups, not nice.
I think I saw reference to something like a shift click to do that but haven't seemed to find it in controls or found what does it.

However you can use Up arrow to advance the formation (moves the destination shadow forward), may actually be almost more useful.
Left/Right buttons traverse sideways & ctrl (or shift) left/right rotates.

So when I first did a battle, I setup my 'g' groups as usual, adjusted the layout & discovered the units were out of order :thinking:
Re-ordered & discovered the locked groups by accident -> setup with locked groups then select all & move :wall: what the crap is this?
Some studying of the controls screen found the arrows stuff, not really happy with that as a longterm solution though.


I like the in battle LoS system :rtwyes:


Performance wise: I have an Phenom2 x6 1055T (fairly overclocked), 4GB ram & Radeon 6950 running 2560*1600 on 30inch monitor.
Game runs mostly OK with Ultra settings, though I'm tolerant of pretty low fps in relatively slow games, getting 15-20fps typical so far with that.
Graphics settings screen has a nicely placed link to benchmark run, though you have to save away & back to actually have setting changes applied.
Everything on min except unit size it only hit about 45fps which is fine, this is no Unreal engine where higher fps lets you jump further.
Seems to use plenty of my multi-core capacity.
Edit: runs nearly 20fps average on Extreme with a couple of tweaks windowed at 1920*1600 :2thumbsup:

Did a land battle on Carthage tile, it was inland & the inland side of Carthage was a disappointment.
No big walls & they didn't even put houses on the inland side of the Bursa, has trees up there :rtwno:
Also my PC tanked when trying to draw Carthage off in the distance.


Fortunately I've been looking for an excuse to get a newer GPU & new generation Radeons are due shortly so the 79xx are getting cheaper &/or there will be a performance leap for similar price.

AntiDamascus
09-03-2013, 16:04
Hello all. Turned on the game this morning because I was tired and couldn't do a midnight play like I wanted :(

Units sometimes don't respond to commands. I lost a battle because I was clicking units to reinforce a fight and they never moved. :( Also trying to move units brought up the placement alignment graphic and they didn't move when I clicked.

My hope is this is one of two things: I am an idiot who isn't used to the new interface or this is a bug that will get patched soon.

Also the units move must faster than the last TW game I played (Medieval 2). Gonna take a bit to get used to this new style. Still need to figure out the House ins and outs. Been a long time since I played Rome I.

AntiDamascus
09-03-2013, 16:04
Also joy, my first actual post is a double post. A good sign of things to come :rolleyes:

mouzfun
09-03-2013, 16:41
Is that just me or you cant kill faction's navy after you destroyed every of their cities? i tried to kill all the units, ram it, burn it, nothing works. it says victory but on the campaign map it's still there with 26 people, next turn he comes back for me with 26 damn people, i'm tired of killing it 20 turns in a row.

B-Wing
09-03-2013, 17:35
I finally got to play the game for about 45 minutes this morning before heading to work. I skipped the prologue, started a campaign as Epirus, and spent my limited time getting familiar with the campaign map. Having played RTW, M2TW, and Shogun 2, this game's interface seems the least intuitive by far, but I'm sure I'll get used to quickly. One thing I haven't figured out is how armies interact with navies. After realizing I couldn't make my land units board my navy units, I realized that they could magically conjure their own fleets... which can't be merged with the permanent naval units. I don't get that. Can anyone shed some light on this new function?

CaptainCrunch
09-03-2013, 18:21
Pretty buggy right now, units moonwalking often (or just gliding with no walk animation) and poor and inconsistent collision detection. Charging units often 'meld' into one another several ranks deep before being 'reset' back out to where they should be. Sarissa from the 2nd rank in a phalanx poke right through the shields of the front rank. 'Pikemen' going into battle with swords drawn unless placed in phalanx.

Also, special abilities like intimidation seem very inconsistent right now. Units that are even or sometimes winning will break for seemingly no reason when fighting a unit that has this ability.

After unit cohesion breaks down (which happens a bit too often to 'disciplined' units) and men start to wander, they often stand around looking at each other. AI still gets confused and commits highly questionable acts of suicide. Had a group of AI Suebian Berserkers break ranks and charge my flank-screening Royal Parthian Cataphracts in the open field from quite a far distance while my force advanced on the Suebian line in a Custom Battle. They were almost completely annihilated in one charge.

Perhaps my biggest disappointment right now though came during a Custom Battle pitting Athens vs Epirus, where my advancing hoplites were rained on by flaming javelins from the Epirote peltasts. Flaming javelins people, you read it right. What's next CA, magic spells?!

So tired of nonsense...

One note, tested some of the hero units like Heroes of Sparta, Berserkers, etc. and found that they were nowhere near as OP as they were in RTW in terms of resistance to damage.

Also, I'm playing it on a 9600GT 1Gb with the latest drivers (modest card for sure) and the shadows even on 'High' are horrendous (V.High or Ultra wouldn't be feasible). If you rotate the camera around to the shaded side of a unit even with the Sun high up, the units turn into dark silhouettes with little to no detail. Wanted to point that out in case there are others out there waiting to play it on older hardware.

rickinator9
09-03-2013, 19:14
It seems the civilized bias is back again...

I(Macedonia) attacked the Triballi with 800 men while they were defending Navissos with 3600. I had with me the companion general, 4 hoplites, 2 slingers and 2 skirmishers. I lost my general early on, but still I was able to win with 300 left while they lost 3000. C'mon, this can't be my good generalship.

Lemur
09-03-2013, 20:45
I'm in the same boat, only I booted it up, looked at the civs available (and their perks/disabilities), and loaded a game as Rome.
It's only getting worse over here. Not only do I need to complete some serious work for the job, but then I promised to do a workout with wife and friend at the gym.

And now wife says she wants sexytime before she loses me to Rome II for the night. So ... grumble grumble grumble. It's gonna be late evening before I can even fire the dang game up.

Again I say: Grrrrrr.

-edit-

At this rate, I might as well wait for Patch 2 ...

Rhyfelwyr
09-03-2013, 21:25
Tried it a bit on my brothers PC. A few notes...

I love the look of barbarian units, but I think the faction rosters are not very varied.
There seems to be a visual bug in snowy battles, since the snowy layer isn't attached properly to the shield, meaning the shield pattern flickers through the snow whenever the shield is moved.
Battles seem to be over far too quickly. But maybe I am just to used to mods.
Why do several enemy armies appear when I attack a city, even when only one is shown as garrisoned?
Why are regular Hoplites better than Spartan Hoplites?

Barkhorn1x
09-03-2013, 21:43
OK - I am up and running now and after the d/l and verification I've had no issues. Playing around w/ settings as I get a lot of shimmer - and that is bad - AMD 6900 series here.

I've seen a lot of what Capt. Crunch has seen but not to a huge game breaking extent. I guess it doesn't bother me as much as some others. I can tell you that the Roman's are bloody supermen IMO.

Anyway, if I can get the shimmers sorted I will feel OK. Oh and that day one patch? I read over on TWC * that that may have been delayed as CA is promising another patch in a week. So either there was no day 1 patch or they are promising yet another.

Typical CA - over promise - under deliver.

(* BRF - Ha!!!)

andrewt
09-03-2013, 23:10
Just finished the prologue. Looked around the encyclopedia and it was a pain in the ass to navigate. Not to mention that scrolling and selecting is sluggish.

There are no more short, long and domination campaigns. Instead, there are three victory conditions which differ by faction.

I think I'm going to pick Carthage. The initial position is pretty rough, since I don't control any provinces. Carthage's 4 territories are all in different provinces. That's probably why it's rated as hard.

Wilbo
09-03-2013, 23:14
I've solely completed the prologue campaign so far. First impressions are excellent. Firstly, my experience wasn't adversely affected by bugs at all, though I did witness some minor glitches. Performance is excellent, much to my surprise - at least as good as Shogun 2.

The units and combat both feel really good - skirmishers are worthy of inclusion, as are the siege weapons, but the fun really starts when your Hastati hit home. BOOM!

Really, it feels a lot like Shogun 2, but with a different setting, more focus on open battle, and nicer combat.

9.5/10.

Sp4
09-03-2013, 23:15
The encyclopdia is a bit stupid to use but the game is fun so far. Just been playing lots of Coop campaign and except for the occasional OOS, it's good fun. Better than Shogun 2 with all the diversity and stuff.

CaptainCrunch
09-04-2013, 02:11
After playing through the Prologue, going 12 years into a campaign, and having run dozens and dozens of Custom Battles, here are some thoughts;

For me the battles have been particularly unsatisfying. As has been stated many times, the pace is absurd, they're over in minutes... but I expected this from the pre-release info. However it happens even when you setup really evenly matched battles. Even though they attempted to create a sense of mass and weight among the units, the fact that they just melt into one another during charges, and then often outright disappear from the scrum really nullifies any sense of 'solidness' among the soldiers. The collision detection is just extraordinarily weak at the moment... but not always! This is part of the inconsistency with the graphics/physics that I've experienced throughout the game so far.

If enough men encircle an opposing unit, that unit literally melts away into oblivion without a trace sometimes. I see soldiers standing inside one another, there can be 3 entire units standing in the same place all mashed up and you can't tell sometimes (especially if you have banners and selection rings disabled). When you mouse over them to see what the hell is going on, the game often gives you the wrong info about the unit ID.

Aesthetically, I feel the look of the game is several orders of magnitude inferior to what we were shown during the pre-release screens and vids. Even though I'm not playing with everything maxed, I am running just about everything on 'high' or 'very high', with unit details and textures set to 'ultra'. Shadows is where I had to take a significant hit where I had to set it to 'High' to get playable frames, but I'm not sure that's reason enough for me to not be able to see any unit details when I position the camera opposite the sun! Everybody on the battlefield turns into a night shade and it's really difficult to see what's going on or get any enjoyment out of the battle animations. I've also played a small scale battle (aren't they all? :yes:) with everything maxed out just to see the difference and I can't really notice one except in the sky and for the water.

Also, my experience with disabling missile trails has so far been to hardly see missiles at all until they just appear stuck in the targeted units. Of course, on better systems I'm sure the appearance of the game is most certainly improved... but by how much? Out of curiosity, I checked out the R2 forum over at TWCenter and saw quite a few threads containing endless complaints about the graphics from players with top-of-the-line machines. I'm no graphics monger believe me, but right now there is very little crispness or definition to the look of the game. You don't have to zoom out very much before you can no longer tell what unit you're looking at, unless it's one that's really distinctive. This might sound nuts to some, but right now in its current state, I much prefer the look of RTW with EB set to max than this. Yeah the models are inferior and there are so many less polys and so forth, but the look is defined and the feel is 'solid'.

The icing on the shitcake for me today though was to discover that not only are there things such as flaming javelins in the game, but also HAs with flaming arrows and skirmisher cav with flaming magic as well.

Really CA... what were you thinking?

I can honestly say that there hasn't been a single aspect of the game I've been able to get excited about... and I'm really trying to. I mean I knew I'd be disappointed about a number of things, and I'm not trying to give the impression that there is nothing I like about the game. However, I really didn't expect this level of dissatisfaction, or the indifference I'm feeling towards it. Damn shame...

BroskiDerpman
09-04-2013, 02:26
Thanks for letting me know.

Online battle footage from youtubers I know seem to consist of heavy infantry spam, heavy cav, and no missiles.

If you got missiles it's usually fodder.

Rushes will take out balanced builds much easier than using a balanced army to take out melee rushes.

Against Parthia seems like you'd just spam more infantry.

Barkhorn1x
09-04-2013, 02:53
I seconds Caps comments regarding:
- Flaming arrows/javelins on the battlefield = what the hell?
- Shadows are pants = best to just set them to Low and enjoy the FPS gain and the sun

I don't think the pathing is horrible, merely just often bad.

What I really don't appreciate is the horribly lagging campaign map. And sometimes it freezes outright when leveling up or checking scrolls.

These issues better be addressed.

Bottom line = CA released a sequel alright. Unfortunately for us it was to Empire Total War. :no:

Lemur
09-04-2013, 02:57
I skipped the prologue, finally played a few turns as Rome. Still trying to wrap my head around the new mechanics: What's with the family politics? I can't make head or tail of it. Not quite as underdeveloped as, say, the railroad transport menu in FotS, but I'm still puzzled by it. Replacing generals is really weird as well, apparently you can't swap 'em or move 'em between armies and navies ... I guess you're stuck with them? And the 4 random "replacements" you are allowed to look at?

Trade at least makes sense, and the diplomacy includes welcome feedback.

I dunno, going to have to dig in for a while and get a handle on the interface and systems.

-edit-

Obviously, I'm not doing any proper battles yet, just trying to get a sense of the campaign tools/interface. And flailing about a great deal.

johnhughthom
09-04-2013, 05:30
Still remember my greatest MTW moments as if they were yesterday, that campaign where I saved the Byzantine's butts countless times as Denmark, my epic crusade battle that came down to the Egyptian sultan and heir to the English throne as the last two men on the battlefield, my first taste of the Mongols as the leader of my little English crusader state became "The Butcher".

Nothing has come close with the recent titles.

johnhughthom
09-04-2013, 05:46
You can, there have been a few budget versions released, in the UK at least. Notoriously difficult to get running on modern machines though.

mlc82
09-04-2013, 06:51
Still remember my greatest MTW moments as if they were yesterday, that campaign where I saved the Byzantine's butts countless times as Denmark, my epic crusade battle that came down to the Egyptian sultan and heir to the English throne as the last two men on the battlefield, my first taste of the Mongols as the leader of my little English crusader state became "The Butcher".

Nothing has come close with the recent titles.


This is going OT, but I could not agree more, IMO Medieval 1 was the pinnacle of the series and none of the others have come anywhere near it. I know that the switch to the 3D map essentially broke the strategic AI, as it just doesn't know how to cope with all of the options/movement, but what amazes me most is that Medieval 1 (and Shogun 1 I think, I never really played it) had an honest to goodness, functional Battle AI. Not a brilliant one, but one that knew how to use units to their strengths, maintain and move armies in formation, run off to hills to defend- that sort of thing. A good player still won often but you actually had to TRY, and even battles where the AI had better units than yours could be really scary. I still play a lot of M1 to this day, so I don't think this is just me rambling nostalgically- my 1st time back to M1 (after several years of an nvidia card that wouldn't run it), the computer HAMMERED me in an even battle, simply because I went into it hardly paying attention and apparently had become soft from being used to the RTW and beyond AI performance.

It's as if they just removed any battle AI programming for Rome 1, and left it out in the subsequent sequels (thankfully modding helps with this to some degree).

- As a side note, on a win 7 pc with AMD card, Medieval 1 now runs just fine for me.

Monk
09-04-2013, 07:24
h-h-here i go


tl:dr version included.



The graphics glitches are a real headscratcher.

Turned up to extreme the game looks awful on my setup, and my PC is no busta. It's not a lag issue, it's a render issue, and I'm not sure what's up. Maybe video drivers need to be updated? Would have thought this kind of thing would be sorted for a game that got this much hype, and looked as good as it did in the press videos. For me it looks absolutely hideous.. I'm not far from hyperbole when I say the terrain set on extreme looks almost identical to the Original RTW for me. There is something seriously wrong with that and I'm saddened that the game is released looking as bad as it does, optimized as poorly as it is.


The technology tree is something I don't see nearly enough people talking about. There's nothing to it at all. You can blitz to Post-Marian reforms legionaries in 10 turns. 15 if you count building time.

What? I understand wanting people to have iconic legionaries but.. what? The transition feels completely pointless, and if anything, is a huge missed opportunity. It would have been much better to do an event like the legendary swordsman in the original STW (maybe a defeat causes Rome to rethink its military, etc) or just a plain event trigger like conquering a set number of provinces, giving the player the choice to reorganize the military to be more mobile/efficient ( Marius' Mules).



The new provincial system is needlessly punishing I think. Sacking and looting a city now effects all cities in that province, even if they are your home cities. Rome starts at war with the Etruscan League so naturally they are enemies of Rome. I kill my enemies. I defeat their armies. Crush their resistance and loot their cities.. but by looting their cities, my capital in Rome takes a happiness hit. Why? Rome should be celebrating! I just nailed the enemy commander to a cross and took his woman before his corpse was cold. I'm a hero! Why on earth would that upset Rome?

Provinces now share happiness, so what happens to one city affects the happiness of the region. Okay, i get that. It's an interesting mechanic and is probably meant to have two goals. One of which is getting armies to stop camping castles/cities which i hugely approve of, and the other to upset neighboring cities and make them more likely to attack you from your expansion. I take Sparta and loot it, causing nearby Athens to grow extremely worried and suffer happiness hits as war looms on their neighboring provinces. But the ability to cause "friendly fire" by natural expansion is rather puzzling. The problem comes in the fact that sacking and looting enemies of Rome is now causing riots in the streets of Rome. This is, unfortunately, not a logical balance system. When i first heard about this system I naturally assumed that friendly fire would not be possible but it looks like I was severely mistaken.



I really like the new recruiting system. It feels like a natural evolution of the way armies work and I wish we had this all the way back in medieval 2. The Army naming is really fun too - I sincerely enjoy any game that allows me to add some customization to my troops. I was worried when some outlets were reporting (most notably RPS) that the army leveling wasn't as fun as we were led to believe. That was correct, unfortunately. The bonuses you get are small and incremental to the point that, by the time you see any real benefit, you'll likely have to be closing in on the max level. The model of small bonuses over a long period of time is ultimately self-defeating. Since by the time i get anything good I've long forgotten about the customization.

It would have been much more fun to get honorary bonuses like legionary standards or relics of slain heroes that your men bring with them on the battle map (like in med 2, remember the giant crosses Crusaders could get?). Sure it would only add a small benefit, but the awesome factor is through the roof in my opinion.



This is becoming long winded, so let me sum up a bit..






TL:DR - AKA - "MONK I AIN'T GONNA READ ALL THAT :daisy:"


The game feels rushed as weird as that sounds. Half-baked ideas and unfinished graphics, AI and systems. Every criticism you've read leveled at the game is fair, and so too is most of the praise. As disappointed as I am there have been serious moments of fun in the time i've played the game! But if I had to put this on the scale of past releases, this is definitely a huge step back for CA. Shogun 2 was tremendous experience from start to finish, one I wrote numerous AARs for, but Rome 2? It just feels like it missed the mark.

It reached for the stars and fell short. In many ways, it's the same as Empire: Total War.


Shogun 2 is still the best unmodded experience you'll find in the 3D TW series imo. (for modded that goes to Medieval 2). If you're thinking about buying this and really want to try it some day, keep an eye on patch notes and wait for a sale. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that there's no fun to be had in Rome 2, because there most certainly is! But there's a lot of negatives.. some of which just don't make any logical sense as to how they got there. :confused:

Arjos
09-04-2013, 08:28
The game feels rushed as weird as that sounds. Half-baked ideas and unfinished graphics, AI and systems.

Saddest part is that their pandering banked. As far as they are concerned this is a success story. The demographics hardly care to learn :P
Will see if they'll put any effort in meaningful patches...


Shogun 2 is still the best unmodded experience you'll find in the 3D TW series imo.

Couldn't agree more: the legendary campaign is easily the best vanilla can offer in the whole TW serie. Only drawbacks for me are the limitation in time and space (obviously discounting RP depth, but hey that's what imagination is for :D)...

quadalpha
09-04-2013, 09:02
Okay, just did the prologue and about twenty turns of the Roman campaign (finished off the Etruscans, Syracuse, and Veneti).

Everything about the game seems weightless and floaty and inconsequential. Others have mentioned this in connection with battles (speed, units melting, etc.). For me, it extends to every part of the experience:

- The strangely sterile UI. The minimalistic black panels oddly incongruous with the archaic pottery icons, which are especially bad for buildings. Where previously, there was always some attempt to represent what the building looked like, now it feels like just clicking on icons to make numbers go up. Even if I understand intellectually the implications of what I'm building, it still feels intuitively like groping in the dark.

- The campaign map does not zoom out enough. You can barely see two provinces at once. There is of course the strategic view, but that is another layer of abstraction that doesn't connect viscerally with anything else. It's just another screen added on because the main system does not do the job.

- The tech tree. Someone mentioned getting to Marian reforms in 10 turns. A large part of the problem is how all the branches of the tech tree seem completely independent from each other. Again, systems which aren't interconnected but piled haphazardly one upon another, free to float past each other without interaction. In MTW, tech and economy were inextricably intertwined. FOTS does a decent job of this as well, with the clan development levels. Here, it's like there was no one sat down and thought about the game as a whole rather than as a checklist.

- The representation of armies. I'm talking very basically about the figures representing armies. They change from a dude to a horse to a ship without so much as a frame of animation between them. When Civ V did this (armies can simply embark without the need for transports), there was a very specific effect as the unit changed to a ship. Granted, it was a bit cheesy, but it showed awareness that the representation of a unit needs to have a certain weight. The sudden change from dude to horse and back again whenever you moved an army is the worst offender here. I know (I heard somewhere) that it's supposed to get rid of the silly fast-walking animation, but the effect now is not of an army but a few numbers being changed in the simulation. The way armies simply float past cities does not help.

- The lack of seasons. Everything feels the same from one turn to the next. In a game that represents history and the long passage of time, it's inexcusable to leave the player feeling like the only thing that changes is the turn counter ticking over.

Hm, is there more? I could complain about how early ranged units are basically useless. My Roman armies are mostly hastati, and slinger projectiles and javelins just bounce off them. Same with hoplites. There was a distinct moment, while I was drawing out hoplites with skirmishers, when I asked myself what the point was when the Roman heavy infantry (i.e., 90% of the units in the army) would just chew through everything anyway with no trouble at all.

I never managed to get very excited about this, for some reason, but I thought that would go away when I'm actually playing it. I guess it's still vaguely enjoyable, in an automatic kind of way, but it feels like the TW experience distilled to its most repetitive and inconsequential elements.

ReluctantSamurai
09-04-2013, 09:13
A good player still won often but you actually had to TRY, and even battles where the AI had better units than yours could be really scary. I still play a lot of M1 to this day, so I don't think this is just me rambling nostalgically- my 1st time back to M1 (after several years of an nvidia card that wouldn't run it), the computer HAMMERED me in an even battle, simply because I went into it hardly paying attention and apparently had become soft from being used to the RTW and beyond AI performance.

I still remember the times after the ETW fallout when many players were falling back to play earlier TW versions. Many of those coming back to play Shogun very quickly got their heads handed to them by the AI (My Lord! Your cowardly general has forsaken his honor and is running like whipped dog!).

Dimeola
09-04-2013, 09:21
...started my first campign as Athens and Sparta cut me off, so i`m making a hook around them to grab some land. Havent really played enough to have an opinion on specifics but it looks good, runs well on my machine and am looking forward to some multiplayer. One thing I wonder tho, they said it was very moddable but if they plan on dlc content will that interfere with modding? IE if we get some great mods will that cut into their dlc sales?

Sir Moody
09-04-2013, 09:50
I finished the prologue last night and I intend to start a campaign next week (when I have more time).

I sadly have the same impression as many here - it feels rushed and poorly planned.

A quick list of my problems (I will come up with a more detailed list once I start a proper campaign)

1) It runs really poorly on my system which is no slouch - it is fine on the campaign map but in battles it can REALLY lag at points and looks terrible - this may be a driver problem (wouldn't be the first time for nvidia...) but time will tell

2) Everything is too quick in the battles - fighting is over in seconds rather than minutes and unit cohesion is utterly non existent - I found my units finishing an engagement and then milling around in a clump rather than reforming into formation

3) cavalry is utterly devastating which makes NO sense - Roman cavalry was rubbish it should not be blitzing through formations with frontal charges... - I can understand the more cavalry heavy factions being this good but not Rome

4) The tech tree is just terrible - it seems to have no depth...

Things I did like

1) Naval battles are fun and Naval invasions work quite well

2) The New recruitment system works well and it feels right - this is how it should have always worked

Hopefully when I start a proper campaign and get to try out diplomacy it will get a bit more interesting but right now it isn't as good as Shogun...

Shaitan
09-04-2013, 10:39
Last TW I played was M2TW. ETW and S2TW is just not my scenario.


I played some turns into the prologue to get a feeling for the new TW.

I cannot save during the prologue. Why is this?

Campaign map runs well. We will see in the standard campaign. Cannot zoom enough out.

Graphics at the battle field look unfinished/unpolished. Flicker, jagged edges (despite activated AA) and low FPS. My system is well above recommended specs.

After 2 battles I already saw flaws in pathfinding, unit cohesion and battle speed.

I like the option to turn off selection circles and similar things (Is this new in R2TW?).


So I share the impression of others that the game feels unfinished and tuned to appeal to the masses. I feel the urge to fire up M2TW to see if it's only nostalgia or not what makes me thinking the old TW is/was better.

benjywa
09-04-2013, 10:59
Lets bring it back chaps
There is a lot of negativity going on and it's starting to read like a WOW forum!

I don't know how people are having lag issues - TURN DOWN THE GRAPHICS - I have a 2 year old i5 with what was a decent graphics card back then and it runs fine
Its not CA's fault your comp can't run high graphics games, they stated from the start, if you can run S2 you can run R2.

1 - Its beautiful - the battlefields feel so so much better, how LOS works and hiding units is way more realisic . Not worse... different
2 - Speed - I love the fact battles are faster, the units feel like they are walking/running and charging at the right pace. The old games always seemed slow, units were slow to move around. You haven't played a full campaign with so many more regions/ provinces and had to fight 2-3 battles per turn - not worse.. different
3 - The tech tree isn't worse either chaps - they are different for grecko romans and barbarians, You cant get and +happiness with Iceni until way into civic which I found to my detriment last night. S2 was 1 tech tree for all and most of it was junk like +1 attack - Not worse... different

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE play a full campaign before you start playing the negative cards

over 50 seasons into an Iceni campaign and I haven't even started to hit the continent yet! This feels a lot like S2 in many ways but 2 big differences so far
1 - It's absolutely HUGE in comparison
2 - the depth of units - there are a lot of variations in look and playstyle which is what I didn't like in S2 and missed from ME2

+ dont slate skirmishers - embrace them
1 - they scout now which is what you would have needed irl
2 - noone ever won a war with bows back then. The main 2 historical examples of bow pwnage are:
Longbows - mainly due to bodkin arrows and the french charging armoured knights up hills against dug in armour piecring bowmen - it was a new tech, machine guns did this in WW1
Mongols - this was down to a number of things, China and japan used to send out champions for 1v1 fighting as a big part of war, the mongols just shot them!

If you OP ranged DPS you trivialise everything else.

My impressions of skirmishers and iceni went
1 - these suck - they couldn't kill cattle
2 - ahh scouting is good they will stop me falling into traps, expensive but necessary cannon fodder
3 - holy cow when attacking you can break up formations with them and make them come to you, if they dont their infantry slowly die and rout
4 - omg if I tie up infantry they will sit on the flanks and slowly chew through units - way better to have 1 infantry holding a unit and skirmishers hitting them than 2 infantry units - it stops them getting in each others way and bogging down

Now I am up to 33% skirmisher - early days and I am sure it will change but I am liking them

Shaitan
09-04-2013, 11:26
I don't know how people are having lag issues - TURN DOWN THE GRAPHICS - I have a 2 year old i5 with what was a decent graphics card back then and it runs fine
Its not CA's fault your comp can't run high graphics games, they stated from the start, if you can run S2 you can run R2.


Some comments to that.

There are people can run S2TW just fine but R2TW lags considerably.
My PC is above recommended specs and the experience is not smooth. Also it will not get considerably better if I turn down the graphics. CA advertised it as very scalable. At the moment it's not.
The "Enhanced for Intel Core" looks like "runs bad on AMD".

At the end I'm pretty sure (read 'hope') the performance issues will be adressed via patch or new graphic drivers.

Sir Moody
09-04-2013, 11:26
Lets bring it back chaps
There is a lot of negativity going on and it's starting to read like a WOW forum!

I don't know how people are having lag issues - TURN DOWN THE GRAPHICS - I have a 2 year old i5 with what was a decent graphics card back then and it runs fine
Its not CA's fault your comp can't run high graphics games, they stated from the start, if you can run S2 you can run R2.

I have a 6 month old I7 and a GTX 680 - the game detects I should be playing at extreme but the game looks terrible and runs terrible - while it may not effect you there IS something wrong with the graphics - as I said it could be a driver issue and thus not CA's fault but the problem is there

The Blind King of Bohemia
09-04-2013, 11:26
The graphical glitches are very weird and slightly irritating. When I started the prologue battle I was a gasp at how terrible it all looked (I surely can't be the only one?)

I've been playing as Macedon and to be fair I'm enjoying parts of the campaign. Had some decent battles vs the Thracian tribe directly above right (not sure of the name) but some of the defending sieges I'm finding very easy even on legendary. The AI just mass themselves at the door with infantry throwing incendiaries at the gate, pour in and I deal with them with very little men. Its happened twice now with the Thracian lot and an Iberian tribe when I was playing as Carthage.

Also I think the power of Spartan needs to be altered slightly in a patch as they seem to be running riot especially against the Ptolemies.

I like to see my army march - I'm not to enamored with the new horse galloping effect.

benjywa
09-04-2013, 11:41
Ohnoes - I am so sorry - I had no idea

lagy graphics you can't fix will just ruin the whole experience... if you have been as excited about this as I havebeen I would be properly ****** off

Spartans - I started a campaign with them just to have a look at the units... English start with awful units (essentially peasant infantry and ranged, you need a few turns of teching just to get something that does any damage) and the only decent stuff is merc and x4 the upkeep, the spartans start with a bunch of pimping hoplites that would roll over most things

Spoonska
09-04-2013, 13:51
Played it for 16 1/2 hours yesterday, and most people here do a good job of voicing my frustrations and likes. So I'll keep it short and simple : Good not great, needs some TLC and it will get there.

Barkhorn1x
09-04-2013, 14:42
Lets bring it back chaps

I don't know how people are having lag issues - TURN DOWN THE GRAPHICS - I have a 2 year old i5 with what was a decent graphics card back then and it runs fine
Its not CA's fault your comp can't run high graphics games, they stated from the start, if you can run S2 you can run R2.


My battles run smooth as silk - but I get lag on the Camp Map during certain actions. So that's not my PC but poorly optimized code.

Barkhorn1x
09-04-2013, 14:42
Double post - deleted.

Barkhorn1x
09-04-2013, 14:45
I have a 6 month old I7 and a GTX 680 - the game detects I should be playing at extreme but the game looks terrible and runs terrible - while it may not effect you there IS something wrong with the graphics - as I said it could be a driver issue and thus not CA's fault but the problem is there

Officially CA has stated that Extreme is FUBARed - run on Ultra - it's much better.

Sir Moody
09-04-2013, 14:46
Officially CA has stated that Extreme is FUBARed - run on Ultra - it's much better.

I will try it when I get home and report back

Kagemusha
09-04-2013, 15:04
Based on few of the first impressions.Maybe better wait until some time next year before getting this one.

rvg
09-04-2013, 16:36
Judging by this thread, Rome 2 might become a decent game to buy on sale about a year from now.

B-Wing
09-04-2013, 18:03
Looked around the encyclopedia and it was a pain in the ass to navigate. Not to mention that scrolling and selecting is sluggish.

Whole-heartedly agree. I don't understand how they went backwards from Shogun 2's encyclopedia, which had its faults but was extremely helpful. And it actually had clickable links! There's really no point in ever opening the encyclopedia in Rome 2; it's borderline useless.

Barkhorn1x
09-04-2013, 18:11
Whole-heartedly agree. I don't understand how they went backwards from Shogun 2's encyclopedia, which had its faults but was extremely helpful. And it actually had clickable links! There's really no point in ever opening the encyclopedia in Rome 2; it's borderline useless.

I agree as well.

Sir Moody
09-04-2013, 18:37
I will try it when I get home and report back

Ultra does indeed run better but it still looks terrible... I am going to try a few more things...

Sir Moody
09-04-2013, 18:52
Ultra does indeed run better but it still looks terrible... I am going to try a few more things...

Ok running the new Nvidia Experience Optimisation for it has MASSIVELY improved my fps and it looks "better" (though still not great)

With Extreme I was getting ~20fps during the fighting at the end of the benchmark
With Ultra that increased to ~40fps
With the Nvidia Optimisations (which seem to be a mix of Ultra and High) I get ~60 with the lowest drop being 51 briefly

this would suggest there is something massively wrong with the high end graphics settings as my system is no slouch and usually the NVidia Experience profiles max my settings...

BroskiDerpman
09-04-2013, 19:17
Hmmm game seems ready for some sort of sale later like that Amazon one for Shogun 2 where it sold from 7.49 USD to 2.49 USD with all dlc halved in price.

:D. Win.

Jacque Schtrapp
09-04-2013, 19:33
Obviously there is a lot of work left to do in order to get the game up to the high standards we all have. I'll just share some of the more odd things I've seen so far in my Roman Normal campaign 150ish turns in:

Carthage lost Alalia to the Italian Rebels, then blockaded their port for 100+ turns. If someone else blockades a port, you apparently cannot siege the associated city and capture it.... even when you ally with the blockading faction (Carthage allied with Rome, I know, I know). Even after Carthage was eliminated on land, there was still that lonely Carthaginian fleet dedicated to blockading those dastardly Italian Rebels.

Sparta hates the Delmatae. Hates. In fact, Sparta hates them so much, they've sent the worlds first 20 stack against the Delmatae which has sat beside their city for nearly 100 turns. Just to be certain they had the most lopsided victory in history, Sparta sent three full fleets as reinforcements. Don't bother with silly things like a blockade. I like to think their daily conversations went like this: "Good night, Delmatae. Good work. Sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning." ~ Sparta.

Instead of a flood of single spear unit armies marching everywhere, we now have a flood of armies compromised of just a general. It seems every faction, including the single province factions, recruit the maximum number of generals available at all times, even if they have no units to go along with the general. The they march those general units everywhere.

Where are the large armies at? I've begun auto-resolving battles because I've only had two encounters in 150ish turns where the enemy had enough units that I didn't have a 90% + chance of winning through auto-resolve. Most armies are 10 units or less, often of poor quality (especially barbarians).

I'm sure it is explained somewhere, but what is with clouds swirling around fleet, armies that appear shrouded in green or red mist, and cities that have a hammer over them when there is nothing to build, upgrade, or repair?

Unless there is some trick I haven't figured out yet, enjoy the never ending hunt for the general, admiral, spy, champion, diplomat, whatever that just leveled up and spawned the "Are you sure you want to end turn without promoting, backslapping, huzzah-ing <hard to find idiot's name here>?"

In the early game, you will struggle with food and money. In the late game, you will struggle with happiness. And it won't matter. Every region of my empire is at or near max unhappiness, despite building and researching every positive order tech/building/unit in the game. I get 1-2 rebellions or slave revolts every turn. Rebellions usually consist of 5 or so weak units that are simply annihilated by whoever is close at hand. And I literally mean whoever. All of my allies and factions with whom I've agreed to military access have sent their troops to the areas where I am having rebellions. In fact, even Sparta, will trespass onto my territory, defeat a rebel army, and re-embark leaving me to try and figure out why I'm getting a trespass message about a Spartan fleet well outside my territorial waters (I caught them and another faction actually trespassing to get at the rebels a few turns later). The AI factions evidently H A T E rebels with a passion.

I do not understand the political functions at all. In the beginning, I had to deal with numerous intrigues and plots. Lately... nothing.... for over 50 turns. At present, my sole family member has enough odd traits to reduce his gravitas to zero and I still have a 73% approval rating. Other factions with leaders who have gravitas in the 20s have dropped from the teens to single digit approval. I have 5 armies and six fleets, only one of which has the family scion and dunce leading it and yet my popularity soars. Real life politicians everywhere will be closely monitoring Rome II TW in order to find out how to accomplish this feat.

The diplomacy feature is wonderfully beefed up. You can form real, that's right, R E A L alliances and your massive behemoth of an empire will not get stabbed in the back 2 turns later by single province faction XXXXii. It still has it's quirks though. A dozen turns after meeting the powerful Seleucids, they tried to sell themselves to me as a client state. I refused and they tried again a few turns later. I've ended more than a few wars, where I was assisting an ally, by taking my ally's enemy on as a client state as part of the peace agreement. Big mistake. That simply begins the barrage of both the ally and client state asking me every couple of turns when I will pull my head out of the great beyond and assist them in making sweet sweet war upon their former foe. You will also get oodles of trade offers from factions on the far side of the world who would love to trade with you if only you honor them with 50% of your net worth (non-negotiable). Then there are the tribes on the Baltic Sea that want you to buy them as client states, or later in the game, try to give themselves to you for free as client states.

Lastly, major factions get murdered far too easily. Egypt died in the first 20 turns. Carthage, destroyed. Seleucids, annihilated despite having a dozen satrapies still in existence. Suebi, done for. All have re-emerged, but so far done nothing and usually get wiped out again. I can attest to that personally, Carthage is like a cockroach that you keep having to kill over and over again. The thing is, they lost to a handful of Iberian factions, most of which never had more than a couple of provinces.

Final Grade = Incomplete. Need improvement.

Veho Nex
09-04-2013, 19:45
My personal rundown goes like this;

The good:
-A lot of people are complaining about compatibility but in my own experience the only lag I get is in battles with 10,000 men or when I'm streaming on vh graphics or higher.
-I enjoy the look and atmosphere of battles. Ive had more interesting fights against the AI in this in hard than on legendary and I think I might stick with that.
-My favorite part of the game at this moment are the combined naval land battles. The management can get a bit much when both fights are going at the same time and naval battles are a bit wonky but the tactical level it brings to the table more than makes up for it.
-The campaign AI has actually caught me by surprise a few times when it moved a large stack by my armies to besiege one of my vulnerable cities or attack me from behind.
-The campaign map is massive. When i first started I was shocked when I first moved the camera to the edge of the map. You can go pretty far east and north which would allow for some crazy empires
The Bad:
-The research trees are way to small for the scale and scope of the game. When I go from hastati to first cohorts by turn 20 I feel like I'm teching faster than anyone can keep up. With the ability to just keep researching into higher tiers without having any requirements allows for one to max out the military by turn 50 and work on economy after that.
-Spartans are all but unkillable. I understand they are a warrior elite, but, when a unit of war elephants hits them from behind while they are being worked over from the front by Macedonian pikes and they still come out on top with minimal losses it just makes you go batty.
-Some factions dont have enough unit diversity while others, e.g Rome/Carthage, have way too many. I hate to say it but Rome's 60 different auxiliary units get kinda old fast.
-Naval battles are odd. Maybe I just dont understand how they work or ramming doesnt do as much as it should. Either way they are weird.

The Ugly:
-Factions are missing units that they should be able to make. Athens, despite showing in the in-game wiki, has no ability to make low level melee ships. Their Assault Diremes - Militia Hoplites don't exist in any area except for the wiki.
-The battles are a blob of units looking at each other with 1 or 2 of 160 attacking at once. I don't understand how the units die so quick when so few on either side attack.
-Turns take too long to complete.

All in all I'm enjoying the game but I'm definitely waiting for a patch or two before I will recommend it.

quadalpha
09-04-2013, 21:37
I'm sure it is explained somewhere, but what is with clouds swirling around fleet, armies that appear shrouded in green or red mist, and cities that have a hammer over them when there is nothing to build, upgrade, or repair?

Unless there is some trick I haven't figured out yet, enjoy the never ending hunt for the general, admiral, spy, champion, diplomat, whatever that just leveled up and spawned the "Are you sure you want to end turn without promoting, backslapping, huzzah-ing <hard to find idiot's name here>?"

- I think the city with the hammer also appears when you can expand a city, which doesn't cost anything except population (or whatever that number that fills up with food is supposed to represent). Does that explain what you're seeing?

- All your generals should be visible in the politics screen and it'll tell you their locations too. And I think there's an agent map view somewhere.

BroskiDerpman
09-04-2013, 22:04
I got to thank you guys for stating your thoughts on the game. Now I know (confirmed) Rome 2 if bought is either when it hits gold edition or a dirt cheap sale.


Metacritic seems to be on rage mode as so far it dropped from 6.3 to a 5.0 quite fast! Wow!

Liberator
09-04-2013, 22:49
- The campaign map does not zoom out enough. You can barely see two provinces at once. There is of course the strategic view, but that is another layer of abstraction that doesn't connect viscerally with anything else. It's just another screen added on because the main system does not do the job.


That was my first impression. can't...zoom...out...
Really stupid, after a day of hard choices and bloody battles, it was a great feeling to zoom out and look at your realm from a distance. Seems like these days are gone.

CaptainCrunch
09-05-2013, 01:15
@ Jacque Schtrapp - LMAO!! Great review man, my favorite so far :thumbsup:


... Spartans are all but unkillable. I understand they are a warrior elite, but, when a unit of war elephants hits them from behind while they are being worked over from the front by Macedonian pikes and they still come out on top with minimal losses it just makes you go batty...

Were these the standard ones or the Heroes of Sparta? Were they leveled up at all? Just curious, so far I've found them to be positively average along with some of the other heroic units. Then again inconsistency has been the name of this game so far for me. Anyway, I hope all the play balancing and magic weapons stuff will get addressed by the first realism mod.

Hooahguy
09-05-2013, 01:32
Right now my main complaint is a dumb AI (though campaign AI seems to be at least half competent- enemy noticed a giant hole in my defenses and struck my capital. Just barely saved it) and the UI, at least for battles. I mean by the Gods, I cant have the unit section open and see whats going on at the same time! Its way too large! At least make it scalable.

Graphics seem to be fine for me, no problems.

BroskiDerpman
09-05-2013, 01:48
Seems like Seleucids are mostly done. Seleucids have been unlocked!

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?617837-MOD-Playable-Seleucid-Faction

Though other factions are locked causing errors if you enable them. CA use to during Shogun 2 would say its unintentional but it's all planned. (True, was reading old threads)

Let the dlcs roll baby!

CaptainCrunch
09-05-2013, 02:34
Seems like Seleucids are mostly done. Seleucids have been unlocked!

I tried it out of curiosity. They aren't available in Custom Battles, but it does indeed unlock them for a campaign. Not working quite right though, at least for me. Had my first crash on the strat map while having a look at the starting settlements.

BroskiDerpman
09-05-2013, 03:00
Seems like you're doing something wrong like some other people on the thread posted.

I don't have Rome 2 luckily so I don't know.

The Stranger
09-05-2013, 04:07
first impressions: playing as julia (yes yes original i know) on legendary

+++
New auto resolve is nice.
no lag when on faster speed
diplomacy is clear at least.

---
combat speed way too fast (so cant really say how good the ai is since battles are meatgrinders in which thousands die within minutes)
dont like the ui/interface
teching goes way too fast, and not that many techs (i have legionares at 260 bc...)
havent seen much of the internal politics

quadalpha
09-05-2013, 08:41
Update: Played a bit more (Rome, ~60 turns in) and it's getting ... quite compelling. I still agree with the individual points of my previous criticisms, but somehow they seem less important now that major players and rivalries are emerging to give the game a narrative shape. I do remember now a few reviews mentioning the slow early game, but I must have tuned it out because the early game in previous TW games has usually been the most interesting for me (causing havok in the HRE as Poland in MTW, anyone?). As Rome in the mid-game, there are threats and opportunities in every direction to be balanced. You are generally more powerful than each rival individually, but you can't afford to be caught with your pants down. Quite enjoying it now.

CaptainCrunch
09-05-2013, 11:17
...Quite enjoying it now.

I'm with you man. About half as far into the campaign as you with Epirus, and I'm having quite a bit of fun playing despite the various issues. The politics among the Hellenes on the Strat Map are vicious, I gotta watch my back at every turn :rtwyes:

Just wish they were as effective on the battlefield...

The Blind King of Bohemia
09-05-2013, 12:54
Prometheus makes loads of good points here, the majority I agree with. The capture points on the battlefield is just completely stupid, I cannot fathom why they decided to do this.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?618358-The-Features-that-we-need-to-be-changed-NOW!!!

The Stranger
09-05-2013, 13:09
ya i thought they said it would only be in certain type of battles:S and not normal ones. whether u have a normal capture point, or a baggage train... what does it matter.

Jarmam
09-05-2013, 15:33
All right, first impressions are in after 12 or so hours of playing as Rome Julia on Legendary. I've tried to stick to main points, but it ended up unbearably long anyway. My apologies, but I had high hopes and Im frustrated at some of the mistakes made as they feel like steps backwards from both Shogun 2 and the original Rome.

The good:
As someone who has few or no graphical glitches or crashes, let me quickly praise the graphics and the visual design. Hastati, for instance, are a perfect mixture of Hollywood and history, and this balance seems consistent on most units. I really, really like the visual design. The campaign map is also beautiful.

I love the province system. A reviewer scorned it for having counter-intuitive public order, which I simply do not understand since each positive and negative effect is clearly marked out for you, and there aren't that many settlements that can contribute those 8 squalor. Given that the campaign map is absolutely huge, I will say that provinces and the division of capital cities and smaller towns is my favourite strategic change. Also the way you can indirectly attack enemies culturally or stability-wise through the province system is great. I also love that fighting a battle in a province makes it unstable even for "your" cities - people (aka those that revolt) don't like instability and rampaging armies.

Food as a resource is rebalanced and its effectiveness is capped off. Thank you so much for this. Yes, YOU! As a follow-up to this, the economy flows much more intuitively and feels fairly solid even after 150 or so turns.

The unrest system is quite enjoyable. Better than Shogun 2? More like "equally functional, while different".

Edicts are a nice way to keep some level of macromanagement without making it overly tedious.

The way armies/legions are mustered and can rank up fits both the game and the era. Its not huge, but it breaks nothing and adds something.

The various "stances" for agents and armies is neat. I especially like the harrassment option of armies/fleets (raids) and champions (harrass). Much, much more enjoyable way of dealing minor damage than the stupid 50-vs-9001-siege-that-somehow-blocks-the-entire-city-from-doing-anything-for-the-turn that previous titles almost relied on as skirmishing went (outside of agents).

Nice, smooth, intuitive progression of max number of agents, armies and edicts.

Customizable general units (aka do you want your general on a horse or in a triarii unit?).


The bad
This is the stuff that bothers me, but is easily fixable via patches or mods, or a matter of me learning the game
Those effing capture points. What the hell? There is a hill right there that I want to set up camp at - but I can't, because the game just decided where I am to defend. I like the idea - to counter redline corner camping - but the execution of said idea is bafflingly stupid and endlessly annoying. It works in siege battles, but not in open battles, at least not in its current form. Speaking of siege battles... why does the AI have to want to zergrush a capture points regardless of how much it will miserably lose the fight for them?

While the unrest system is fine, the revolt system is not. So the slaves rebel, a whopping 5 units of crappy t1 infantry. Oh no, better hope they dont... suicide... on my retainers... and get enslaved again?
But wait, you say... if unhappiness ensues, the AI will not attack you, but wait for the revolt to be strengthened (a great system). Yes! Brilliant! Except that half the original stack is dead from attrition. Make - rebels - in - their - own - province - immune, or this otherwise excellent idea is completely wasted.

The game is hopelessly, hilariously counter-intuitive. It is so difficult to understand why some things happen. What is this family system of which you speak? Took me forever to even remotely understand. I had no idea if units got the bonus from all the temples in a province, or from the one in the settlement that the Barracks is it, or what - and I couldn't look it up anywhere! The Encyclopeadia is awful compared to Shogun 2's. No links, annoying interface, can't even run it out of game and I could go on. What does "run amok" do, exactly? Well, go and test it, because we, the developers, sure as hell aren't gonna tell ya! No sir, no nice, clean instruction in the various unit skills. Food bonuses are capped? Well, congratz for figuring it out. What, we should have a section about that under "Food" somewhere? Buddy... please.

Does the reseach that gives +50% missiles to units apply to Principles? Who knows! Boy, wouldn't you like a list of affected units! Well, you can't have one! Now research some more.

Okay, I did and now I have "modern" Legions. But its 250 BC. Okay then. Game was good.
Research is tiered poorly (aka not integrated cross-tech like Shogun 2 had it), there is too little of it, and reaching the end of a tier is way too fast.

... which all leads to:
The game feels so unpolished. Shogun 2 had problems, sure, but it felt clean and ready and polished to a mirror shine at release compared to Rome 2. I don't even suffer from all the glitches and crashes and I still feel like this is the case.

Lethality of units. I am fine with ranged units being less effective than in Shogun 2. I personally like having strong archers in a Total War game, but it fits Shogun 2 perfectly - Rome not so much. However, melee units kill eachother absurdly quickly. At first I actually thought my Hastati died from my Velite attack through friendly fire, but no. Turns out an Italian Spearman is batshit crazy effective at killing. Too bad they're all dead, Hastati are even better at it.

No seasons! Yes, I get why the game needs to skip ahead a year per turn, due to the setting. Screw the setting! Shogun 2 nailed it - the map changed visually, which would fit Rome 2 wonderfully, and more importantly attrition was something you could plan for and around and it added something to the strategy of invasions. No longer the case. Also since the map hardly changes ever, the flow of time isn't really felt - snow was a great way of adding a feel of "flow" and I am surprised at just how much I miss it.

And finally a personal gripe of mine: While the visual design is fantastic, the audio design is not. VA first. Now I actually like most of the voice work in Rome 2. But a mixture of having to say the Latin names "correctly in English" (which is stupid for obvious reasons) and a general laying lowness compared to Rome 1 just makes things less... engaging? Immersive? Epic? Im not sure. An example: I dont care how you say Triarii in correct Latin. What I liked in Rome 1 was that they sounded like they meant business. Speak English and make me believe that you believe in victory! For Rome! (Yes, I can live without the charge trumpet, but that battlecry is sorely missing).
Same with the music. Its so lowkey! Maybe they were trying to not come off as trying too hard? But it sounds like ambience! If you dislike the music, turn it off! Thats fine. But everything feels so much less... epic... without Divinitus (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irXQid4peS0) in the campaign map, and by Jupiter do I miss the gems from the battle maps:
Soldier's Chant (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YeulwYhQoU)
Journey to Rome (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDx089iLPlI)
Mobilize (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aZ4ogKXrhw)
Shed out that money, hire Jeff van Dyck or Jesper Kyd or Michael McCann and give me epicness.


The ugly
This is the stuff that bothers me and is conceptually designed into the game, making it potentially difficult to fix
Remember how they made a harrass option for armies and agents? To avoid the 50-vs-9001 siege stupidity? Guess what still works! Goddammit, if someone attacks me I dont have to wait for my turn to react. If someone sieges my city, let me respond instantly. Having to chase 20 horseguys that keep sieging Rome and her 1500 garrison retainers, thus permanently shutting down the city, is stupid and horrible and should never have gone through testing.

The map is too big. Because it makes loadtimes unbearably long. Even if you dont show AI turns it takes forever. The map from Rome 1 felt plenty epic without suffocating under its own weight of trying-to-epicness too... epically. They should have put this effort into the sound design instead.

While the "stance" idea is brilliant on paper it is tedious as hell. If I wanted a Spy Network or Improved Taxation in Shogun 2, I just put my agent in a town until I didnt want the agent to do it anymore. Now I get that the new system of "stancing" in the province is technically more flexible, but the agents go in and out of their ordered projects like they're deliberately trying to piss me off - and again, I have absolutely zero idea why. Talk to me, game! What is it you want me to do?!

The AI (yes, still). No noticable improvement from Shogun 2. In fact, the AI is more predictable now, especially in siege assaults. All I ask is that Macedon advances his pike phalanx formation with 1 cavalry unit on each flank on my 8 Hastati 2 Triarii (one on each flank) and then, seconds before we meet, suddenly move his left cavalry to the right so that I have to react in any way at all to the "plan" of the AI, which atm seems to be "set up vanilla formation, then react to player. Do nothing unexpected".

Maybe this can be modded, but the way the Legionnaires throw their pilea... while it fits the fast flow of combat, it looks ridiculous. Also why can't I micro my Legions' usage of pilae anymore (no fire-at-will-option...what?)

In fact... why is unit control so bloody difficult now? It was so good in Shogun 2. Now I had to effing set up hotkeys just for using unit abilities! Really?!
Why is the ability bar positioned so poorly? Why next to group controls and stuff, don't cluster important information next to similar looking buttons with no value!
Why can't I make the unit flags of selected units bounce so I can clearly and quickly see what I have selected? Why can't I show ranged units' range without having to mouse over them?
Why do all the unit cards look so similarly? Yes, I get the art choice, it looks ancient-like! Great!... but its annoying for the player and I am more important than a cutesy art throwback.
Why do skirmishers still not skirmish. I have a perfectly even line of skirmishers on skirmish. A perfectly even line of Hoplite Militia move towards them. They throw some javelins, 4 of them run back, 1 of them run straight into the line of Hoplites... I now turn off skirmish and do it manually because I have lost too many battles early on due to this AI screwup, which was also present in every TW title ever.

Ships! My biggest problem with Shogun 2 was that even with a solid effort, ship combat sucked. Now in Rome 2, while the landing-of-units-thing works fine and adds a lot to (otherwise kind of boring) siege battles, ship-on-ship action is exactly as un-sexy as it sounds. Ramming is really unintuitive and the ships still refuse to obey the simplest of orders. Maybe I just need to learn it properly? But I gave up ages ago and Im working off of autoresolves.


If only writing a paper for college was half as easy! Well, off to see if that Seleucid faction unlock fix actually works. Here's to a good patch tomorrow!

Azi Tohak
09-05-2013, 19:06
I enjoy it even if too much isn't clear, even after spending WAY too much time yesterday playing it.

I don't much like the ship combat, but I knew there would be issues there.

Anyway, the game's not a dumpster fire but it's nowhere near as good as Shogun 2 is now.

Azi

CaptainCrunch
09-05-2013, 19:15
... Speaking of siege battles... why does the AI have to want to zergrush a capture points regardless of how much it will miserably lose the fight for them? ...

This definitely needs to be addressed. It's insane. In the early game, my settlement at Larissa was attacked by a force of Royal Spartans (6 units) when I moved my standing army north and I was left to defend it with a few units of militia & citizen hops and a couple of slingers and your ubiquitous mobs. The difference in force power was absurd, I should've been steamrolled, but the AI had such an insane mad-on for the capture points it just tried to bullrush its units to them completely indifferent to the fact that they were being slaughtered wholesale while doing so. They routed in no time, the battle was over in less than 30 seconds after contact.

Unfortunately just one example of a regular occurrence...

Tellos Athenaios
09-05-2013, 19:58
First impressions:


The UI is, frankly, appalling. From a bunch of small icons on the left at the main "menu", to useless stats obscuring the view of a battle, to cut scenes which don't work if you previously selected a unit, to incomprehensible logic behind placement of buttons, to unit cards which look pretty (if partially anachronistic) but also wholly indistinct. (The difference between pikeman 1 and pikeman 2 could be in whether one has a beard, or which way the head is turned.) At least settings and quitting to windows are now more easily accessible.
Can't zoom enough (either in or out).
Tab thingy for the battlefield is not nearly as useful as the radar screen was in battles (can't really access it at a glance), though can see how it may prove more useful than the minimap in campaigns.
The settlements are pretty.
AI is like a cat near catnip once you show them your general. Rather exploitable.
AI is terrible at attacking, in its mind an attack is a mad rush to the other side (running all the way) with less sense than a WWI Blackadder general. Cavalry is meant to smash headlong in heavy infantry in a frontal charge.
AI is not particularly inspired when defending, though, if it has the numbers it will win Cannae style by default from other AI due to the mad-rush syndrome.
Skirmishers don't skirmish, or do a particularly poor job of it -- even more so than in RTW.
Unit stats make no sense, or rather they do make sense but only in a rock-paper-scissors style thing with cavalry as thermo-nuclear-trumps-all option. Differences between units of the same class are minimal, there's only "more and less powerful in the typical role", there's little chance of putting units from one class to effective use in an alternative role.
The units are interchangeable pieces, with different skins. Some of which are pretty, some of which are distinctly uninspiring. Standout favourite: the Celtic hairdos. Standout disappointment: the cataphracts with lot's of dark plastic and tape for armour instead of metal. To be fair, they have a decent moustache. Also, game still suffers from faction colours as a "uniform" feature with skins, hence overly saturated colours in tunics & other clothing.
If the AI were any good, assaulting well developed cities would be a nightmare. So points for that.

BroskiDerpman
09-05-2013, 20:25
Angry Joe's Rome 2 videos are hilarious, especially the boat that clips through a whole city to ram another ship! XD

@Tellos

Cav got nerfed so bad to be weaker than EB's cav.

Rear charge causes 1 casualty to heavy infantry and makes the cavalry lose many horses and rout.

Source: Online play from Youtubers.

Tellos Athenaios
09-05-2013, 22:35
Angry Joe's Rome 2 videos are hilarious, especially the boat that clips through a whole city to ram another ship! XD

@Tellos

Cav got nerfed so bad to be weaker than EB's cav.

Dunno. I had equites getting their pathfinding mixed up in a city and plow right through a bunch of Samnite "noble infantry". So that was a bit of a déjà vu.

sassbarman
09-05-2013, 22:37
My 2 cents and let me qualify this by sayin' that I don't have the game yet, but it seems to me after reading all the post's here and on TWC that CA/Sega are spending more and more money on PR rather than using their resources to release a finished product. It's also quite apparent that the truly creative and thoughtful staff a CA are being drown out be those who think gimmicky unit ability buttons, ground shaking camera's effects, 2 minute battles, battle field capture zones and "flaming everything" are cool additions to the game.

It's to bad.

Sp4
09-05-2013, 22:39
Angry Joe's Rome 2 videos are hilarious, especially the boat that clips through a whole city to ram another ship! XD

@Tellos

Cav got nerfed so bad to be weaker than EB's cav.

Rear charge causes 1 casualty to heavy infantry and makes the cavalry lose many horses and rout.

Source: Online play from Youtubers.

I've seen ships behave weirdly as well. In a coop campaign, one of them clipped from one side of the map, through the beach, not over the beach, it sort of land-sub-marined around and ended up on the other side of the map, where it then unloaded its troops XD

ReluctantSamurai
09-06-2013, 05:08
The "capture-the-flag" mentality on open battlefields is a major bummer, for me. Makes a bit of sense in cities, but not in the field. My style of play has me (usually) fighting with vastly inferior numbers but much better quality. To do so requires freedom to maneuver. To be tied to 'defending the flag' sucks big-time:furious3:

The single season without the visual campaign-map change-of-season is also a major bummer. Even without having played I can already say this would greatly reduce the immersion factor. Shogun 1, with its' four seasons (and corresponding music) was the pinnacle AFAIAC....you actually had to plan your recruitment and construction so you didn't run out of money before the next harvest...and god help you if you had a string of bad ones.....

Battle speed is another downer. It seems that epic battles that take one to two hours to complete are a thing of the past and not likely to ever return.

I've always hated the way family traits were implemented in RTW, and it seems as if I will not be liking the new system either.:no:

I'm sure that the graphical and optimization issues will be dealt with in subsequent patches. I have AMD/ATI all across the board, so I hope compatibility with these is improved.

Legionnaires by 250BC?? Yikes! Talk about a poorly designed tech tree.....:creep:

My hat is off to those of you willing to plunk down your hard-earned cash for, essentially, a beta-version game. I will be waiting until the graphics-issues and bug-squashing patches come out.

Papewaio
09-06-2013, 05:29
You start with legionaires ... admirals are a unit of 120 legionaires.

ReluctantSamurai
09-06-2013, 05:34
You start with legionaires

That makes no sense, to me:shrug:

CaptainCrunch
09-06-2013, 08:19
The "capture-the-flag" mentality on open battlefields is a major bummer, for me. Makes a bit of sense in cities, but not in the field. My style of play has me (usually) fighting with vastly inferior numbers but much better quality. To do so requires freedom to maneuver. To be tied to 'defending the flag' sucks big-time:furious3:

You just said it all right there. Without a doubt the most absurdly questionable gameplay decision CA made this time around, as far as I'm concerned (and a wholllle shitload of others gauging by the TWC forums). Capture points actually serve no purpose in a pitched battle setting, other than to completely strip the player of any tactical deployment choices before the battle. Honestly, this feature is close to game breaking at times, it needs to be removed post haste.

I've had no less than 20 heroic victories snatched away from me cuz some errant unit that spawned somewhere hundreds of meters away from the battle ran to the capture point while my vastly outnumbered force was tied up taking care of business. All because the game decided I had to defend this random stretch of dirt that had no strategic significance whatsoever. :rtwno:

It literally breaks the deployment feature since it renders the player's choice untenable by design. The AI will make a beeline right for the capture point, you have no choice but to defend it. Like you state, if you're severely outnumbered you now have probably zero chance of victory.

ReluctantSamurai
09-06-2013, 09:23
It literally breaks the deployment feature since it renders the player's choice untenable by design. The AI will make a beeline right for the capture point, you have no choice but to defend it. Like you state, if you're severely outnumbered you now have probably zero chance of victory.

What I don't understand is why play-testing didn't point this out. Surely there must be some of the CA staff who actually know how to play this game:creep: The staff members playing some of the demos certainly didn't, but I can't believe noone raised the fact that what you just stated is plain as day......place a victory point on the map and you've just dictated to the defender where they have to deploy irregardless of terrain or troop composition.....

And yes, it approaches the 'game-breaker' status for me.

As stated earlier, the most obvious reason for this has to be preventing "corner cuddling" but to this I say.....make better maps. As a mapmaker for a now-forgotten WW2 strategy game, I can say with some authority that maps make the battle. Make them interesting, make deployment areas flexible depending in the situation, and for gods sake get rid of those hills/mountains in the corners where the AI loves to camp:stare:

SwordsMaster
09-06-2013, 10:48
You just said it all right there. Without a doubt the most absurdly questionable gameplay decision CA made this time around, as far as I'm concerned (and a wholllle shitload of others gauging by the TWC forums). Capture points actually serve no purpose in a pitched battle setting, other than to completely strip the player of any tactical deployment choices before the battle. Honestly, this feature is close to game breaking at times, it needs to be removed post haste.

I've had no less than 20 heroic victories snatched away from me cuz some errant unit that spawned somewhere hundreds of meters away from the battle ran to the capture point while my vastly outnumbered force was tied up taking care of business. All because the game decided I had to defend this random stretch of dirt that had no strategic significance whatsoever. :rtwno:

It literally breaks the deployment feature since it renders the player's choice untenable by design. The AI will make a beeline right for the capture point, you have no choice but to defend it. Like you state, if you're severely outnumbered you now have probably zero chance of victory.


Thing is - this could make sense if, as in the tutorial the defender had a camp with a capture point, in a tactically sensible position, and there was another capture point of strategic value on the map. As you say, having only 1, anchors you to a random spot. Having more would give you a real choice of whether you prefer to reach and defend the points, or route the enemy.

I'm thinking it has been underdone if anything - toning down the killing speed, and with the huge maps in R2, we could easily distribute 6-7 cap points on the map giving the player much more choice on how to position their army. Of course the attacker should control none of these initially.

If the intention of capture points is to portray a feeling of 'denial of the land' as opposed to 'destruction of the enemy' then it's been vastly underdone and only works as the 'town square' mechanic in RTW1. However, as a strategic option, it is a valid one.

Example: siege of Lylibaeum - 1 cap point. This in a town with a port, landing beaches, temples, high ground? Really? That's stupid. Who controls a city supplied both by sea and land by capturing 1 spot? That's ridiculous. However, having 5-6 cap points would make a lot more sense. It would force the attacker to put in more effort if they were going for controlling the land instead of destroying the enemy, and it would force them to garrison each of these points after capture, as otherwise the defender would just cycle around.

Which brings me to the next point - ongoing city battles. If we recognise that cities have several points of strategic importance it means it's possible to control part of a city without controlling the whole. The Romans held the Capitolium having lost the rest IIRC a few times during their early history. Attrition should be huge per turn spent in a 'split city' situation to encourage one of the forces to take over.

Anyway, this is my thinking. The only things I'm really, seriously annoyed at now are the terrible pathfinding in naval battles and gate attacks in sieges, and the absolutely stupid 4 man army sieges of various cities after their last city was taken. Since these last 4 dudes are usually powerful ones, often they can't be defeated outright. Rome was besieged 4 times by a lone Etruscan League general bodyguard with 12 men, I autoresolved, and he left with no casualties all 4 times. I the fought the battle manually and killed them in with 2 volleys from those garrison leves. Unjustifiably idiotic. And you can't even sally the garrison to deal with them!

komnenos
09-06-2013, 11:49
I've heard that RTW2 is going to release an edition called Black box. What's that and When will be released?

nearchos
09-06-2013, 12:54
Prometheus makes loads of good points here, the majority I agree with. The capture points on the battlefield is just completely stupid, I cannot fathom why they decided to do this.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?618358-The-Features-that-we-need-to-be-changed-NOW!!!
I agree 1000%, i dont know wether is posible or not to remove the capture points from the battle map with some patch, but if it can be done they must do it yesterday.....
Capture points in open battles + problems with the units behaviour = no real battles

Barkhorn1x
09-06-2013, 13:47
Hear, hear. Non-siege battle capture points = lame!

Azi Tohak
09-06-2013, 15:16
I played a pair of defense battles last night, one on the side of a hill, and another really fun (I hate the Celtic commander heavy cav!) bridge/river crossing. No stupid capture points in either.

This morning I captured the capitol of Sardinia, and that had three capture points, but it's a city.

I still dearly like this game, even with its silly bits.

Azi

CaptainCrunch
09-06-2013, 15:34
What I don't understand is why play-testing didn't point this out... place a victory point on the map and you've just dictated to the defender where they have to deploy irregardless of terrain or troop composition...

I remember people voiced concerns about this during the pre-launch and I distinctly remember CA reps saying that it would not be a 'feature' of open battles, with the exception of ambushed armies who would be forced to protect their baggage train. So either those people were talkin' outta their rear ends, lying, or it somehow became part of open battles cuz of a bug.

It certainly seems like a bug, or something that was hastily implemented at the last moment without much thought. You can have a battle on the exact same tile and every time the 'capture point' will be in a different, equally inconsequential spot near the deployment area.


... The only things I'm really, seriously annoyed at now are the terrible pathfinding in naval battles and gate attacks in sieges, and the absolutely stupid 4 man army sieges of various cities after their last city was taken...

This right here is some more utter nonsense that needs immediate attention. Why waste time with siege engines when you can simply burn down the gate and in you go? And no shattered remnants of an army with fewer than 'x=amount' of men left should even have the option to assault a settlement. Since the mechanic is already in place for the game to predict your chance of victory when it calculates the result of an auto-resolved battle before you commit to it, it should be pretty easy (not to mention logical) for them to apply this to the AI. If the AI has absolutely no chance of victory with its unit of rabble, it shouldn't even have the option to attack settlements. I mean, they wanted to create new features to reduce micro on the Strat Map but didn't refine the game so that their philosophy works in harmony :crazy:

Is it me, or does it not even matter that I place armies in the path of expected assaults outside of settlements just to watch the AI simply go right past them and attack the settlement anyway when I end turn? Evidently they don't have their path restricted the way the player does around hostile armies. I wont even mention the times when AI armies can attack one of mine standing right next to 2 others and then not have access to my support forces during the battle...

The Stranger
09-06-2013, 16:23
oh god... please increase movement range by like 300% atleast for navies and armies in friendly territory... it takes me 8 years to move an army from one side of my empire to the other, playing as carthage.

nafod
09-06-2013, 16:46
I agree 1000%, i dont know wether is posible or not to remove the capture points from the battle map with some patch, but if it can be done they must do it yesterday.....
Capture points in open battles + problems with the units behaviour = no real battles

Or

Capture points in open battles = Much less difficulty to design battle AI

I'd wager a very nice bottle of Irish Whiskey that this is exactly why it is so.

Lord of the Isles
09-06-2013, 17:06
Didn't want to start another thread for a simple question so hoped I could get away with it here: am I the only one who has no pictures in the Encyclopedia? I have all the info but none of the boxes in any page has any pictures in them. Which makes the whole thing just a mass of empty black boxes. I can move the mouse over and get a tooltip which answers (most) of my questions but I can't help feeling this is not quite right.

I bought a DVD of the game but used the preload feature to download all the stuff last weekend. Perhaps that has caused the glitch.

Barkhorn1x
09-06-2013, 17:21
Didn't want to start another thread for a simple question so hoped I could get away with it here: am I the only one who has no pictures in the Encyclopedia? I have all the info but none of the boxes in any page has any pictures in them. Which makes the whole thing just a mass of empty black boxes. I can move the mouse over and get a tooltip which answers (most) of my questions but I can't help feeling this is not quite right.

I bought a DVD of the game but used the preload feature to download all the stuff last weekend. Perhaps that has caused the glitch.

Nope - I get that too. Looks like this "encyclopedia" is incomplete. I searched disc 1 and could not find a discreet file so no dice there either.

CaptainCrunch
09-06-2013, 18:46
oh god... please increase movement range by like 300% atleast for navies and armies in friendly territory... it takes me 8 years to move an army from one side of my empire to the other, playing as carthage.

:laugh: :wall:

Sp4
09-06-2013, 18:49
Coop campaigns are a lot of fun at 2 turns per hour because the AI spends ages doing whatever the hell they are doing.

Hooahguy
09-06-2013, 19:00
oh god... please increase movement range by like 300% atleast for navies and armies in friendly territory... it takes me 8 years to move an army from one side of my empire to the other, playing as carthage.

Thats why I use forced march and turn it off right before I need to fight. Is it risky? Hell yes, but the benefits outweigh the risks.

phred
09-06-2013, 19:27
Didn't want to start another thread for a simple question so hoped I could get away with it here: am I the only one who has no pictures in the Encyclopedia? I have all the info but none of the boxes in any page has any pictures in them. Which makes the whole thing just a mass of empty black boxes. I can move the mouse over and get a tooltip which answers (most) of my questions but I can't help feeling this is not quite right.

I bought a DVD of the game but used the preload feature to download all the stuff last weekend. Perhaps that has caused the glitch.

Are you playing offline?
I noticed that when I was playing offline, but the pictures came back when I was back online.

Barkhorn1x
09-06-2013, 19:36
Are you playing offline?
I noticed that when I was playing offline, but the pictures came back when I was back online.

Hmmm...will check on that.

The Stranger
09-06-2013, 20:28
Thats why I use forced march and turn it off right before I need to fight. Is it risky? Hell yes, but the benefits outweigh the risks.

i do that too, its still taking me hella long.

and worst part is, cant defend the minor settlements since there are no walls and you can only have so many armies. and while it takes you ages to get a decent one, the minor AI nations just spam 20/20 stacks of cheap shit units. they melt against any decent opposition but they will swarm your minor settlements... and since reinforments take like a billion years to get from a to b...

i quit in frustration and im now playing EB... nuff said.


also, javelin troops throwing FLAMING missiles... really CA? REALLY? And wardogs are op... dunno if anyone used them XD

Hooahguy
09-06-2013, 22:55
i do that too, its still taking me hella long.

and worst part is, cant defend the minor settlements since there are no walls and you can only have so many armies. and while it takes you ages to get a decent one, the minor AI nations just spam 20/20 stacks of cheap shit units. they melt against any decent opposition but they will swarm your minor settlements... and since reinforments take like a billion years to get from a to b...

i quit in frustration and im now playing EB... nuff said.


also, javelin troops throwing FLAMING missiles... really CA? REALLY? And wardogs are op... dunno if anyone used them XD
Yeah that annoys me too. I do worry about the small settlements.

Which is why I do think there needs to be a way to make it more feasible to defend those settlements, maybe like increased defenders that automatically replenish or something.

And Im with you on the flaming javelins.

Furunculus
09-06-2013, 23:11
doing the tutorial.

about to beseige busputiam of whatever its name is.

how do i attack the city, i seem to have nothing that will attack the walls to get my chaps through.

i have researched seige'y stuff, and i requested two seige'y units at the start of the seige.

and yet they do not appear in the seige, so my troops just wander about aimlessly.

am i being stupid?

Hooahguy
09-06-2013, 23:23
how do i attack the city, i seem to have nothing that will attack the walls to get my chaps through.

i have researched seige'y stuff, and i requested two seige'y units at the start of the seige.

and yet they do not appear in the seige, so my troops just wander about aimlessly.

am i being stupid?

Cant really help you there as I have yet to be in a serious siege with battering rams and stuff like that, but any unit can throw torches at the gates. Though I definitely loved the ninja-style way the STW2 units climbed up the walls, which was insanely gamey but looked funny and so useful.

Furunculus
09-06-2013, 23:58
how?

CaptainCrunch
09-07-2013, 00:03
doing the tutorial.

about to beseige busputiam of whatever its name is.

how do i attack the city, i seem to have nothing that will attack the walls to get my chaps through...

Definitely no need for any of that, you can just burn down the gates like Hooahguy said and it's open sesame.

At this point it's actually surprising CA didn't add any magic spells. True. :dizzy2:

Hooahguy
09-07-2013, 00:16
Definitely no need for any of that, you can just burn down the gates like Hooahguy said and it's open sesame.

At this point it's actually surprising CA didn't add any magic spells. True. :dizzy2:

Though the problem with burning down the gates is that its costly if the enemy has any ranged units on the gates. Unless you have a reserve of cheap units to just throw at the gate, I dont recommend it unless its a last resort.

Nelson
09-07-2013, 01:00
doing the tutorial.

about to beseige busputiam of whatever its name is.

how do i attack the city, i seem to have nothing that will attack the walls to get my chaps through.

i have researched seige'y stuff, and i requested two seige'y units at the start of the seige.

and yet they do not appear in the seige, so my troops just wander about aimlessly.

am i being stupid?

No, not stupid. The siege equipment appears as white symbols on the map. I didn't notice them at first either. Build ladders because the sheds won't help get in if you don't burn the gates. The units will climb the ladders and if you can get to the the wall above a gate you will eventually capture it and be able to enter.

The flaming missiles have always bugged me if a building or ship is not the target. I won't use them in a field battle but of course the AI never passes on a chance to "Flame On!".

FesterShinetop
09-07-2013, 09:53
Yep, also took me some time to figure out too. But it IS in the help text during the siege. You have to pick units to man the ladders.

The game certainly has it flaws but I am very much enjoying it so far. I am sure they will polish it some more with upcoming patches!

Furunculus
09-07-2013, 11:43
cheers, will have another look today.

Lord of the Isles
09-07-2013, 15:32
Are you playing offline?
I noticed that when I was playing offline, but the pictures came back when I was back online.

A good spot - pictures are there when I go online. Thanks.

Ahha, it is more complicated than that I find, having experimented a bit. In summary: the pictures (hyperlinks?) work when in online or offline mode in Steam. But they don't appear in offline mode when your computer has no working internet connection. Not Steam, but the TW:RII program itself is using the network if it can while running.

Background (not meant to be a Steam rant, really):

For years I knew that Steam's "Offline Mode" was nothing of the sort, since it 'phoned home' on the sly. That meant that it could discover there was an update and then refuse to let you play a game until you applied it. Which sometimes left you unable to complete an unfinished game (if the update wouldn't work with saved games) or unable to use mods (until the mod maker updated their mod). In addition, sometimes you would find that despite having set a game to "Do not keep this game up to date" in the Steam game properties, from time to time Steam would silently reset that back to the default.

To get around that, I have for years been setting Steam in Offline Mode and not letting it start up when I log in. Then I always manually disable my network adapter before starting up Steam. That stopped the b****r phoning home :yes: I managed about 10 months at one point playing mods and a game version I liked without updates (while the forums were moaning about side-effects of updates). But this last year I haven't managed it since every month or so Steam complains about "no login information on your computer" or similar and refuses to let me run any games until it has been online. I doubt there is any technical reason for this - Steam is just trying to force people to run online. Sigh. And now the games themselves are being designed to expect a working internet connection. No doubt for good and worthy reasons but I'd prefer to manage my own system (but am clearly a dinosaur).

nearchos
09-07-2013, 20:06
I dont know if anyone have noticed, but i think that the slingers units of the game are causing more damage than they should.
For example, in a battle against Rhodes, playing as Macedon, four units of rhodian slingers, desimated 2 units of hoplites, ( the one was veteran), in falanx formation, you know, bronze cloud men behind huge bronze shields,so these units finaly were defeated fron militia hoplites and these were my haviest armored units, you can imagine what hapened to my other units.....
The same have happent, many times and with my slingers too, against well armored units.
Among thousants of thinks that need fixing..

nearchos
09-07-2013, 20:18
Or

Capture points in open battles = Much less difficulty to design battle AI

I'd wager a very nice bottle of Irish Whiskey that this is exactly why it is so.
Yes, this makes sence, meke the bottles two.

Quillan
09-07-2013, 20:30
I dont know if anyone have noticed, but i think that the slingers units of the game are causing more damage than they should.
For example, in a battle against Rhodes, playing as Macedon, four units of rhodian slingers, desimated 2 units of hoplites, ( the one was veteran), in falanx formation, you know, bronze cloud men behind huge bronze shields,so these units finaly were defeated fron militia hoplites and these were my haviest armored units, you can imagine what hapened to my other units.....
The same have happent, many times and with my slingers too, against well armored units.
Among thousants of thinks that need fixing..

Slings seem to be armor piercing in game. Doesn't the entry on slingers say something like "average damage but good armor penetration"? Javelins do as well, but are much shorter ranged. I have a very healthy respect for slings in this game; even with armored legionaries they can't sit still under fire from slings and just shrug it off without major casualties, even in testudo formation.

Jacque Schtrapp
09-07-2013, 21:08
Just lost my initial campaign to an unavoidable crash at turn 236. Not enjoying the beta so far....

Drakarys1402
09-07-2013, 22:10
Extremely frustrated by the army cap. I am earning 20,000 denari a turn and have 5,000,000 gold yet I am relying entirely on garrison units to defend my historic roman empire as I need all of my 16 armies to be holding provinces I've just taken. Rebellion wouldn't annoy me at all if it didn't cancel all of my decades of romanization efforts at a stroke as th rebels convert my stuff to their culture and cause a decline in public order across the province. Worse is that CA is doing the bizarre thing where rebels get access to hellinic cataphracts and silver chevron elite units for no reason. I would like to know how the rebels have the infastructure and facilities to put better armies than most of my actual rivals into service?

If you build lots of farms everybody starts rebelling (because obviously the population is going to instantly go up: sigh). If you build loads of temples everybody is happy as they starve to death. It can be a very fiddly system and the subsistence crisis really adds to the difficulty. But it is so annoying and difficult to balance those scales especially as you take new provinces which messes the system up as the AI hasn't balanced his right at all.

Hooahguy
09-07-2013, 22:14
Slings seem to be armor piercing in game. Doesn't the entry on slingers say something like "average damage but good armor penetration"? Javelins do as well, but are much shorter ranged. I have a very healthy respect for slings in this game; even with armored legionaries they can't sit still under fire from slings and just shrug it off without major casualties, even in testudo formation.
That is correct. Historically it was like that. Thats what I learned from Europa Barbarorum. Slingers were fantastic units, but were limited that they couldnt shoot over a unit in front of them. Hence they made excellent skirmishers, but not very useful once the main engagement starts as you will undoubtedly hit your own men.




If you build lots of farms everybody starts rebelling (because obviously the population is going to instantly go up: sigh). If you build loads of temples everybody is happy as they starve to death. It can be a very fiddly system and the subsistence crisis really adds to the difficulty. But it is so annoying and difficult to balance those scales especially as you take new provinces which messes the system up as the AI hasn't balanced his right at all.
You might want to look into some campaign mods which reduce the penalties of squalor and food shortages (and their likelihood of having). I posted some links in the mod subforum.

Hooahguy
09-07-2013, 22:16
Please delete.

Drakarys1402
09-07-2013, 22:53
Also one major thing. Not being able to save during the AI turn when there is a battle. When you have a large empire and might have to spend half an hour or more to fight the five or so battles is just too much of a slog. Sometimes I want to be able to leave my campaign and this just gets annoying.

Hooahguy
09-07-2013, 23:18
Also one major thing. Not being able to save during the AI turn when there is a battle. When you have a large empire and might have to spend half an hour or more to fight the five or so battles is just too much of a slog. Sometimes I want to be able to leave my campaign and this just gets annoying.

As far as I can remember you have never been able to save during an AI turn, or during a battle.

Drakarys1402
09-07-2013, 23:24
Not during a battle. But when the AI attacks you and you have the option to click auto-resolve or to fight it you can press escape and get to the menu to save the game. This means you can leave if you want to. Now you can't.

quadalpha
09-07-2013, 23:31
Not during a battle. But when the AI attacks you and you have the option to click auto-resolve or to fight it you can press escape and get to the menu to save the game. This means you can leave if you want to. Now you can't.

Fear no more! I just found the quick save button on the upper left part of your army panel in the battle deployment screen (when it's zoomed in on the campaign map).

Hooahguy
09-07-2013, 23:37
Ignore

Drakarys1402
09-07-2013, 23:41
Odd. It was shaded out on mine. Plus I usually just press escape and that works. Being locked out of that made it seem like it doesn't let you.

quadalpha
09-08-2013, 03:51
No, random-one-province-minor-on-the-other-side-of-the-world, I don't want to buy your non-aggression for 16k. For the 5th time.

nafod
09-08-2013, 06:15
Anyone else having extreme lag in Rain?

My rig is quite dated, (3.16 Ghz Core 2 Duo, Nvidia 470, 8 GB ram) but I can get away with decent settings (think medium with a select high) and yet keep fps in the 20-30 range. Rain battles are at 2 fps. Can't even play.

I must say I started to get a little pulled in by this game, but the fact that I cannot play a battle in rain at all is a little troubling.

And I can't stand flaming javelins......

The Stranger
09-08-2013, 14:01
Anyone else having extreme lag in Rain?

My rig is quite dated, (3.16 Ghz Core 2 Duo, Nvidia 470, 8 GB ram) but I can get away with decent settings (think medium with a select high) and yet keep fps in the 20-30 range. Rain battles are at 2 fps. Can't even play.

I must say I started to get a little pulled in by this game, but the fact that I cannot play a battle in rain at all is a little troubling.

And I can't stand flaming javelins......

i had it once. really sucked :S had to quit game in taskmanager. and ya wtf flaming javelins =_=

The Stranger
09-08-2013, 14:03
Not during a battle. But when the AI attacks you and you have the option to click auto-resolve or to fight it you can press escape and get to the menu to save the game. This means you can leave if you want to. Now you can't.

you still can i think, but not when you are playing on legendary

CaptainCrunch
09-08-2013, 15:37
No, random-one-province-minor-on-the-other-side-of-the-world, I don't want to buy your non-aggression for 16k. For the 5th time.

Flip it on them! When this happens to me I counter-offer with the suggested amount as a payment to me instead, and usually the offer has a High or Moderate chance of success still.

ShadesPanther
09-08-2013, 16:05
I agree with everyones points here but one i havent seen mentioned is on the campaign map.

The way main factions get wiped out quickly and one city nations become superpowers. In my Macedon game Cimmeria has conquered all of ancient Asia minor (modern day Turkey) except for peraganum and ephesus.
Namomemes has conquered all of Eastern North Africa with a border at carthage with the numidians (begins with M) holding the rest and lillybaeum.

I've seen similar in all my other games. How have they not picked this up in playtesting?

ReluctantSamurai
09-08-2013, 17:08
oh god... please increase movement range by like 300% atleast for navies and armies in friendly territory... it takes me 8 years to move an army from one side of my empire to the other, playing as carthage.

One of those scalable issues that has never been resolved correctly (IMHO) since the introduction of the 3D map and the reduction in the # of seasons.


You might want to look into some campaign mods which reduce the penalties of squalor and food shortages (and their likelihood of having).

I have always detested RTW demographics. Cities always grow way too fast (or too slow if you're wanting to get to the next tier of development:laugh4:) and squalor has always been much too much of an issue. In RTW 1, once you figured out how to achieve ZPG, all such problems went away. I wonder how it's to be done in this game without resorting to this:shrug:


Steam is just trying to force people to run online. Sigh. And now the games themselves are being designed to expect a working internet connection. No doubt for good and worthy reasons but I'd prefer to manage my own system (but am clearly a dinosaur)

This makes at least two of us......which is why I wait until the Gold/Platinum/(or whatever) Edition comes out.

BroskiDerpman
09-08-2013, 17:30
Shogun 2's Gold Edition was win unless you bought the US edition like I did. Since the US edition has no dlc (Only expansions) and was only cheaper many of the times by a few bucks. Meanwhile the Euro edition got the cool cover and all dlc except for blood dlc for only a few more USD. (Cool cover, nuff said)

ArcturUs
09-09-2013, 08:14
Hey everyone, I think I'm a bit late to give the first impressions. I got it on the release date (with Greek State DLC for free as I pre ordered :laugh4:) Been a little out of touch with TW for quite some time, so started with prologue. Here's my first impressions.
Love the new game mechanics. Still trying to figure out how everything works. Graphics are nice, but could have been better. Some bugs have been reported, like ramming in naval battles. But also heard that they were fixed in the patch that was out on friday. Yet to test them out. I do like the new setting, provincial governance in the campaign map. Playing the Roman campaign under the Julia family. Overall well worth the money. I also heard that the bugs that are currently not fixed will be done so in the upcoming patches. ~:cheers:

Bramborough
09-09-2013, 09:40
Background: not a TW fanatic, but have played and enjoyed several of the earlier titles: MTW, RTW, M2TW, ETW, and NTW. As I've read through others' comments in this and other fora, it seems significant to point out that I have NOT played Shogun 2 (although am now very tempted to go back and give it a try). In addition, Rome 2 is the first TW game (heck, actually the first game of ANY kind, I think) that I preordered in advance and began playing on release. So...these comments are made in the context of not having played CA's most recent (and apparently very worthy) effort, as well as not being able to compare to the typical upon-release state of a TW game.

So, all that disclaimer aside, I'm 150ish turns into Rome Junii campaign, and also did full Prologue "tutorial" campaign. Here's a few thoughts.

*** Game looks pretty awesome. I did have some annoying visual glitches, but bumped from "Extreme" down to "Ultra" graphic setting, haven't found much about which to complain since.

*** For first 100 turns or so, the end-of-turn wait didn't bother me much. Now that my empire is bigger, have a couple of client states, and more trade partners, however, I see much more of the map, and that wait time is starting to get annoyingly long. Turning off AI moves doesn't help much.

*** I think the mechanics of internal politics (Roman at least) are interesting and well-done. What is not apparent (yet) to me, however, is why it matters in the first place. My Junii have ranged between 9% to 62% influence, and I haven't discerned any significant penalties/rewards for low or high influence. I assume that 0% means one gets fired and loses game. I also understand from pre-release reviews and others' posts here that civil war occurs if one's influence gets too high. Therefore it appears that the goal is to stay in a "happy medium" which happens to be extremely wide and very easy to maintain with little effort (something like 10-60% range). Outside these extremes, I see very little point thus far in paying much attention to politics. The political rank bonuses (for aedile, praetor, etc) are nice, but don't necessarily seem worth the treasury cost of obtaining them. What am I missing (if anything?). EDIT: Right after I posted this, Civil War occurred, with 55% senate influence...a level I'd taken care to maintain +/- 5% for at least 75 turns. I'd been deluded into thinking that not letting my influence get too high had mollified the other families enough to avoid open conflict. It now appears to me that civil war is either a random and/or eventually inevitable event. So now I'm feeling even less motivation to pay any particular attention to internal politics; I have yet to see any positive outcomes worth the effort, and now also don't feel that it's a way to avoid negative events (i.e., civil war) either.

*** AI blockading cities (particularly Rebels). Very annoying, seems to be an issue with port cities under rebel control. You want to take out a city, but it's rebel, so neutrals (or even allies) are ganging up on it. But they don't assault, they simply put a naval blockade on the thing in perpetuity. Had to go to war with Cyrenaica and Nasomones just to take my last settlement to finish out Africa province, whereas otherwise my plan had been to stay somewhat friendly with them once Africa was completed.

*** Naval-only presence in city. Easily the most frustrating gameplay issue I've run across yet. I had a non-walled minor settlement which happened to be occupied by my medium-sized fleet (maybe 8 ships). It was newly-conquered and had a relatively small inherent garrison. Enemy comes along to attack. They easily overwhelmed the small land garrison, but were definitely beatable by my fleet hastati, IF I'd been able to get them ashore quickly. I could not do so in time to prevent their capturing the central victory point...landing beaches were too far out and (counterintuitively), the ships could not go alongside the port wharves to unload troops (this ought to be allowed in cities which one already holds and is defending). So the attackers easily capture my city. So far, merely annoying. I'd lost the settlement, but could get it back pretty easily in a turn or two. My fleet was very lightly damaged, because most of the ships had been unable to engage at all. BUT...in end-battle results, I'd LOST THE ENTIRE FLEET. WTF?!? Why couldn't they have merely sailed out of port? Obviously I learned to be much more careful about where/when I put fleets into port, so lesson learned there. But my point is that this is a goofy mechanic in the first place. I'm okay with making fleets horrible for settlement defense vs land attack...but they ought to be easily withdrawn back to sea rather than destroyed.

*** Garrison effects on Public Order (or lack thereof). I like the new "inherent garrison" mechanic whereby each city's buildings provide troops for defense. Much more streamlined than the old mechanic where one had to hire low-end troops in each city (which was tiresome, took up unit slots, and mounted upkeep costs). So far so good. These garrisons, however, appear to be only valuable for defense, and do nothing for public order...which in older TW games was often the most important consideration in establishing a garrison in the first place. Rather frustrating that I have to park a field army (which are capped in numbers) to impact public order...when that settlement already has a fairly robust garrison. In the game of trade-offs, I think it would make more sense to have some sort of "Mobilize Garrison" or "Martial Law" option for a city or province, which it costs food/money but increases public order.

*** Small troop movements. Overall, I don't have a problem with the army/fleet cap and requiring a general's presence in field armies. This makes sense to me. I do think, however, that one ought to be able to move smaller non-general-led troops about. Perhaps in forced-march only mode, where these troops cannot initiate battles and are at a disadvantage when attacked. I'd like to be able to build infantry in one province, cavalry in another, missile/siege in a third, and then have these component units come together to form a combined legion under a general. This would allow me to spread out the military buildings a bit instead of having to concentrate them all in the slots of one province. OR, alternatively, perhaps they can't move, but I could still build them in a city where'd they contribute to the garrison and public order until a general came along to pick them up for campaign.

*** Champions a bit OP in terms of military training bonus. I've got several field armies running around with all units maxed out for XP. Some of this came from battle of course, but most of it came from simply parking a champion in the army.

*** Household. I like the pool system whereby one can pick an appropriate follower for a general/admiral. Good small way to tailor a general, especially as he bounces back and forth between field campaign and province garrison. I'd like to see a few more "administrative" household cards pop up (+public order, +commerce, etc). I'd also like to see each general perhaps have two household slots rather than just one. Separate-but-closely-related, it doesn't make sense to me that one can arrange marriages to OTHER families' generals, but apparently no way to initiate marriage for one's OWN generals. Thus far, the other families have been quite reticent about arranging marriages into the Junii, so almost all of my generals are apparently bachelors (and therefore empty spouse slots which could otherwise have a trait associated).

BroskiDerpman
09-09-2013, 11:44
Play Shogun 2 with the UAI mod...


Waiting for Gold when CA finishes the beta finally. Then the game to me will be somewhat bearable, hopefully.

ReluctantSamurai
09-09-2013, 12:30
@Broski....play Shogun 1 with the 1.02 patch installed. Then prepare to get your ass kicked~D
Bramborough

Thank you for that analysis. As one who has a love/hate relationship with micromanagement, it's good to see some 'nuts & bolts' commentary on how the game works:bow:

Myth
09-09-2013, 12:47
I'm getting the game and then I suspect I'll spend an entire afternoon at work writing an in-depth, diehard geek, TW bread and fed review. BTW ReluctantSamurai why haven't you obtained Rome 2 yet?

ArcturUs
09-09-2013, 12:51
Bramborough Nice review. Regarding garrison armies, I would advise you to not park armies in the cities unless they are vulnerable to attack(borders). You can increase public order by other means, such as edicts, lower taxation, etc. I play the Julia campaign, and actually right now I have only one army in all of Italy(which I will be using for the invasion of Gaul in a few turns), even the cities to the north like Velathari and Ariminum are quite unguarded, as I haven't gone into war with Helvetti tribes in the north yet. So you need not park an army in every city that you capture.

One thing I discovered is that the cash flow at the start of the campaign is quite low so you will have to watch where you are spending that money. But as you progress through the turns and capture more cities, get trade agreements etc, your income increases considerably.

ReluctantSamurai
09-09-2013, 12:56
BTW @ReluctantSamurai why haven't you obtained Rome 2 yet?

I NEVER buy any game upon release (and this includes Paradox, Bioware, etc.)
I don't like Steam telling me what I can or can't do............

The Stranger
09-09-2013, 14:48
Background: not a TW fanatic, but have played and enjoyed several of the earlier titles: MTW, RTW, M2TW, ETW, and NTW. As I've read through others' comments in this and other fora, it seems significant to point out that I have NOT played Shogun 2 (although am now very tempted to go back and give it a try). In addition, Rome 2 is the first TW game (heck, actually the first game of ANY kind, I think) that I preordered in advance and began playing on release. So...these comments are made in the context of not having played CA's most recent (and apparently very worthy) effort, as well as not being able to compare to the typical upon-release state of a TW game.

So, all that disclaimer aside, I'm 150ish turns into Rome Junii campaign, and also did full Prologue "tutorial" campaign. Here's a few thoughts.

*** Game looks pretty awesome. I did have some annoying visual glitches, but bumped from "Extreme" down to "Ultra" graphic setting, haven't found much about which to complain since.

*** For first 100 turns or so, the end-of-turn wait didn't bother me much. Now that my empire is bigger, have a couple of client states, and more trade partners, however, I see much more of the map, and that wait time is starting to get annoyingly long. Turning off AI moves doesn't help much.

*** I think the mechanics of internal politics (Roman at least) are interesting and well-done. What is not apparent (yet) to me, however, is why it matters in the first place. My Junii have ranged between 9% to 62% influence, and I haven't discerned any significant penalties/rewards for low or high influence. I assume that 0% means one gets fired and loses game. I also understand from pre-release reviews and others' posts here that civil war occurs if one's influence gets too high. Therefore it appears that the goal is to stay in a "happy medium" which happens to be extremely wide and very easy to maintain with little effort (something like 10-60% range). Outside these extremes, I see very little point thus far in paying much attention to politics. The political rank bonuses (for aedile, praetor, etc) are nice, but don't necessarily seem worth the treasury cost of obtaining them. What am I missing (if anything?).

*** AI blockading cities (particularly Rebels). Very annoying, seems to be an issue with port cities under rebel control. You want to take out a city, but it's rebel, so neutrals (or even allies) are ganging up on it. But they don't assault, they simply put a naval blockade on the thing in perpetuity. Had to go to war with Cyrenaica and Nasomones just to take my last settlement to finish out Africa province, whereas otherwise my plan had been to stay somewhat friendly with them once Africa was completed.

*** Naval-only presence in city. Easily the most frustrating gameplay issue I've run across yet. I had a non-walled minor settlement which happened to be occupied by my medium-sized fleet (maybe 8 ships). It was newly-conquered and had a relatively small inherent garrison. Enemy comes along to attack. They easily overwhelmed the small land garrison, but were definitely beatable by my fleet hastati, IF I'd been able to get them ashore quickly. I could not do so in time to prevent their capturing the central victory point...landing beaches were too far out and (counterintuitively), the ships could not go alongside the port wharves to unload troops (this ought to be allowed in cities which one already holds and is defending). So the attackers easily capture my city. So far, merely annoying. I'd lost the settlement, but could get it back pretty easily in a turn or two. My fleet was very lightly damaged, because most of the ships had been unable to engage at all. BUT...in end-battle results, I'd LOST THE ENTIRE FLEET. WTF?!? Why couldn't they have merely sailed out of port? Obviously I learned to be much more careful about where/when I put fleets into port, so lesson learned there. But my point is that this is a goofy mechanic in the first place. I'm okay with making fleets horrible for settlement defense vs land attack...but they ought to be easily withdrawn back to sea rather than destroyed.

*** Garrison effects on Public Order (or lack thereof). I like the new "inherent garrison" mechanic whereby each city's buildings provide troops for defense. Much more streamlined than the old mechanic where one had to hire low-end troops in each city (which was tiresome, took up unit slots, and mounted upkeep costs). So far so good. These garrisons, however, appear to be only valuable for defense, and do nothing for public order...which in older TW games was often the most important consideration in establishing a garrison in the first place. Rather frustrating that I have to park a field army (which are capped in numbers) to impact public order...when that settlement already has a fairly robust garrison. In the game of trade-offs, I think it would make more sense to have some sort of "Mobilize Garrison" or "Martial Law" option for a city or province, which it costs food/money but increases public order.

*** Small troop movements. Overall, I don't have a problem with the army/fleet cap and requiring a general's presence in field armies. This makes sense to me. I do think, however, that one ought to be able to move smaller non-general-led troops about. Perhaps in forced-march only mode, where these troops cannot initiate battles and are at a disadvantage when attacked. I'd like to be able to build infantry in one province, cavalry in another, missile/siege in a third, and then have these component units come together to form a combined legion under a general. This would allow me to spread out the military buildings a bit instead of having to concentrate them all in the slots of one province. OR, alternatively, perhaps they can't move, but I could still build them in a city where'd they contribute to the garrison and public order until a general came along to pick them up for campaign.

*** Champions a bit OP in terms of military training bonus. I've got several field armies running around with all units maxed out for XP. Some of this came from battle of course, but most of it came from simply parking a champion in the army.

*** Household. I like the pool system whereby one can pick an appropriate follower for a general/admiral. Good small way to tailor a general, especially as he bounces back and forth between field campaign and province garrison. I'd like to see a few more "administrative" household cards pop up (+public order, +commerce, etc). I'd also like to see each general perhaps have two household slots rather than just one. Separate-but-closely-related, it doesn't make sense to me that one can arrange marriages to OTHER families' generals, but apparently no way to initiate marriage for one's OWN generals. Thus far, the other families have been quite reticent about arranging marriages into the Junii, so almost all of my generals are apparently bachelors (and therefore empty spouse slots which could otherwise have a trait associated).

LOL i'd rage so hard if that happened to my fleet... I quit the game over less XD

and ya the ancillary slots are too few :S need more!

Ituralde
09-09-2013, 15:30
I was finally able to play the game yesterday. Five hours in so these really are my first impressions.

I played the Prologue just to get back into the series. All in all it was a mixed bag for me. The province happiness system was really difficult to grasp for me and except for my Rome provinces all others had massive Public Order problems and the only two provinces I ever taxed where Rome and Campania. I also lost Salernum, becaue I moved out immediatelly to capture Butaxium (or something like that) in the south by sea. The naval invasion was fun, but during the battle the AI reared it's ugly head for the first time. I split my Equites from my main force and rode them in a column along the coast, while naval reinforcements came in from the sea. The defenders initially positioned themselves between the town center and my main force, but when my Equites passed them they wheeled around with their whole army to chase after them. The path to the town center for my main army was clear, so I ran ahead and captured it. My Equites safely avoided the main force and the town was taken with probably 10 casualties on each side.

Afterwards I had one army in Capua staving off the Samnites and attempting to retake Salernum, while my initial army went around Salerno and just captured all the settlements leading up to Bovianum. The siege of Bovianum was atrocious! The AI only gives you one turn to build siege equipment and I chose Gallerys, mistaking them for rams from the picture. Once the battle started my units would not attack the gate itself and my galleries were utterly useless. The enemy sallied forth through one gate and I thought I could push them back inside, but there was some kind of invisible wall holding my troops back, they just would not enter the city, even when the gates were wide open. Instead there was some massive blob fighting it out in front of the gates every time the defenders actually moved out with one unit or two. One nice thing about the new line of sight mechanic came to light though. A unit of Spearmen was able to surprise my Slingers and dealt some heavy damage. I was distracted by the battle and a hill had shielded their approach. This has never happened to me in any of the previous titles. In the end I couldn't take the city and had to withdraw.

On my second try I was prepared and built some Ladders. Stormed the wall and killed everyone on it. But then what? The gate is still closed. I need to capture it, alright. But I can't capture it, while there are still enemies on the other side of it. Just attack them then? Sorry, no can do. Unlike in previous titles your troops can't use gate houses to get off the wall. So I had to walk around half the town to find one of the towers, where I was finally able to climb down, take one of the victory points and then kill all the remaining defenders! The Prologue was done, and so was I. Battles happen without cohesion and you loose any kind of control over your troops five seconds after impact. It's a constant running around and you never know where your units end up or how far they'll spread around the map. Then there's the infamous hotkeys, flaming javelins for crying out loud! Also once your general has a certain rank there are literally ten different hotkeys with abilities that are so small it was hard to distinguish them. I also had some lag so activating them was a lot of hit and miss, especially for those where you had to target an enemy unit. It's hard to make them out in the massive raging blob in front of you. Also no actual keys are assigned to the abilites by default and F will no longer toggle Fire At Will and S for skirmish is gone as well (Why change it?).

Since the Prologue put me off of playing Rome (No defensive Pilae from the Hastati!), I went ahead and started a campaing as the Suebi! I had a lot of fun setting my armies in Plunder stance and just going to town on the Boii. I even harassed one of the german tribes north of me, without declaring war, thus gaining favour from the Lugii, who are at war with them and signing a defensive alliance with them. It felt really immersive and responsive from the camaping AI side. I even managed to sack the Boii Provincial Capital, though I was a bit surprised that it didn't belong to me afterwards. It fit with the pillage and plunder narrative, but I won the battle for the town fair and square (By just rushing everyone at the main gate) but the Capital was still in Boii hands.

Unfortunately I forgot everything I learned from playing Shogun II and plunged my one province into a massive food shortage by immediately building the next level of town. One more reason to plunder my enemies territories, as my armies were starving at home. I went with some food Shrine that took forever to finish though and made the choice too late to switch from a horse enclosure to a farm for more food! The Boii came at me with a vengeance, wiped out one of my armies and nearly took my Capital! It was a really intense fight in a forested area, where in the end only my general with his Wodan Spearmen was left and had to tackle several roaming slingers in the forest, before I won.

Now I finally have food again and am swimming in gold, as I couldn't recruit anything while under siege. Unfortunately I can still only recruit the three units I had from the beginning, as I have not figured out where military units come from in barbarian building chains (The Encyclopedia was no help at all!). But despite all of that I am really looking forward to putting some more turns in. I always had that next goal to keep me motivated (Build that army, plunder that guy, get trade rights with him, eliminate the food deficit) and the Agents are a lot of fun to play around with as well.

So Rome II has its ups and downs. It pulls me in, but it annoys me at every corner as well. A few patches and balancing will really help with this one, but it won't keep me from enjoying my Suebi campaign some more!

Bramborough
09-09-2013, 16:43
Bramborough Nice review. Regarding garrison armies, I would advise you to not park armies in the cities unless they are vulnerable to attack(borders). You can increase public order by other means, such as edicts, lower taxation, etc. I play the Julia campaign, and actually right now I have only one army in all of Italy(which I will be using for the invasion of Gaul in a few turns), even the cities to the north like Velathari and Ariminum are quite unguarded, as I haven't gone into war with Helvetti tribes in the north yet. So you need not park an army in every city that you capture.

Totally agree. And indeed, in my more "settled" provinces such as Italia, Cisalpina, Magna Grecia etc, I maintain zero military presence. My comment pertains more to recently conquered provinces, while dealing with the cultural differences and slowly decaying unrest. This typically takes around 10-15 turns to resolve (and yes, I know dignitaries help..I use 'em). During this "assimilation period", however, I feel like I have to keep my field armies parked in these settlements until they cross back into the "green" for public order. Lends a rather "start-stop" dynamic to the ongoing Roman juggernaut.

Lord of the Isles
09-09-2013, 17:39
Lends a rather "start-stop" dynamic to the ongoing Roman juggernaut.

Very true. I particularly noticed the assimilation problem when launching a war against Thrace (IIRC). A 4 region province and I sent 3 armies against 3 of the regions in one turn. Forgetting that the -25 one-off hit to public order in the province would be cumulative. Thankfully my characters and the armies just kept public order to -97 at the end of turn and I was able to build it up to about -70 so I could finish off the last region 4 or so turns later. Then I had to wait some more turns till public order came down enough to let my armies leave to go rampaging elsewhere.

But I quite like it as a slight brake on expansion. In fact, while there are numerous big problems with the game, I like the whole region/province mechanism and how CA have done faction management and the economy (though not the tech tree). Some tradeoffs to decide on every so often but not impossible to build an empire. And about the right amount of micromanagement.

quadalpha
09-09-2013, 18:44
Also, letting public order go all the way down to -100 isn't catastrophic. All it does it spawn a smallish rebel army that gets reinforced every turn until you take it out.

ArcturUs
09-09-2013, 19:14
Totally agree. And indeed, in my more "settled" provinces such as Italia, Cisalpina, Magna Grecia etc, I maintain zero military presence. My comment pertains more to recently conquered provinces, while dealing with the cultural differences and slowly decaying unrest. This typically takes around 10-15 turns to resolve (and yes, I know dignitaries help..I use 'em). During this "assimilation period", however, I feel like I have to keep my field armies parked in these settlements until they cross back into the "green" for public order. Lends a rather "start-stop" dynamic to the ongoing Roman juggernaut.
Ya when you capture new regions it is a bit of a problem. But even then I usually park my conquering army for just a single turn(by which the one turn political instability will be over) and move on to the next settlement. Like quadalpha mentioned even if it does get to -100, it just spawns a rebel army which you can defeat relatively easily, in most cases. What I do is, if I notice that the settlement is going to rebel soon I'll keep my conquering army just on the borders of the settlement so that I can take care of the rebel army when it spawns. One good thing when you beat a rebel army is that it restores public order and the people will know who their true masters are :whip:

Another thing I noticed is that factions that were destroyed previously can make a comeback if their previously owned territories rebel. I noticed this when I destroyed Libya, but after a few turns one of the towns that I captured from them rebelled and a Libyan army spawned. Although I did decimate them in the very next turn :hmg:

BroskiDerpman
09-09-2013, 20:18
@Broski....play Shogun 1 with the 1.02 patch installed. Then prepare to get your ass kicked~D
Bramborough

Thank you for that analysis. As one who has a love/hate relationship with micromanagement, it's good to see some 'nuts & bolts' commentary on how the game works:bow:

Once I got used to the ui I rampaged through Japan till the game derped out on me and I had to uninstall the game.

ShadesPanther
09-09-2013, 20:54
Apparently civil war is linked to the ambition of your generals. If it is too "high" it can trigger it.
What is "too high" is unclear though

BroskiDerpman
09-09-2013, 20:57
I wonder if civil war and rebelling generals are hard to deal with, if not sad Panda is sad.

ReluctantSamurai
09-09-2013, 21:35
Once I got used to the ui I rampaged through Japan till the game derped out on me and I had to uninstall the game

Are we talking Shoggie I or II here? cuz no player I've ever know could rampage anywhere through Japan in the original on expert setting:inquisitive:

andrewt
09-09-2013, 21:50
Also, letting public order go all the way down to -100 isn't catastrophic. All it does it spawn a smallish rebel army that gets reinforced every turn until you take it out.

I prefer blitzing provinces and getting public order go all the way down to -100. In fact, I sometimes put one of my armies to raiding stance to help it along. It spawns a 4-unit rebel army. Each turn, the province gets a +20 modifier while the rebel army gets 4 more units. I believe this happens until -20. The moment the rebel army spawns, I can park an army in the settlement it spawned close to. That frees up the rest of my armies. I kill the rebel army once happiness hits -20.

Bramborough
09-09-2013, 21:54
I wonder if civil war and rebelling generals are hard to deal with, if not sad Panda is sad.

From the Roman perspective (not sure what happens with other factions): One of your regions (single region, not a whole province) remains Roman, but rebels against YOU. This region is treated as a newly arising faction called "Senate Loyalists". In my case it happened to be Sardinia, just across the sea from Italia & Sicily. I'm guessing that the civil war faction will probably always spawn in an older region in or near Italia, rather than out on the fringe somewhere. And this does break up province cohesion, so it negates any edict you had, and may affect recruitment, depending on what buildings are in the rebelling town. For example, my most advanced fleet recruitment port was in Sardinia, so I didn't have access to recruit these vessels until after I retook that town.

In my case, I didn't lose control of any of my army/fleets (although I suspect this might happen if there's one actually stationed in the affected region). I did, however, lose all my Cornelii and Julii general/admirals, and had to replace them. The "Other Houses" general/admirals stayed loyal. So...six armies and four fleets (all 12 units each) insta-spawned in Sardinia, and proceeded to fan out toward Corsica, Sicily, and Magna Grecia from there. And they're all Roman troops, with access to the same level of units (in this case, legionaries with a sprinkling of veteran legionaries among them, with accompanying velites and equites). I did, however, have access to praetorians and 1st cohorts, but did not see any among the opposing legions.

So anyhoo, 6 armies and 4 fleets of Roman troops rampaging around the home provinces, yeah, it was a pain in the butt to deal with, and took quite a few turns to contain. I had enough power to do so, but had to call a lot of legions home so it took some travel time. Meanwhile, they ate up 3 provinces (Sardinia, Corsica, Lilybaeum) and *should* have taken Syracuse (not sure how/why they didn't, they were a step ahead of me and could've done so). They also landed a couple of legions in Italia, but by then my guys were closing in on them. In general, my sense is that the Campaign AI roughly marches toward Rome, although not necessarily in a straight line (thank goodness). And yes, you do have to deal with unrest and conquest public order penalties all over again when you retake those settlements (at least there's not a cultural assimilation though).

I don't remember exactly when it started, I'd say it took me 8-10 turns to get legions home, retake provinces, etc. As I type now, the civil war is still technically going on, but there's only a couple of small beat-up fleets I need to chase down and eliminate. I assume that once they're gone, the "Senate Loyalist" faction is eliminated and that's that. I don't know yet if there's some other event triggered like an internal peace treaty, or establishing the Empire (vice Republic) or whatever.

So bottom line, is it "hard" to deal with? Not necessarily, but harder than any other faction, I'd say. Derails your ongoing plans, takes time, causes some chaos on your core provinces, etc. The battle AI isn't really any smarter than for any other faction, but they are Roman troops, your units don't possess any inherent qualitative advantage over them, so they can't be taken lightly.

BroskiDerpman
09-09-2013, 22:01
Sounds interesting but if you could beat them even with your legions marching all the way back (Perhaps it's possible to keep any reserve legions?) them I'm sure the rebellion could get destroyed and be considered a minor set back.

Though it seems quite fun to be able to fight Romans with Romans.

1 duty to me just seems to little, perhaps CA should've given more to the rebels so they start of already well developed and you'd be in even bigger trouble.

Fluvius Camillus
09-09-2013, 22:06
Personal rundown for anyone who is interested (Macedon, Normal campaign, around turn 80).

Good:
- Awesome look
- Province system
- The used cities and minor factions (good research or did they take a good look at EB?)
- Diplomacy options
- The option to travel over water by transport.

Bad:
- Autoresolve is very bad at killing whole units (very annoying when a faction without towns repeatedly attacks with trash).
- Battles are over way too fast.
- Hoplites overpowered? In hoplite phalanx mode my standard hoplites absolutely butcher every enemy they meet.
- Going to land/sea mechanics sometimes have problems so you waste movement.
- Transports are no easy pickings, largely even better than naval troops.
- On normal, the campaign AI is INSANELY PASSIVE. While I loathe the braindead AI who suddenly attacks you in past TW's, some challenge by being attacked by a destined enemy is welcome. The AI never builds their forces to a decent level in terms of quantity and quality. The campaign has been made extremely boring since I just use 1 fullstack to destroy the faction which I decide is ripe for the taking.

That is all for now.

~Fluvius

Suraknar
09-09-2013, 23:44
First Impressions, 12 hours of play, Rome/Julia House.

I am wowed, I really like all the changes to the game, and the streamlining of mechanics.

Graphics are great as well, even with some glitches here and there (albeit I am playing on DX9, due to my aged GF9600 GT, all else is on x64, windows 7 etc)

The New Strategic map and also Compbat areas, and the fact that the Battlemap is actually a Huge Map mirroring the Strategy map is simply Amazing!

What i particularly lie is the pace of the battles, this is as Good now as it was with STW and MTW (the originals), it is much much better than RTW(1), really good job there. Tacticas are back onthe menu, it is not long a Rush with everything you got.

Combined Naval/Land battles are awesome!

Economics seem to be fine as well, this must be the first MTW game that I play with default economy (I always moded the treasury previously from MTW onwards...it was simply "Much Koku" with STW).

I like the way Provinces are structured with one main city etc very much.

Overall very happy with Rome2, kudos!

I foresee many many many many many hours of play here :)

gedingradski
09-10-2013, 05:56
So far I haven't noticed anyone mention (and sorry if you have) the total lack of battle map variation.

This is a pet hate of mine. You know, back in RTW days you could forgive them for having fairly bland battle maps during sieges, but at least back then the maps outside of settlements actually kind of represented where the battle took place. It just seems to be the same maps, maybe with a different orientation. And the settlement battles? I was soooo dissapointed that after waiting 10 turns or so after my first settlement capture, getting ready for the next one... patiently tolerating all the glitches and performance issues... finally ready to take my second settlement and lo and behold it was the exact same map as before.... Considering how modular these maps are already I think it wouldn't be too much of an ask to put a bit more effort in to actually make it interesting to take a town, and actually require some, even a teeny-tiny amount of strategy on how best to take the town instead of the exact same way you took this one last time. It makes it worst that the defenders just sit at their defence flag (don't even get me started on those...) waiting for you slice them up, or that their actual army decided to jump in a boat and hang out in the dock so that I'm just breezing through their garrison troops before they even turn up.

Considering that the game is already 9 gB, I wouldn't mind an extra gB or two if that meant more battle maps, not that I think it would require anything near that amount of space...

nearchos
09-10-2013, 07:20
Extremely frustrated by the army cap. I am earning 20,000 denari a turn and have 5,000,000 gold yet I am relying entirely on garrison units to defend my historic roman empire as I need all of my 16 armies to be holding provinces I've just taken. Rebellion wouldn't annoy me at all if it didn't cancel all of my decades of romanization efforts at a stroke as th rebels convert my stuff to their culture and cause a decline in public order across the province. Worse is that CA is doing the bizarre thing where rebels get access to hellinic cataphracts and silver chevron elite units for no reason. I would like to know how the rebels have the infastructure and facilities to put better armies than most of my actual rivals into service?

If you build lots of farms everybody starts rebelling (because obviously the population is going to instantly go up: sigh). If you build loads of temples everybody is happy as they starve to death. It can be a very fiddly system and the subsistence crisis really adds to the difficulty. But it is so annoying and difficult to balance those scales especially as you take new provinces which messes the system up as the AI hasn't balanced his right at all.
And moreover, if you go for the high level bildings, no mater what type of bilding is, ( religious, farming etc) its either -food or -public order without any serious ballancing by other bilding, ie a temple ofering a +20 public order against the -100 caused by the other infrastracture.

I think they must fix that as well, beeing a ballance between the types of bildings.

quadalpha
09-10-2013, 07:40
If you build lots of farms everybody starts rebelling (because obviously the population is going to instantly go up: sigh). If you build loads of temples everybody is happy as they starve to death. It can be a very fiddly system and the subsistence crisis really adds to the difficulty. But it is so annoying and difficult to balance those scales especially as you take new provinces which messes the system up as the AI hasn't balanced his right at all.

Does that actually happen? I've never seen it, and it would invalidate all we know about how population works. Maybe there was something else going on?

nearchos
09-10-2013, 07:53
From the Roman perspective (not sure what happens with other factions): One of your regions (single region, not a whole province) remains Roman, but rebels against YOU. This region is treated as a newly arising faction called "Senate Loyalists". In my case it happened to be Sardinia, just across the sea from Italia & Sicily. I'm guessing that the civil war faction will probably always spawn in an older region in or near Italia, rather than out on the fringe somewhere. And this does break up province cohesion, so it negates any edict you had, and may affect recruitment, depending on what buildings are in the rebelling town. For example, my most advanced fleet recruitment port was in Sardinia, so I didn't have access to recruit these vessels until after I retook that town.

In my case, I didn't lose control of any of my army/fleets (although I suspect this might happen if there's one actually stationed in the affected region). I did, however, lose all my Cornelii and Julii general/admirals, and had to replace them. The "Other Houses" general/admirals stayed loyal. So...six armies and four fleets (all 12 units each) insta-spawned in Sardinia, and proceeded to fan out toward Corsica, Sicily, and Magna Grecia from there. And they're all Roman troops, with access to the same level of units (in this case, legionaries with a sprinkling of veteran legionaries among them, with accompanying velites and equites). I did, however, have access to praetorians and 1st cohorts, but did not see any among the opposing legions.

So anyhoo, 6 armies and 4 fleets of Roman troops rampaging around the home provinces, yeah, it was a pain in the butt to deal with, and took quite a few turns to contain. I had enough power to do so, but had to call a lot of legions home so it took some travel time. Meanwhile, they ate up 3 provinces (Sardinia, Corsica, Lilybaeum) and *should* have taken Syracuse (not sure how/why they didn't, they were a step ahead of me and could've done so). They also landed a couple of legions in Italia, but by then my guys were closing in on them. In general, my sense is that the Campaign AI roughly marches toward Rome, although not necessarily in a straight line (thank goodness). And yes, you do have to deal with unrest and conquest public order penalties all over again when you retake those settlements (at least there's not a cultural assimilation though).

I don't remember exactly when it started, I'd say it took me 8-10 turns to get legions home, retake provinces, etc. As I type now, the civil war is still technically going on, but there's only a couple of small beat-up fleets I need to chase down and eliminate. I assume that once they're gone, the "Senate Loyalist" faction is eliminated and that's that. I don't know yet if there's some other event triggered like an internal peace treaty, or establishing the Empire (vice Republic) or whatever.

So bottom line, is it "hard" to deal with? Not necessarily, but harder than any other faction, I'd say. Derails your ongoing plans, takes time, causes some chaos on your core provinces, etc. The battle AI isn't really any smarter than for any other faction, but they are Roman troops, your units don't possess any inherent qualitative advantage over them, so they can't be taken lightly.
In my campaign as Macedon, the Macedonian nobles emerged at my homeprovince of Pella, with 9 20 unit stacks and 6 20 ship fleets, all prime units.

It took me also 9 or 10 turns, to destroy them, by marching half my armies all the way from the caspian sea, ( thank god the chorasmii acepted the peace proposal), and a lot of fighting, where i lost a full stack army.

Well in the end i think its fun and interesting aspect, if only i could understand the mevhanics of the civil war, so far i believe it just hapens in some turn of the game no matter what.

nearchos
09-10-2013, 07:58
Are we talking Shoggie I or II here? cuz no player I've ever know could rampage anywhere through Japan in the original on expert setting:inquisitive:
Or any other setting exept very easy.....

nearchos
09-10-2013, 08:07
So far I haven't noticed anyone mention (and sorry if you have) the total lack of battle map variation.

This is a pet hate of mine. You know, back in RTW days you could forgive them for having fairly bland battle maps during sieges, but at least back then the maps outside of settlements actually kind of represented where the battle took place. It just seems to be the same maps, maybe with a different orientation. And the settlement battles? I was soooo dissapointed that after waiting 10 turns or so after my first settlement capture, getting ready for the next one... patiently tolerating all the glitches and performance issues... finally ready to take my second settlement and lo and behold it was the exact same map as before.... Considering how modular these maps are already I think it wouldn't be too much of an ask to put a bit more effort in to actually make it interesting to take a town, and actually require some, even a teeny-tiny amount of strategy on how best to take the town instead of the exact same way you took this one last time. It makes it worst that the defenders just sit at their defence flag (don't even get me started on those...) waiting for you slice them up, or that their actual army decided to jump in a boat and hang out in the dock so that I'm just breezing through their garrison troops before they even turn up.

Considering that the game is already 9 gB, I wouldn't mind an extra gB or two if that meant more battle maps, not that I think it would require anything near that amount of space...
I havent notice about the settlements but the battlefields looks the same, almost plain, with high grass and some trees here and there.

Myth
09-10-2013, 10:11
I had very little time to play last night and I'm on a business trip tonight, but this weekend I'm staying in Sofia and I'll make sweet, sweet love to Rome II. Here go my first impressions:

I need some way to run it in DX11, because It's clearly running in DX9 now and it looks just like Shogun II would at DX9. That being said, patch included, the game runs very well on my rig - notecably faster than Shogun II.

My specs are a 2 year old I7, 16 GB of 1600 mhz ram and an nVidia GTX 570 1gb graphics card. You can change all the graphics options on the fly and tweak them until you get the best frame rate/eye candy ratio. Granted, I'm running on the max settings and I have no severe drops in FPS, but for those with older/different systems they can definitely tweak it. No more of "you must restart the game for these settings to take effect" bull. And yes, you can tweak graphics settings while in a battle. Further more, if you do it on the menu, the game can run a demo for you and you can see your frame rate and performance (it runs the battle of Tetuborg forest demo). Yes the sky is red for me for some reason, but I'm sure this will be fixed.

While on the subject of graphics, and this is coming from a person who still plays very old games (I am not a graphics junkie by any means) - I feel CA has more power stored in that game engine, but they haven't really gotten the fine tuning right. Even when I crank the graphics up to 11 there are still odd glitches here and there - the engine can't decide if the town center is covered in marble tiles or sand for example. Some edges look pixelated even with AA on. The ultrabilinniear shadows look just like plain old shdows to me (maybe because I'm runing DX9 though. I mean, I can't tell if I am, but SII with DX11 had all sorts of blooms and glows and RII doesn't have them now, so I'm assuming it's DX9). But honestly that doesn't really matter. The game loads about 10 times faster than Shogun II does for me. The battles load 15 times faster. If I swtich the graphics down from Extreme to Ultra battle loading times are almost instant.

And graphics don't really matter that much in a TW game for me, because I'm a lazy general and I only ever bother leading armies early on (when every unit matters) or when faced with below average odds. The new cinematic cam is good for when you're bored and have your cav chasing down enemy units at max battle speed, though in some cases using it right before a clash really gives you the feeling that you're there in the thick of things. Seriously, it's not a gimmick, it's actually pretty awesome for those of us who enjoy roleplaying/immersion.

The actuall battles are different, but with some patch love the new battles will be better than Rome 1.

What's better:

- preset formations that are actually useful (ranged in front, solid line of infantry after, cav at the back. Or cav to the flanks, archers at the back etc.)
- you can lock down your initial formation: what this means is that whatever setup you have in your deployment phase, you can use Ctrl+G and lock the formation in place. When you move your army the formation is kept as is, and wit the right mouse button you can deloy it facing the correct way.
- The units are more responsive. Yes, you can actually disengage cavalry from melee and have them run away from the enemy.
- Unit animations and sounds are really immersive
- You'd be surprised but once I got to actually playig the game the new unit cards don't bother me at all and are actually pleasing for the eye. Also, it's not hard to tell the difference between units once you start paying attention. The unit cards and text are bigger than SII which is a life saver for me.
- General's Bodyguards and early cav in general no longer kill 80% of the enemy army via charging at their backs. Cav has a shock/support function at the start (haven't played wtih a cataphract faction or with Pretorian Cav yet)
- Javelins actually useful not only as general slayers or at the backs of enemy phalanxes. They break up the enemy line now.
- Slingers other than Rhodian Slingers actually useful (as they were historically)
- Playing battles in realism mode and with the new LOS feature really feels like you're actually leading men on the field and not like an arcade grind.

What's the same:
- Skirmish mode is still hit and miss, nothing new here
- The AI seems it's usual self, that is to say dumb with moments of clarity here and there

What changed for the worse and has to be fixed:
- Removal of various hotkeys like fire at will, skirmish mode, flaming missiles, close/loose formation and such (we need those!!!)
- Flaming javelins are here to ruin your day. Not only are they historically inaccurate, they pack a mean punch and will melt your cav general in seconds.
- Once your melee troops engage the enemy they tend to blob and start fighting like undisciplined barbarians. Imagine if you're playing rome 1 or M2TW and every unit behaved like peasants once they engaged.
- The killing speed of infantry is too high.
- Too many special abilities for generals.

Overall I think with some patching that the land battles will be great.

So I start the game, the intro is really great. Once I got to that angry looking, badass Legate pondering over the campaign map I got shivers. The tutorial I couldn't finish, it is very, very heavily scripted and meant for very new players.

On the actual campaign I only played 10-ish turns. Here are my impressions so far:

- The sound and voice acting are to my oppinion, good and fit the game perfectly. It is possible for one to immerse themselves in the world of classical antiquity.
- The graphics on the campaign map are great and really nothing better is required for a TW game.
- I agree that we can't zoom out far enough. Imagine playing Rome 1/ Medieval 2 from about a 20% lower angle. Yeah... But this is easily fixed with a patch.
- The campaign map does indeed possess lots of choke points between forests, mountains and hills but this is pretty historically accurate. Armies used to march with a huge baggage train, you can't expect them to trudge through dense forests, swamps or high mountains without any roads.
- The new city/province management system shows great potential indeed. You will have a lot to learn, more if you didn't play Shogun II. If you come straight from Rome 1/ Medieveal 2, you will have a steep learning curve to cover quickly.
- I agree that while the encyclopedia is easy to access and MUCH easier to read than the one in SII which had miniscule typeface size, some things are not made clear. For example, the temple to Neptune boosts income from ports, but is this only for the town it's built in, or for the whole province? Do temple bonuses stack? What about the bonuses from other structures? This will need to be discovered by trial and error IMO or CA will have to give us the information or to expand the encyclopedia. Still, most things we now take for granted from Rome 1/Med 2, we actually learned on our own from trial and error, so don't be a spoiled brat and just play the game :yes:
- The tech system is pretty, it makes sense, the names are great but it is indeed way too small and way too fast to research. By 260 BC you can have marian troops indeed, and that is bad mojo for the AI even on Legendary.
- Everything, from units to traits to names, is very immersive. If you right click on any unit you can read their stats a-la Shogun II and also a detailed historical explanation. Even a simple item equipped by your general will have such a description.
- Can't comment much on the campaign AI but Epirus got stomped 10 turns from the start of the game, so something isn't right here, considering that Epirus should be a major player in the region.
- Diplomacy looks like Shogun IIs and makes sense. Faction leaders have attitudes you can adjust to.
- Armies can indeed conjure sea worthy transports out of thin air which IMO should be removed and only left in if we get travesrable major rivers in Europe. Right now it literally doesn't matter if your army is on land or sea. You can right click from Rome to Alexandria and your legionaires will swim there no problem. IMO, considering that the Romans were notoriously bad sailors, and that trans sea sailing requires a lot of supplies, this has to be removed and changed. Do note though that Rome 1/Med 2/Shogun II all had the same ridiculous system of "1 dingy boat can carry a fullstack of 20 units of 80 horsemen per unit) so it wasn't really better but a different flavor of bad. IMO we do need transports as units in the game. Remember how the crusaders begged and parlayed for genoese/venetian transports to get them to the levant? We need this in TW games.
- Stances make sense and I have to explore them more. Playing on legendary and forgetting forced march on can really bite you in the butt. Also, armies can fort up but no longer magically create motte&bailey settlements in the middle of nowhere like in R1/M2
- You can grow your generals as they rank up and choose some traits for them, but the "random bullshit traits out of nowhere" system from R1 is still somewhat present. On turn 3 one of my generals got "not quite right" meaning he started going insane, and another freshly recruited one got "procrastinator" because I sent him to Rome as a governor because he had a +1 food for the local province as a starting trait...
- Army customization in names and symbols is really fun an immersive. I will strive to keep Legio I Italica alive until campaign end. Some are complaining that the bonuses are small but I disagree. 3% to melee damage at the first level up (which happens after your first victory) is not a small ammount. Army bonuses should not be game breaking - an enemy must have the option of coming back into the game if you wipe out their experienced army but they have more troops than you. If army experience gave absurd bonuses like 50% damage or something, the player would just grind to level them up and then become unstoppable. So I think these bonuses are fine, and this is a mechanic meant to increase immersion and roleplaying and not be a major strategic advantage for either side. Even so, 3% at first level is really not a small ammount, and I assume that 50 turns in I can have a legion that will have indeed a substantial edge over a fresh army. And that is all I really ask for - in reality veteran troops and commanding officers had an edge, they didn't turn into terminators on steroids.
- The movement points are indeed somewhat low when not using forced march, but you can choose traits for extra MP bonuses for your champion (and stick him in your main stack), and get items that give MP bonuses as well. So I thnk later on with more experience and careful use of forced march the MP will be enough. And actually low MP means less blitzing of the map, which is what CA is going for and which is a good thing. What fun is there to blob and be unstoppable by turn 20?

I need to play more to give a detailed review but I think Rome II is a god game and will probably become the best in the series (excluding Shogun 1 and Medieval 1) with a few easily implemented changes.

phred
09-10-2013, 18:24
Does that actually happen? I've never seen it, and it would invalidate all we know about how population works. Maybe there was something else going on?

I think it's representative of upgrading farms into giant latinfundia that results in putting the small farmer out of business.
Since the latinfundia are worked by slaves, then unemployed small farmers flock to the cities and cause squalor.
Historically, I think something like that happened in the imperial time frame. (also cheap wheat from Egypt put small farmers in Italy out of business).

Suraknar
09-11-2013, 01:17
I think it's representative of upgrading farms into giant latinfundia that results in putting the small farmer out of business.
Since the latinfundia are worked by slaves, then unemployed small farmers flock to the cities and cause squalor.
Historically, I think something like that happened in the imperial time frame. (also cheap wheat from Egypt put small farmers in Italy out of business).

Some nice thoughts here :)

I am not sure however that the game uses these factors, especially the cheap Wheat from Egypt :P ... something is amiss, the game is different, maybe it is a combination of play style and a missed bug?

I am going to be watching this, so far in my first campaign I am making at lest 3 farms per province.

Spoonska
09-11-2013, 14:55
I just hit the 75 hour mark last night in terms of time played, so I feel like I can give this game a fair shake. My sentiments about Rome 2 have changed a lot in the past week. The honeymoon phase of loving the game, when it's unpacking and you're as giddy as a little school girl... It gets stomped out when you have that first round of bugs, and crashes. Kinda like when David Goyer shreds one of your childhood heroes. I wrote earlier in this thread "Good not great", and that is still generally my feeling. It's not the best Total War game I've ever played, but it's most certainly not the worst or even second worst.

That being said I really dig this game, a lot. Sometimes I wonder if I'm playing the same game as everyone else that tear it apart with such hostility and bile. I get bugs sure, like: Antioch fully upgraded is a siege nightmare for the computer. AI bull rushing for the capture point, defeated armies with only a handful of units suiciding into full stacks, lag, fps drops... There's a really weird thing where when I start the game in windowed mode I have to always select the proper resolution, I guess Rome 2 isn't dual monitor friendly?But none of the Total War games are. Stuff like the navy just sitting around not doing anything or ignoring orders. During a siege the troops won't throw their fire sticks at my gate, sometimes the sticks go through the gate causing 0 damage. Sieges not happening because siege weaponry won't fire (this happened in Rome 1. Yay for continuity). During large sieges on capitals the game always crashes when reinforcements enter for the enemy. It might sound a little overwhelming, but its not all happening at the same time. One of these things might happen ever 3-5 turns.

I'm not apologizing for it. I'm not a CA apologist. These are things that absolutely shouldn't be in the game, and if they are you should run into it maybe once or twice every 100 turns, bugs happen. The marketing department, whoever's fault it was clearly misled consumers about Rome 2. Look at the Teutoburg Forest playthrough and then run the benchmark OR play the battle in game. There is a night and day difference in terms of visual appeal. These are things that are inexcusable in the eyes of a consumer. That may have not been their intention, but more or less CA/Sega played that card. Speaking of that playthrough, whens the next Rally Point? You want to make an apology to fans Mikey boy, that's the perfect avenue. The avenue that put out videos almost once a month for the past year exclaiming about the wondrous things that Rome 2 would have, but fail to deliver on launch day.

All that said, I'm really invested in the current campaign I have going. That's where 90% of those 75 hours are made up of. I love the way they reworked the talent tree system. In Shogun / FotS there were blatantly obvious talents that you wouldn't take if your life depended on it.It was cookie cutter every single time. How many people do you know that went down the right side of the General's talent tree in Shogun? You didn't because Generals where one if not your most valuable resource. If I'm recruiting a General in Rome 2, and I see he gives bonuses to something like Taxes or Public order then I can recruit him as a Governor and specialize in public order, and siege defense. If I have an army in the north that needs good reinforcements then I can spec a General for mercenary bonuses. People were originally upset that Generals would die too quickly, but having played a good bit I don't mind it.They level up quickly and my needs for a particular army change every 30 or so turns. Agents are great as well for most of the same reasons, they are a jack of all trades. Take the Champion for example; you can deploy him in your province to boost public order, throw him in an army to boost experience, morale, or replenishment rate, or throw him in an enemy territory, and have him make money or incite slave revolts among other things.

I also really love the expanded economy from Shogun. It's really a juggling act of balancing taxed income versus public order versus food. In Shogun it was set it and forget it cookie cutter builds. In the 155 turns I've played I've restructured my empire three times, and every single time brought with it its own challenges. Having unit replenishment tied into food, and then food being an inhibitor for what you can and can't build was a fantastic design choice. I've seen people talk about how much a throwaway the economy is in Rome 2, and to that I say where is your economic victory? I have a pretty firm grasp of the economics in this game, and the most I can squeeze without a ton of food / order disarray is around 20-25k talents a turn. That 80k mark seems unfathomable to me at the moment. Point being when you're going for a military victory or a cultural victory the economy is supposed to be secondary or tertiary. Your focus is meant to be taken away from economy.

Even though I'm loving this game there are a ton of things I wish were more fleshed out. I really don't care about politics in this game. There is nothing really steering me towards them, and I feel no connection to the people on that screen. And that's not because they die too fast or some other excuse, it's because they pop up out of nowhere, and every now and then you'll get a random event message about them; and I'm like," Errr, okay I guess you want to adopt someone or something ...? " A family tree or something desperately needs to make a comeback. I will be an apologist for multiplayer. For the past 2 years that Shogun has been out people have constantly cried about the complexity and fairness of the Avatar / Veteran system. It seemed at least to me the vocal majority wanted to go back to the simpleness of custom games that Rome 1 had. Well they did that, but I'm not really surprised those same people that wanted less now want more. I've personally never felt that way because I liked everything about the MP in Shogun 2. It was a game within a game. With Rome 2 though, it gives me the same mixed bag of feelings that I have with things like the political system. A system that's not fully fleshed out or hopefully, (but I honestly don't have a lot of hope)will eventually be implemented all the way.

I'm an avid streamer. Pretty much all of my 75 hours are recorded on Twitch. I've also spent a good bit of time watching other streamers play, and I realized my play style is very different from them. Perhaps that's why I have such a differing view of Rome 2 than most people. I like to play a little more passive, and lure out those field engagements.Those that say the AI is too passive; I streamed for 6 hours last night and only moved from turn 150 to turn 155. I'm constantly getting attacked by people I'm at war with, and not minor armies, but full stacks.When I started out the night, Egypt landed a full stack on the shores of Jerusalem trying to take it back. I sprung a civil war on like turn 152, and 12 stacks that were 1/2 -3/4 full marched out N,S,E,W towards each of my provinces and gave me all sorts of headaches last night (crushed them though, filthy rebel scum). At one point 4 stacks would hit Pergamon resulting in a 60-something minute siege. All the while Syracuse is sieging 3 of my towns in the west.

To wrap this up, I want to quote Reluctant Samurai where he made this point in another thread:
And yes, you may spend considerable time right now, playing the game....How much of your attraction to the game, at the moment, is simply novelty? how much is because of the 'meat & potatoes' of the game itself? how much time will you be spending 6 months from now? or a year? I got this game because I love past Total Wars. The novelty of that wore off pretty quick when "Pre-Alpha" Teutoburg forest looked nothing like the "Finished" version. Reality comes sharply crashing down after that.The meat & potatoes of this game fall into the 80/20 rule for me. 80% of this game is fun, immersive and a rewarding experience. 20% as always is what should've happened or what could've happened (as with every game,ever). I don't know if I'll come around to liking this game as much as I like Shogun 2 or even Rome 1, but I'm excited for the future of this game. And that's not a sarcastic, " Oh you mean when the game is out of beta, herp derp ". I'm optimistic about future additions, and playing this game into the ground. Even if the bugs stayed, and there was never another patch , I'd probably still sink hundreds of hours into this game. I'm enjoying it that much.

Bramborough
09-11-2013, 18:49
I just hit the 75 hour mark last night in terms of time played, so I feel like I can give this game a fair shake. Etc Etc.

Nice post, Spoonska. Well written. I find your take on the game close to my own.

fallen851
09-11-2013, 19:09
I like to play a little more passive, and lure out those field engagements.

Nice review.

It is upsetting that you have to "lure" out field engagements. Rome Total Siege II?

Hooahguy
09-11-2013, 19:24
Great review Spoonska, saw some of your posts on Reddit, cant agree more with your posts.

Barkhorn1x
09-11-2013, 19:59
Nice review.

It is upsetting that you have to "lure" out field engagements. Rome Total Siege II?

Yea, and CA stated it would be just the opposite.

BroskiDerpman
09-11-2013, 20:06
Hoping they do betas before release for their next TW game. (Before...)

Antiquity in the Western world is full of different cultures and such but it just feels really misrepresented and implemented. (Tried out Rome 2, on a friend's account)

The cultures to me feel like Shogun 2's and the game's ui bugs me. Plus the over streamlining of gameplay.

Spoonska
09-11-2013, 21:28
Nice review.

It is upsetting that you have to "lure" out field engagements. Rome Total Siege II?

What I meant by that is: encircling a settlement , ambush stance or moving my troops into mountain passes / valleys. The latter frustrates me in game because often times an army would rather go around you then engage you. I know it makes strategic sense for the AI to do that but whatevs. If I implied I was perhaps cleverly tricking the game to do that, apologies. I've been able to get off ambushes, but I have yet to be ambushed myself. I'm not sure if the difficulty level I'm playing on (Hard campaign, VH for battles) has an effect. I think it did in Shogun ?

BroskiDerpman
09-11-2013, 21:32
Think that also can happen on the battle maps, especially sieges. I got the ai to run forward to get shot and then back repeatedly. What's so nice is that I'm besieging and heavily outnumbered. Then the ai rushed forward and back all the time till their forces were shattered.

Roflstomp victory, going to try this out on every siege and easily take over all of Europe.

CaptainCrunch
09-12-2013, 00:19
... I've been able to get off ambushes, but I have yet to be ambushed myself. I'm not sure if the difficulty level I'm playing on (Hard campaign, VH for battles) has an effect. I think it did in Shogun ?

I'm playing a 'normal' campaign and I've been ambushed several times. Once, while campaigning in Magna Graecia with Epirus my military intelligence was intercepted by the AI and I got a message saying that my strategic plans were now compromised. When I moved on Consentia I had scoped it out with my spy and found it to be defended only by the garrison, but when I attacked it that same turn I found 2 Roman support armies waiting for me in ambush! Pretty nice, wish stuff like that happened more often.


Think that also can happen on the battle maps, especially sieges. I got the ai to run forward to get shot and then back repeatedly. What's so nice is that I'm besieging and heavily outnumbered. Then the ai rushed forward and back all the time till their forces were shattered.

Roflstomp victory, going to try this out on every siege and easily take over all of Europe.

Right now the AI can't deal with missile units well on land, either defending or attacking. They often sit there and get showered to death, or run back & forth like you mentioned -or- use their own archers, for example, to attack your heavy infantry with their dinky little melee weapons as first assault units :laugh4:

Myth
09-12-2013, 00:37
Think that also can happen on the battle maps, especially sieges. I got the ai to run forward to get shot and then back repeatedly. What's so nice is that I'm besieging and heavily outnumbered. Then the ai rushed forward and back all the time till their forces were shattered.

Roflstomp victory, going to try this out on every siege and easily take over all of Europe.

You will get torn up by heavy infantry that way. At some point plinking bullets or javs won't do squat versus armoured phalanxes.

BroskiDerpman
09-12-2013, 00:44
By then I'll be blasting the ai with artillery, even then in SP missiles are more useful vs the ai.

Vetted slingers seem fun... I'll also have my own heavy infantry.

It's just much easier to exploit the ai in this game. Also I can keep the ai occupied and sneak up on the capture point and win while the ai is too must running around in circles or just standing still.

I'm glad my friend let me try out the game so I could see how it's like. I can go on but people would get mad at me of course.

Spoonska
09-12-2013, 01:27
I'm playing a 'normal' campaign and I've been ambushed several times. Once, while campaigning in Magna Graecia with Epirus my military intelligence was intercepted by the AI and I got a message saying that my strategic plans were now compromised. When I moved on Consentia I had scoped it out with my spy and found it to be defended only by the garrison, but when I attacked it that same turn I found 2 Roman support armies waiting for me in ambush! Pretty nice, wish stuff like that happened more often.

That sounds pretty great. I didn't add it in my post, but I really like the reworked version of ambushes from Shogun. It's a lot easier to set up hidden along the CPU's path, and contain them from bolting to a hill or something like that.

CaptainCrunch
09-12-2013, 02:58
... It's just much easier to exploit the ai in this game. Also I can keep the ai occupied and sneak up on the capture point and win while the ai is too must running around in circles or just standing still...

The AI is very easy to exploit, but that's how it is with most TW games. It's the nature of how the battle AI is instantly fed info on your battlefield commands, and their single-minded suicidal focus on attacking units it deems vulnerable to their own. We all know you can get every unit of AI spear infantry to chase around a single unit of cav all over the map for instance. I avoid exploiting it at all costs to try to make the battles at least a little more interesting.

I also make it a personal policy to never take any capture points in sieges, cuz that's way too easy. I also remove the battle timer, try to always fight outnumbered and fight 'til one side is crushed. Capture points are absurd and seriously gamey in my opinion, in any scenario. If they applied it right it could be good for sieges, in certain situations. But I feel the way it is now is goofy. You can be in a pitched battle in the middle of the streets surrounded by the enemy and they all suddenly rout cuz one of your units took the central capture point off in the distance. :thumbsdown:

CaptainCrunch
09-12-2013, 03:00
That sounds pretty great. I didn't add it in my post, but I really like the reworked version of ambushes from Shogun. It's a lot easier to set up hidden along the CPU's path, and contain them from bolting to a hill or something like that.

Yes. Definitely agree. I especially used to hate when they ran and hid on a mountain top surrounded by forest in RTW.

VAE VICTUS
09-13-2013, 02:06
the learning curve on this game is quite steep for me ( I never really got into Shogun 2 ). I am likely doing everything wrong, but I enjoy because if the game were too simplistic I would grow tired of it quickly. This game is so rich, I think it will be still be fun and challenging to play ( I am a terrible general ) well into the future. Some controls could be more intuitive however, but this is a small complaint from someone who still frantically scrolls through the encyclopedia looking for ways to grow the economy.

VAE VICTUS
09-13-2013, 02:07
yes, I enjoy ambushes, you know how to use fireballs or did I make them up?

nafod
09-17-2013, 01:41
I must say the Beta patch hasn't necessarily fixed the AI to perfection, but if you play on hard and try to mail in the war against the Etruscans they will at least make it difficult. Granted if I played the battles they unleashed on my garrisons it might have been different but at least they put up a fight as opposed to rolling over and laying siege with 1-2 units.

I was so surprised I decided to start over!

ArcturUs
09-23-2013, 17:52
Uhm a noob question, has anyone used first person view in the battles? How do you do that? I'm half way into the campaign and still don't know how to do it ~:confused:

Sp4
09-23-2013, 19:27
Insert button.

ShadesPanther
09-24-2013, 13:50
Uhm a noob question, has anyone used first person view in the battles? How do you do that? I'm half way into the campaign and still don't know how to do it ~:confused:

Insert, as mentioned by Sp4 or the button that looks like a sort of shield in the bottom left corner (I think it says cinematic view when you hover over it)

Cyclades
09-25-2013, 04:25
Cinematic view for battle replays is impressive.

nearchos
09-25-2013, 07:57
What I meant by that is: encircling a settlement , ambush stance or moving my troops into mountain passes / valleys. The latter frustrates me in game because often times an army would rather go around you then engage you. I know it makes strategic sense for the AI to do that but whatevs. If I implied I was perhaps cleverly tricking the game to do that, apologies. I've been able to get off ambushes, but I have yet to be ambushed myself. I'm not sure if the difficulty level I'm playing on (Hard campaign, VH for battles) has an effect. I think it did in Shogun ?
It is a tactics the AI is using, since i think MTW2, to avoid battle and go for the settlements, i remember that in MTW2 the only defencive open field battles i enjoyed were those when i was besieging a settlement and an enemy field army wanted to lift the siege,( very rare).
But i think that CA must change something here since even historicaly, during a war, there was a rule.
Seek and destroy the enemy in the field and then proceed to conquer his lands unoposed.
I mean, whats the point for the AI to avoid battle and conquer a settlement, by fighting a battle which will cost him any way leaving your field army intact who in next turn will assault the settlement destroy thim and retake it.
In history the one that was less powerfull was trying to avoid battle and choose at least a good battleground.
So AI must be more capable in handling first of all the economy, then the bilding decisions, then unit recruitment/army composition and then when it decides that it is profitable to attack you do it properly.
Invade your lands, seek and destroy your standing army and then rambage your land.

Myth
09-25-2013, 09:13
Historically is a very broad term. Ptiched battles and bloody city assaults happened more frequently in antiquity than during the middle ages. In the times of knights and chivarly, long, drawn out sieges were the norm. They would most likely end with some form of parlay and a relinquishing of this and that between the nobility involved in the fight.

Pitched battles and siege assaults were bloody and costly business, and your dirt farmer levies were going to break morale and run at the first hint of trouble. These were not disciplined Roman troops or blood thirsty proud warrior societies like the celts, gauls and the germanic tribes. That's why in the middle ages the most prominent battles we remember were actually the most rare type of battle - like the siege of Acre, the fall of Jersualem etc.

That being said, settlements do, in fact, turn into deathtraps for the AI in R2TW. Since unlike in games like Rome 1 and Medieval 2, here the conquering army loses all it's movement points upon entering the settlement. In the previous games you gould go in, sack and run away. Here you go in and you're stuck, and the next turn the player comes with two stacks and splatters you. I know that's how I play. Especially now in my Avernii campaign, I'm making great use of the Celtic Ballista units, raining fire on the clumped up low morale barb units just sitting there inside a settlement or fort.

Spoonska
09-25-2013, 12:26
With the latest patch came the "Sally Forth"ability. For those unfamiliar what it does is: gives you the option while under siege to meet the enemy in battle, AKA have a field fight instead of a siege fight. This might be one of my favorite changes. I even had the AI use this option last night. I was taken off guard by it.

ShadesPanther
09-25-2013, 12:31
With the latest patch came the "Sally Forth"ability. For those unfamiliar what it does is: gives you the option while under siege to meet the enemy in battle, AKA have a field fight instead of a siege fight. This might be one of my favorite changes. I even had the AI use this option last night. I was taken off guard by it.

It should at least force them to fight a field battle now. Is the Garrison army included in the battle?


Although for me I have had lots of field battles, the difference between normal and hard is huge.

Spoonska
09-25-2013, 12:42
Yes, it is.

Ituralde
10-08-2013, 09:22
This is probably a bit late, but as I don't get to play as much as I want to, this is my first impression of the province system and I love it!

In my Suebi campaign I own 4 to 5 provinces and finally have the money and technology to build the third to fourth tier buildings. I've never had this much fun just tinkering around with my buildings in any previous Total War title. I'm trying out different specializations trying to get as close as possible to my happy cap and reducing my food surplus, which was around 30 at one time, to get more money. Now I've raised my income by 3000 to 4000 just by shuffling buildings around. It's really fun to discover all the synergies between the different kind of buildings, find the right shrine to go with it and not have food or happiness problems. There's just so many buildings to choose from and this has added a whole new scope to the game for me.

Also the Unique Ability of the Suebi to get happiness from war declarations plays into this very nicely as well. I declared several wars and declared on enemies where I don't intend to attack just to retain the happiness level back home. Gotta love those blood-thirsty Barbarians!

Vuk
01-09-2014, 18:23
Well, my sister got me RII as a Christmas gift during the Steam sale, so I installed it and gave it a whirl. I gotta say, this is worse than I ever imagined. This is it patched? I thought they said that it will run nearly as good as SII. I can play SII on nearly the highest settings without issue, but this barely gets 6 fps on the lowest settings. The animations are retarded and glitchy, the game is horribly unrealistic, and there is just no joy in playing it. It feels like it was made for 8 year olds. (or it would, if it were not so unecassarily sexualized)

I will probably never buy about CA game in my life after this disappointment. Back to the classics for me; I don't need this garbage. Congratulations on losing a fan of nearly a decade CA. I hope you are proud of your work.

Mhantra
01-09-2014, 19:02
Bummer, I am almost 300 hours in, still learning and enjoying.

Hooahguy
01-09-2014, 20:07
Sucks for you, Ive really enjoyed it and I only have lag when Im in a battle of over 12,000.

:shrug:

BroskiDerpman
01-09-2014, 21:40
I feel bad for your sister Vuk.

Going to go save up my money for something else. I can just see others play Rome 2 and already know what it's like. :creep: (Plus some of my friends from RTK see it as mediocre at best and some highly recommend me to spend my time on something better, I take their word; and no they're not from TWC)

Kamakazi
01-09-2014, 23:23
im over 300 hours in... still enjoying it myself

easytarget
01-10-2014, 01:26
I don't necessarily equate time spent playing a game (apparently) with the quality of it.

easytarget
01-10-2014, 01:28
But I have noticed a high propensity in the TW crowd in correlating the two.

Hooahguy
01-10-2014, 01:32
Because generally I think the reasoning is that if you dont enjoy it, why still play? Logically it makes no sense to play hundreds of hours in a game that you dont enjoy. Unless you are a masochist.

easytarget
01-10-2014, 01:42
Yeah, that's where your logic fails you a bit, plenty of gamers spend a lot of time in games I consider complete shite. And in many quite a lot of time. COD comes immediately to mind.

Hooahguy
01-10-2014, 01:46
plenty of gamers spend a lot of time in games I consider complete shite.
Well, maybe they dont think its shite?

easytarget
01-10-2014, 01:51
Indeedy, there is that.

And I'll freely admit over the course of more than a couple decades I've wasted way too many hours in way too many just ok games, because for me 9 out of 10 usually are just ok.

Point being, time is simply not a gauge one would use to determine quality. And that goes well beyond just reviewing game content, it applies to a whole lot of things in life. :bow:

Hooahguy
01-10-2014, 03:05
Nothing about quality and everything about enjoyment. It is possible to enjoy a sub-par product. I happen to enjoy Rome 2, which is in most cases a sub-par product. IMO its an overall good game, but still sub-par in many places, and with a combination of mods I think it brings it up to par. Of course, the mods shouldnt really be necessary, but thats the way it is.

My point is, time spent is more indicative of enjoyment of the game and not whether or not it is an overall good game.

Myth
01-10-2014, 03:35
I think the horrible performance is what's throwing you off. I suspect the video card or processor as the culprit. Can you post your specs, Vuk?

Sp4
01-10-2014, 07:19
I've played some with the DeI mod and now I can't play the vanilla game anymore even though the DeI mod has one flaw and that it, it either makes the game way too easy or way too hard.

Buzghush
01-10-2014, 14:23
I'm over 350 hours and still enjoying the game. Yes, there some bugs but game still playable and enjoyable. Also, they keep patching the game.

Andres
01-10-2014, 15:25
I think the horrible performance is what's throwing you off. I suspect the video card or processor as the culprit. Can you post your specs, Vuk?

That's what I was thinking as well.
Vuk

Vuk
01-11-2014, 02:22
It is not just the performance. In fact, that is the smallest part of it.
The specs on the computer I am using are not that good, but like I said, it ran SII just fine.
3 Gigs ram
2.4 ghz dual core processor
GeForce 9500 GT

They said that if you could play SII you should be able to play this, but this is unplayable and SII runs just fine. I am calling BS on their claims.

Sp4
01-11-2014, 02:48
It seems to be the biggest issue.

Beskar
01-11-2014, 06:25
It is not just the performance. In fact, that is the smallest part of it.
The specs on the computer I am using are not that good, but like I said, it ran SII just fine.
3 Gigs ram
2.4 ghz dual core processor
GeForce 9500 GT

They said that if you could play SII you should be able to play this, but this is unplayable and SII runs just fine. I am calling BS on their claims.

This game is far more demanding on the CPU than Shogun 2, especially on the turn phases and the like, it is foolish to have 'show turns' as the computer goes into melt-down and by the looks of it, my Q6600 is more powerful than your own processor. From the experience, it left me with a "I think I need a new computer" is one of them. When I get one of the 'lightning storm' weather patterns (some seem fine, but now and then...) I have to consider opening taskmanager to close the game.

However, I am able to play a majority of games on Ultra+, such as Skyrim where I have tons of extra graphical enhancements on top.

Strangely, a game which I have felt hitting my computer hard is Starbound, which is a 2D side-scroller, which had several memory leak and other software-side issues to contend with. So how much of it is "My computer" vs "Poor Programming" does make you wonder with Rome2.

fallen851
01-11-2014, 16:44
Strangely, a game which I have felt hitting my computer hard is Starbound, which is a 2D side-scroller, which had several memory leak and other software-side issues to contend with. So how much of it is "My computer" vs "Poor Programming" does make you wonder with Rome2.

I've found that most TW games are poorly optimized.

Hooahguy
01-11-2014, 18:11
Thread merged with the first impressions thread. All threads dealing solely with user reviews will be moved to this thread.

ichi
06-25-2014, 05:56
So is it possible to necro a sticky thread? Regardless, here goes ...

I completely missed the release of R2TW, because I was still dabbling with S2 (DLC and Radious mods) and I disliked the original Rome soooo much.

and I'll admit I wanted to hate R2, but I got it for free and its summer so I loaded it up. I'm running a comp that can handle R2 easily, so a lot of the previous comments in this thread don't apply.

I read a few bits of guides but really played this one 'in ignorance', which led to a false start when I realized that unlike Shogun I had to have a General/Admiral to build an army, I couldn't garrison a few Ashigaru to boost order and couldn't build replacements in Rome and have them come meet me in Sicily. OK.

Once I got the food/order/income stuff figured out and understood how which buildings to pursue, province management seemed straightforward. Early Roman units are pretty strong so no problems with my campaigns. Actually later Roman units seemed way OP and there wasn't a lot of challenge crushing most settlements.

My big complaint about S2TW is that I end up fighting a high proportion of castle battles compared to field battles, and while there are a lot of settlement fights in R2 it didn't seem as bad, especially early on. The naval battles between fleets was interesting, but I still don't fully understand the fights between fleets and armies in transport. There didn't seem to be the issue of factions loading up armies on fleets and showing up in the heart of my territory, something those damn daimyo were notorious for trying, but the small army harassment was constant and tied down my armies effectively at times.

Diplomacy felt consistent with previous TW titles, in that no one wanted to be my friend at the beginning. At some point I guess I got big enough that everyone wanted to trade, and then my income shot up to the point it was irrelevant to my gameplay - I had so much cash I could pump up every legion and fleet and upgrade every building. I even threw cash at some diplomacy, which worked well.

I found the Client State aspect lacking, in that my clients never acted like anything I said mattered to them. One wouldn't trade, and at one point two of my clients fought to the death, and there was nothing I could do diplomatically to make them play well with each other. None of my enemies respected any of my clients either, several of my clients got wiped out and the aggressor didn't get any penalty or even an acknowledgement.

There's a lot more content to R2 than Shogun IMHO, the game lasted a long time (I may be slow too, so YMMV). I really liked the lack of any time constraints, something that made S2TW seem rushed and never allowed for pleasant province building. The provincial building chains in Rome seem rather dull and basic tho, there was a lack of a goal or target building. The simple research chains worked for me, I was able to unlock stuff at an appropriate pace and felt like I had a lot of choice about which priority to go after.

The characters seemed to die too fast, I'd just get them skilled and then bam natural causes. I finally figured out the leftmost choice was usually younger and lasted longer, but still seemed to cycle too quickly.

The games not as pretty as Shogun, but it does look good on Ultra. They did include the classic TW meme - "A Shamefur Dispray" which is cool but it lacks the overdone accent. any latin scholars?

I used Google Translate English to Latin for Shameful Display and got turpis Lorem ipsum dolor

I then used Google Translate Latin to English for turpis Lorem ipsum dolor and got Lakers fan

how funny is that?

The units of the various cultures also play well, I still feel like arty is too powerful tho. Fortunately the AI doesn't protect their arty from my cav (an old Shoggy trick was to order your cav to run through arty to the other side, they'd engage on contact but the AI doesn't react as quickly as when you order cav to directly attack).

In the end I found the game worthy of the TW series, probably my fav after STW, MTW, and S2TW. I looked forward to getting on and was challenged enough and rewarded enough that it made for a pleasant experience. I'm thinking I might go once more as some obscure faction, but probably not as Rome anymore. Maybe I'll set it on impossibru. If I do I'll report back, if not I'll see you all when the next TW drops.

ichi
06-27-2014, 08:38
OK tried to go again with an obscure eastern faction, two turns and I'm done, no enthusiasm for it (and I played S2 through every faction).

See you next game

Myth
07-03-2014, 07:51
I'm not much unto client states unless I'm a barbarian faction that can form a confederation.

Sp4
07-03-2014, 10:22
All allies in this are pretty useless and incapable because the AI sucks or maybe it does so purposefully to make it harder for you. Allying with a bunch of people or making them client states is actually a pretty good way to weaken them in the long term and it gets them off your back in the meantime.

Myth
07-03-2014, 14:11
I preffer aggressive expansion of my own emprie. I need the food, gold and training centers.