RTW Bugs

[Spino]

From your above description I must ask this..Do you group these units before you deploy them or afterwards? I'll tell you why...I noticed this and also noticed that if the units you arrange are grouped, they will rearrange to their prior relative positions regardless of how you group them. However once you ungroup these units, arrange them as you want and then group them, they maintain their formation...

You hit the nail on the head Orda. That is exactly what happens. I just discovered that last night. It is such a headache to have to group, ungroup and group again. Why did they try to reinvent Medieval's command system? Rome's command system isn't all that bad but it seems to be a case of two steps forward, one step back. The headaches caused by this stuff really puts a tarnish on such a brilliant game.

[hoom]

I'd call it one step forward & two back myself...

I think what they have done is stuck the previously largely unused optional group formations lower down, so that you have to use them & we're all clashing with that or something.

[Colovion]

I was assaulting a town and had my 6 units of Hastati in a group as they moved through the gates and then I wanted to split them up to put one on either side of teh enemy and flank them. So I took 3 and put them in a seperate group. Then I went to take those three and align them with the drag/click function in front of the enemy and - suddenly it shows all 6 units of Hastati on the battle map about to be aligned as my mouse is dragging. I check and I only have three selected. I retry with the other three, same thing. I try making the groups again and other things but it keeps doing it!!! I eventually had to do it individually. >:( This was a HUGE annoyance as the amount of time it took me to do that almost lost me the battle through time contraints.

Oh yeah and when assaulting the center sqaure you can just line your missile troops up and rain hell on the enemy as they bunch up on the square - they never/VERY rarely attack. This is at Hastati/Pila range so it was really weird.

[hoom]

Heh, I just had a funny one doing some custom battles.
Two phalanxes meeting exactly head to head on guard mode just stand there spear tip to spear tip & shuffle to their respective rights.
I watched two units shuffle till they were no longer facing each other
After they turned to face each other again, they did start fighting though.

[bhutavarna]

on one bridge battle, i saw one enemy unit run straight into the river instead crossing the bridge. they all drown except for the captain who miraculously reappear from the river only to rout. this happened as my own unit was half way across the bridge to attack.

[ShellShock]

I live in the UK and I can't get the game until Friday, and this is really bugging me. Does this count?

However, before the mods jump on me, do we need to be providing more information to CA about the bugs?

The following instructions are for Windows XP (2000 is similar):

1. Exact circumstances in which the bug occurs. This seems to be pretty much covered already.

2. System information. Run dxdiag, and click Save All Information; this will produce a text file which contains all the details about your system configuration. It would be useful to attach this to your post (dothe mods object?).

3. Crashes. This should produce a Dr Watson log. Run drwtsn32 (in Windows\System32) and note the Log File Path. This will be where the log is created. Open the log file in notepad and search from the end upwards for "Application exception". You have now found the crash log for the last crash. Check the App name is for RTW and the When matches the time the crash occurred. If so then copy from this point to the end of the file into another file, and attach the new file here.

Dr Watson can also produce crash dumps, which is a snapshot of your computer's memory at the time of the crash, but I've never had much success debugging with these. There is a better JIT debugger from Microsoft, called WinDbg, but it is a bit complicated, so I'll leave it to the more dedicated.

4. Memory leaks. It may be useful to CA to capture a log of the performance of RTW.

Go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Performance. Expand "Performance Logs and Alerts", and click on "Counter Logs". Right click in the right hand pane and select "New Log Settings" from the pop up menu. Enter a name (e.g., RTW), and click OK. In the dialog, click Add Counters.

In the "Add Counters" dialog, change the "Performance object" to Process, select "All counters" and "All instances", click Add and then Close. You can leave the sample interval at 15 seconds.

Click on Log Files tab, and click Configure to change the location of the log file.

On the Schedule tab, select the log to start Manually.

Click OK

You should now see "RTW" appear in the list of counter logs, along with "System Overview". Right click RTW and select Start from the pop up menu to start the log. Now play RTW - if it lags big time, it could be leaking memory. Exit RTW, and stop the Counter log.

You now have a performance log file that can be used for diagnostic purposes (or sent to CA?). To open the file, click on "System Monitor" in the Performance applet in Control Panel, Administrative Tools.

Type Ctrl+L or click the hard drive icon in the tool bar, and enter the Log file as the file you've generated.

Then type Ctrl+I, or use the plus icon in the tool bar, to add counters to the graph from the log file. The only Performance object available will be Process (as that is all we've logged).

For memory leaks, a good counter to view is "Private Bytes". The instance should be "Rome" (or whatever the RTW exe name is).


It could be CA can reproduce these bugs themselves, and do not need all this diagnostic information from us; however it must be difficult for them to match all the different types of hardware that us users have.

Once I get my hands on the game, if I get any of the bugs that other people have reported, I'm going to try and gather as much evidence as possible. Whether this will be of any use to CA is another matter

[AnnieP]

1. Was able to be in MP Foyer 3 days ago. Try the #ignore command. Horror. Doesn't work.

2. Try SP and now can't even get into MP foyer. Crashed to Desk Top.

3. Try uninstall, and uninstall process crashed.

The game didn't like me.

Annie

[Colovion]

The enemy AI doesn't know how to bunch their units into cohesive forces, nor lead their big stacks with their family members to build Generals up. I'm getting amazing 10 star generals so easily because I'm rolling over loads of small bands of Gauls led by captains and then the Generals are even leading small stacks wheras the larger stacks are rare and led by captains. If they would figure out how to group their units better it would be much more difficult, and less like I'm fighting a bunch of rabble.

[Dimeola]

Upon exiting last campaign system rebooted.

[hoom]

My CTD on entry of the Senate panel was solved by installing the windows media runtime :)
Though now some pre-existing wmv files do not render correctly in media player :(

[LittleRaven]

For some odd reason, towards the end of a very long battle, the sound effect get set to mute. Maybe I'm inadvertantly pushing a keyboard shortcut, but I can't figure out what. Only happens during very long battles.

Also, the grouping bug is very, very irritating. In terms of patches, FIX THIS FIRST.

The game still rocks, though.

[Bigwig]

Bugs I've found so far:

1. The whole friendly fire thing, that is missile units killing themselves when they are overlapping each other (never put your hastati on fire at will mode in the middle of a big melee, ouch)

2. I can't order groups of guys to run. If I want to charge some grouped hastati through a gate for example, I have to ungroup them first, otherwise they'll just walk through.

3. Sometimes units just sort of forget their orders. I told some Principes on the flank of a bunch of barbarians to charge, only to have them walk up to them and just stop within a few feet.

4. Sieges against towns with wooden walls suck. You can park your archers/onagers close to the city walls and have a field day firing at the guys inside because they just run around in circles (literally). Also, while not a bug, it kind of sucks that there are only a few locations where you can breach the walls, and even then the size of the holes are always really small. It would be nice if I could knock down big sections of the walls so I could squeeze more troops through.

5. Enemies camping in the plaza during a siege can just be picked off with missile troops, they never go out to fight.

6. The battle advisor keeps telling me that the enemy is deploying on top of a hill even when they're standing in the middle of an open plain.

There's probably more, I just can't think of them.

[Plaxx]

I don't think a lot of these are actually bugs

[Colovion]

I don't think a lot of these are actually bugs

I'd call all of those problems we hope to be fixed.

1. I'm really annoyed sometimes when I group some units, tell them to go somewhere, click "run" for the group, and then they walk there. I always have to click for them to run places individually. I have been able to click two or three units and click "run" otherwise they don't even listen to me and continue having a good ol' time getting where I told them.

2. What is even more annoying is when you sally forth from a town and the enemy is a certain distance away and you don't want to provoke them yet. I tried to line up some Velites on front of the gates and not get too close to the enemy - and they run right into the enemy. If I do this when there's enough room what happens is the units (any) run out in front of where they are heading and then come back to get in line - really stupid and frusterating when trying to get into position quickly/trying to keep a low profile from an enemy at close proximity.

2b I was seiging a town. I had some Hastati holding the front lines from the enemy and it was nicely screening the gate - perfect to setup flanking moves. I run some Equites in and tell them to run to the left and setup their lines facing the enemy flank. There was plenty of room for the Equites to get over to the left but what to I find them doing? charging in and following the Hastati and ATTACKING THE ENEMY!!!

It's really annoying when you have to babysit your army 10x more than you should while things move much faster than before - it doesn't make for a winning combination.

[Murmandamus]

I've found I can't get skirmishers (cavalry auxilia in special formation) to break away from attacking a unit and go where I want them to until I dissable skirmish mode first. Lost a few units before I discovered that one.

Cavalry ordered to run down fleeing units often just run alongside, behind or even amongst the unit they are supposed to be killing. I have to get them to run ahead of the unit and charge them back at it to get them to kill properly.

Pathfinding in towns needs an overhaul. Units don't always take the shortest route. Sometimes they just can't determine a route at all and just stand in place. Also, when arranging units around the center square in order to finish off the enemy, units who are ordered to line up on the sides usually try to march there via the flag pole, right through the enemy.

Way points with shift-click only sometimes work for me and almost never work in complex towns where they would be most useful. The unit just goes to the first point and stops. Try getting a unit to do a lap of the town, inside the walls, using way points. Maybe I have to shift+ctrl+click and set formation at each way point?

When you get the victory conditions met continue/end battle dialog, it pauses the battle. If you move the mouse to the side of the screen, it unpauses it. I had a situation where the dialog popped up, the game unpaused and the enemies general was killed in the background. Then I clicked continue battle to finish off the enemy but when all units were killed, the battle didn't finish. The timer kept counting down and went negative. I hit escape and selected exit battle and fortunately, it gave me the victory but I was nervous about doing so since you always lost if you did that in previous games.

[hoom]

Cavalry ordered to run down fleeing units often just run alongside, behind or even amongst the unit they are supposed to be killing.

Yeh thats a pain in the ass. It used to happen to a certain extent in S&M but it seems to be worse now.

[Red Harvest]

Ok, the corruptions are back. I get a wierd but consistent problem in my Scipii campaign now, so I had to abandon it. Under "family tree" I get some sort of Greek/Spartan family tree instead of mine (Scipii.) Noticed it a few saves back and was unable to clear by rebooting and reloading.

[Red Harvest]

Battle timer. Why is it on in some campaigns, but not others? I had no timer for Scipii, but have a 20 minute timer for Carthage for every battle. That is wonked! Should there be a toggle to disable it.

Setting a 20 minute timer is a bug, period. There is no reason for the timer to be less than an hour. You can't even close the distance on some maps that way. This seriously hampers slow units since they must run to beat the stupid artificial timer.

[Blodrast]

I've also consistently had the "ram" bug, noticed by Murmandamus.
(multiple rams, can only move one at a time, the others stop).

Also consider silly AI that they never move from the plaza no matter how many tons of missiles you pound them with; same with sieges, you can pound the units inside and they do actually run in circles, literally.

Grouping/moving/ungrouping is a pain. Orda is right, once they're in a group, they will preserve that formation forever until you manually arrange/move each of them, and regroup them. That is totally crazy, since you end up having to manually move and reassign each and every single unit, which is an unbelievable waste of time...

Also, how the hell do you move them "in formation" ? i.e., I have multiple groups, and I select all the units with CTRL-A, and I want to move them to some other point; but both right-click and ALT-right-click just send everybody there in a total mess...at the destination, they are totally overlapped... if there is no way to move them in order, this is another serious problem.

Also, the fact that one single unit cannot be assigned a shortcut is very annoying - I mean, I'm sure most people like to keep their general unit on a shortcut...

[Turbo]

The game does a poor job of autodetecting settings particularly for audio and video cards. I had a host of problems with bizarre behavior, CTD's, until I custom set my settings.

The lag - Rome is memory intensive. On my son's machines with 512, I noticed some hesistation-lag which was caused by the mem being swapped to the harddrive. On my machine with 1 gig, it was smooth.

Graphics - If you are using a video card over a year old, you should turn off autoaliasing and take the resolution settings down several notches. The game isn't as pretty, but it runs a damn sight better.

Audio - Updating my Audigy 2 drivers solved most problems. My son uses a Creative Live! card which even with updated drivers was locking up and hesistant. Switching the settings to the Miles 2D fixed the problems.

Hope this helps

[Orda Khan]

To move your army so they march and arrive in order ( ie as you deployed them ) you can try the following.......
Group your whole army but forget any alt/ commands, just right click and your army will march to that designated spot in formation. Now then, some points to remember when doing this.
Unlike STW and MTW where the target destination would apply to the centre of your army, it now applies to the front line. Not too bad really as it does help prevent that 'click too far'. However, beware!! Make sure you know the width of your army well If that target point is not central to your entire army width, your army will wheel about in some awful shape. Once your army arrives where ( hopefully ) you clicked, you can achieve correct facing using the < and > keys.
Not the best I know, in fact it's one hell of a drag. It's funny I suppose, the slower speeds of MTW and the simple commands compared with a much faster RTW and a whole lot of complex, time consuming commands. To me that equation does not compute

One thing is certain. Forget groups once close to the enemy

.....Orda

[Shorty]

Playing on a LAN with another guy, it was a close battle and eventually the soldiers got to the point were they weren't killing each other (it was mostly my Seleucid phalanx vs. Julii cohorts I think). At first I thought that they were just so exhausted that they could barely move or attack, but then my friend comes over asking how my entire army had collapsed so quickly!

It turns out that on his pc the game had already ended in a clear victory for him, while on mine the battle continued as a complete stalemate with almost nothing happening at all. I quit and it said that the battle was inconclusive. We tried it again with different factions and map and everything worked fine though.

[Blodrast]

Thank you, Orda. It sure is a pain - I thought of grouping everybody into one group, but unfortunately one unit cannot belong in more than one group at a time, so I can't preserve my own groups.
And once I get close to the enemy, I will obviously not have time to re-group units from one global group into the groups I consider useful !...

And yeah, unfortunately, once you're close to the enemy, it literally turns into chaos...no way you can do anything except for giving orders to some individual units every now and then (unless they're cavalry in which case they may be running faster than you can scroll ;P ).

Well, a lot less tactics indeed, what with the weird grouping and faster speeds...too bad, really.

[Turbo]

One thing that is that is REALLY a game ruining bug that really does ruin a HUGE aspect of the game for me. After you build a large stone wall in a city and the city is under seige, sallying forth is screwed up. When you opt to sally forth to attack the army that is seiging your city, the attacking army will run up to your cities walls and will stand there under attack from your arrow towers until they are all killed and they run away. It's really very very dissapointing that they are not smart enough to stand out of range. A few times I tried to sally forth anyways, even though I knew they were all going to die eventually, however they are so close to the gates that you are attacked before coming all the way out. You can come out through a side gate I suppose, but really the whole game is kind of screwed up by this problem. It is really an important battle, and I've found that it takes a lot of the fun out of the game knowing that the AI is dumb enough to stand there to die.

[Colt374]

GROUP MODE BUG : Has anyone else noticed how if you have your army grouped into several groups and you give one group an destination all the other groups also start heading for that destination. Don't know if this happens all the time but it seems to. Especially obvious in siege battles : Say I have an attacking army split into two groups, all the units with siege equipment in one group and all the other units in another group. After I send the first group of units in to attack the walls, if I then give the second group and order to advance closer to the walls, all my siege equipment units stop and head for the same destination as the second group.... even if they are already scaling/battering the walls!! Groups seem almost useless because of this.

Colt.

P.S. Yeh, I've also noticed the "Stand next to the walls and die" problem when you sally forth in a siege.

[Spino]

Andrewt posted this in another thread. I thought it deserved a mention here...

...This always happens with my legions. I put them on fire at will, stop near the enemy, unload all my pila, then charge. The stupid thing is that they don't seem to notice that they've run out of pila. The icon already changes to a sword icon indicating they don't have any pila anymore but they always pause, try to fire a pilum (and they have the firing missiles icon in their unit card), find out they no longer have any left, then charge. It always delays my charge because they go through the whole aiming animation before charging. It happens when I charge a legionaire with no more pila...

[zentuit]

Strategic Map / Settlement bug:
Open up a town by double clicking. Select the button to show the details. Click on the arrows to go to the next town. The details screen changes correctly. Click on the Trade Info button on the detail screen. Click the check button to close this screen. You are now at the detail screen for the previous town.
(Somebody missed an off by one error )

[hoom]

Typo:
Tyre seems to have been repeatedly misspelt Sidon
Not just ingame either, this bug is present in the documentation & marketing material too

[slackker]

looks like CA is having a holiday..or at least let us know that they are workin on patches..
i'm gettin the game in the nxt couple of hrs but wld love to c the following fixed soon..after reading so many posts on them

1.improved sieging AI esp when the computer juz let u slaughter them with arrow fire..makes me juz want to keep tonnes of archers in every town when i start the game..

2.Enable us the option to control our reinforcements even if it has a General in it!



as for the squalor..seems like there are ppl from diff camps..some seem to deal with it really well, some have tonnes of trouble..perhaps the population effect on it is 2 adverse..i got 2 try the game to give my verdict :)

[zentuit]

1.improved sieging AI esp when the computer juz let u slaughter them with arrow fire..makes me juz want to keep tonnes of archers in every town when i start the game..

Archers are a bit up on the tech tree. It will be a while before you get to them (as Roman).

2.Enable us the option to control our reinforcements even if it has a General in it!

I love this feature. It really can add to the game. I just don't understand why the Family member AI doesn't behave like the enemy AI; I haven't seen the enemy AI suicide.