In the early autumn of 9 CE a Roman general named Publius Quinctilius Varus led an expedition deep into the German interior. He was investigating reports of unrest among the local tribes, and marched despite warnings that one of his advisors – a German named Arminius – planned to betray him. Arminius had been raised by the Romans, and Varus trusted him.
History has not been kind to the general, in light of what happened next.
He got it spectacularly wrong. Arminius was planning to betray him: working in secret with the German tribes he had set a trap for the Roman commander deep in the Teutoburg forest. The problem for the Roman Empire was that Varus wasn’t marching into this trap by himself. More than fifteen thousand men were marching with him.
This isn’t just the story of how a few bad decisions can lead to military catastrophe: this is the story of how it’s possible to lose three full legions of the most renowned fighting force of its age. This is the story of how it’s possible to beat the Romans.
I’m watching Rome II’s take on the battle of the Teutoburg forest being played by Creative Assembly communications manager Al Bickham. Like the battle of Carthage sequence, Teutoburg will be a historical battle in the final game—a standalone challenge with certain distinct rules. Unlike the pre-scripted Carthage demo, however, the battle of Teutoburg is being played live—tactical blunders and all.
I immediately get a clearer sense of how Rome II’s cinematic aspirations will be realised. The mission begins with a framing vignette: the corpses of dozens of Roman soldiers lie on the leaf-scattered floor of a misty forest rendered in cool blues and greys. The voice of the Emperor Augustus screams the words attributed to him in the aftermath of the disaster – “Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!”
ut to three weeks earlier.
The Romans are marching in a line through the forest, hemmed in on both sides by tall embankments, their vision obscured by trees. Elsewhere, Arminius addresses his own troops, renouncing his upbringing and vowing to lay waste to the imperial invaders. As the attack begins, flaming balls of pitch tumble from the treeline and crash into the unready Romans, their screams of surprise drowned out by the roar of Germanic warriors emerging from the woods. At the moment of impact – as Varus wheels around in response to the chaos – control is handed over to the player.
Rome II alters the traditional Total War interface in a number of ways. The unit cards along the bottom of the screen are now larger and heavily stylised, the designs varying from culture to culture. Mediterranean factions are represented by pictograms inspired by Greco-Roman pottery: angular figures rendered in black and red against a clean white marble background.
These cards can be minimised and will shrink as armies grow. The idea, as explained to me by lead battle designer Jamie Ferguson, is that as the player’s level of knowledge rises they’ll become more familiar with their units and therefore won’t need as much information on the fly as they did when they started out.
The traditional UI elements are present but there’s been an evident effort to reduce clutter and communicate more information within the battle simulation itself. Men respond to their environment as individuals – whether by glancing at a new enemy that has appeared from the forest, or dynamically raising their shields to protect themselves from incoming fire. Barks and other incidental voiceover elements are much more pronounced than in Shogun 2. I hear a Roman captain shouting at his men to abandon the wounded as the legionaries attempt to break free of the ambush. In one instance, the writing is missionspecific. “Where is Arminius?” Varus yells, panicked, in a moment of irony. “We need his auxiliaries!”
The notion is that the game can be controlled without having to take your eye off what your men are doing to look at a number ticking down on a unit card. This feeds directly into the more reactive style of play that Rome II promotes – even though the controls, as far as setting formations and giving movement orders go, haven’t changed. The objectives of the various battle types are now more varied: while a field skirmish might revolve around control of baggage trains, a siege will have entirely different parameters for success.
The aim is to reduce the sense that each Total War battle is necessarily a straight-on clash between massive armies, to provide more room for surprise, and to make it more interesting to be outnumbered.
“You get a lot more variety in the way that combat falls out,” Jamie Ferguson tells me. “As a defender, you can’t be quite so sure of yourself.”
The Roman objective in Teutoburg, however, is simple: get out of the forest. Defeating the Germanic forces is a means to an end, in that regard, but sticking around to fight is suicidal. The barbarian army is supported by archers and war dogs, and as the Romans get bogged down in swampy ground they are beset on all sides. As I watch, the decisions being made are less about winning skirmishes and more about mitigating damage to the army’s core: the three legionary eagle standards, revered symbols of Roman power whose loss, historically, was a source of national shame. On the hardest setting, the player will be required to extract all three eagles – in the version I’m seeing, however, simply not screwing up as badly as Varus did is all that’s asked.
A cohort of infantry is left behind to cover the retreat as the Romans break the first wave of attackers. Later, another unit is sent into the forest to chase off a group of archers attacking the main group from a ridgeline – Bickham tells them to attack and then directs his attention elsewhere, spending the unit like currency to relieve the pressure on the rest of his forces. The road leading through the forest opens onto a wide, wet area of marshland, and for the first time it looks as if the Romans will have some space to breathe, to spread out and fight this like the open field battles they’re good at. That’s when the bulk of Arminius’s army reveals itself: a horde of berserkers, breaking from the undergrowth and running fulltilt at the Romans.
For the first time in a Total War game, there’s now height variance between individual men – even within a single unit of men. This fact becomes brutally relevant as a wall of half-naked, six-foot-tall barbarians crash into the Roman line. Another few cohorts are sacrificed as the rest of the army flees. Eventually, only two Roman units are left – far enough from the body of the Germanic army to escape, but blocked by a line of infantry. Bickham moves them into attack position then hammers the order to push through the German line, panic-clicking on an area just beyond the enemy troops. Also for the first time in a Total War game, this kind of urgent key-battering will actually work, troops interpreting repeated move orders as a sign that no, you really want them to disengage – albeit at the risk of increased casualties.
The mass of units is now calculated individually, so the likelihood of your units being able to escape will depend on type. In this case, the heavily armoured Romans are able to press the advantage and get away – a victory, of a sort. One of the escaping units was an eagle cohort, but its standard bearer fell in the field. All three eagles are gone. Still, Bickham has done better than Varus did.
With the camera set low over the Roman army there’s a claustrophobic aspect to the battle I’ve not previously encountered in a Total War game. Part of this is the environment: Teutoburg’s trees are five times bigger than Shogun 2’s tallest, and it is possible to zoom the camera right down over the shoulder of an individual legionary and observe the way the low sun obscures vision as it casts long angular shadows over the forest floor. There’s a sense that enemies could emerge from anywhere, and this is preserved even when the camera is zoomed all the way out to the new tactical view, where light is flattened, time slowed, and units are represented by translucent rectangles. This is thanks to a subtle but major change to the Total War formula: every unit now has dynamic, terrain-based line of sight, and no enemy unit is visible by default. No more steering your men towards a general magically marked out by a star on the battlefield.
“Each individual man is actually looking around him,” Ferguson explains. “He can see only what he can see. As a result of that you get a much more claustrophobic effect when you’re in a forest situation – and much less time to react.”
The battle of the Teutoburg forest shows off this feature in its most obvious context: an ambush that relies specifically on surprise as a weapon. It has an impact on the entire game, however – even openfield battles.
“With the new system, a lot of existing maps have ambush opportunities in them,” lead unit designer Jack Lusted tells me. “It doesn’t take a lot of re-engineering.” In Shogun 2, the average infantry unit moves at the speed of a marathon runner in order to reduce the time that armies spend closing the gap between one another – for Rome II, line of sight solves the same problem.
“The first thing that you discover is that a 30-meter hill – that’s pretty good for hiding 15 units behind,” Ferguson says. Armies can surprise one another on the battlefield in ways that simply weren’t possible under the old system.
The battle of Teutoburg is a standalone scenario, but ambushes will be a part of the main campaign. It’s now possible to set an army’s stance to defensive, aggressive, or ambush. In the latter, you’ll have the option to force a battle upon a passing enemy. They won’t have a chance to deploy, and you’ll have an opportunity to wipe them out before they can flee. Battlefield terrain, once generated, will now be persistent within an area on the campaign map – so if you’ve found a rocky mountain pass that you like to use for ambushes, you can keep returning to use it for as long as enemies are willing to walk into your clutches. Combined with the line-of-sight system, this has the potential to make the non-Roman factions genuinely more interesting to play: the Germans might not have the same technology and discipline, but familiarity with their environment could win them some decisive victories. As in life.
Ambushes are also a great way for allies to announce that they’re no longer interested in being friends with you – something that Rome II’s campaign designers anticipate will happen frequently.
“Sometimes we’ve had people internally say that alliance behaviour is broken – ‘my ally attacked me!’” lead designer James Russell says. “Sometimes, though, that’s because the AI has decided that friendship doesn’t fit with its plans.”
I’ve still not seen the revamped campaign map, but talking to its lead designers reveals some of the thinking behind the changes in store. In particular, Creative Assembly are looking to address problems with the clean-up phase that can bog down the endgame of a Total War campaign. Shogun 2’s realm-divide mechanic – where the other factions turned on the player when their empire reached a certain critical mass – was, appropriately enough, divisive. In Rome II, it’s still likely that the player will face increased opposition as they grow in power, but it’ll happen gradually, and you’ll have a chance to anticipate it.
“The new system remembers facts,” is how lead campaign designer Janos Gaspar explains it to me. “Deeds will be remembered, and the hatred towards the player will build. As you’re bumping into new powers, the friends of your enemies are getting hostile. A power vacuum can form around you, new empires can appear.”
This is linked to the other major change: political dynasties. In addition to choosing your faction, you also pick which family, tribe or power base you represent within it. The first Rome game split the Republic into three separate factions: Rome II presents the same idea in a much more subtle way, and expands it across every culture.
“We didn’t want the player to feel like they weren’t controlling Rome,” campaign designer Dom Starr says. “They are Rome – just part of a political dynasty.”
You’ll have internal rivals to contend with, and your relationship with these – based on a substantially expanded version of Shogun 2’s loyalty system – will have a major influence on your decision-making. Over a long enough stretch of time, betrayal and civil war is inevitable. Or, to put it another way: someone is going to cross the Rubicon.
“[Rivals] will still try to achieve their goals, but if everything goes right, you won’t fight them,” Gaspar says. “It’s more like personal differences. Later on, it could lead to a break or a rupture.”
This, then, is the final way in which the precedents set by the Teutoburg scenario feed into the campaign as a whole. When betrayal is nigh-inevitable, the freedom to make choices – where to fight, who to trust – is essential. As well as representing Varus’s actions literally, Creative Assembly want to give the player freedom to dig a similar hole for themselves. “The more reversible a decision is, the less of a decision it was,” is how Russell puts it. “If a decision has no consequence, it wasn’t really a decision.”
03-17-2013, 00:11
Monk
Re: PC Gamer TWR2 Preview Online
That political system sounds really interesting. Like taking the family-faction system from RTW and putting everyone in the same faction from the start. That sounds really cool! ~D
Quote:
“The new system remembers facts,” is how lead campaign designer Janos Gaspar explains it to me. “Deeds will be remembered, and the hatred towards the player will build. As you’re bumping into new powers, the friends of your enemies are getting hostile. A power vacuum can form around you, new empires can appear.”
Sounds a bit like an expansion on what we saw in Shogun 2. I also like the sound of a MUCH softer 'split' event. Realm Divide was fun the first time through but afterwards it quickly became tedious. The news that opposition will still build in response to a powerful player empire but will do so in less hard terms is a good one for me.
Quote:
“Sometimes we’ve had people internally say that alliance behaviour is broken – ‘my ally attacked me!’” lead designer James Russell says. “Sometimes, though, that’s because the AI has decided that friendship doesn’t fit with its plans.”
Sounds like a bit sketchy to me but it depends on their implementation I guess, and how many tools are there for the player to help anticipate the betrayal. In shogun 2, each clan had a trust value that told you how likely they were to respect their deals with you. I always found it was a bit counter-intuitive to have that displayed right up front as it naturally made me want to simply destroy every clan I saw who was untrustworthy.
I think a really nice feature to have would be if the value built over time and was affected by events/diplomatic actions. You could ask trading partners what they know about other factions and if they could be trusted, or even more interesting, lie to/be lied to the AI about the same. Depending on your relation to the faction you ask, the AI might tell you the truth or lie, and it's up to you as the player to interpret their words. Over time the trust meter is built by observed behavior and diplomatic acts and adjusts accordingly on your diplomatic screen, leading you to have to choose what you want to do. It sets up a situation where you could be on peaceful terms with a faction, but you've heard from multiple sources they cannot be trusted. Do you take the chance and attack, or leave them be? Afterall, can you really trust those Parthians to be honest after you just fought a war with them?
Wishful thinking I guess. ~:)
Quote:
“Each individual man is actually looking around him,” Ferguson explains. “He can see only what he can see. As a result of that you get a much more claustrophobic effect when you’re in a forest situation – and much less time to react.”
That sounds... interesting! I really like the sound of each individual trooper having their own line of sight. I just hope it doesnt bone the AI's decision making :yes:
03-18-2013, 09:40
Myth
Re: PC Gamer TWR2 Preview Online
Things that I'm excited about:
Larger unit cards! The S2TW ones were simply too small, and the typeface was small as well on a full HD resolution.
Custom animations, zooming in and out, better graphics etc. I'll probably need a new graphics card as even S2TW ran on a lower frame rate than what I would have liked and my graphics card is almost 3 years old. I hope a dual quad core I7 and 16 GB of ram will be otherwise enough.
Disengage after multiple clicking - no more of one single retard from your stack of cav being caught by the edge of an enemy phalanx and then usddenly your whole cav unit is bogged down in a melee with the enemy spears, and you click and click and click and they still want to fight... This is good.
Difference between fights - this was probably my biggest gripe with RTW and M2TW apart from the stupid AI. Every battle eventually became one of these:
1. Hammer&anvil them
2. Pelt them with arrows by archers/Ha, then charge with cav.
3. Storm city with heavy infantry, put archers on their walls once you take them.
That's it. I am excited for new field battles, sieges and defences with different objectives and smart implementation. I don't want to start autoresolving past turn 30 due to boredom. I also don't want the super efficient autoresolve of S2TW which made two fullstacks of ahsigaru beat a fullstack of elite samurai with moderate losses.
Berserkers! Need I say more? :laugh4: No, I seriously liked them in RTW despite their ahistorical stats and throwing units around. If the size of the men in the unit plays a role in combat that'd be even more awesome.
Things that I am excited about if implemented correctly:
Tactical map ambushes - this sounds good for PvP but I am a bit sceptical about the AI portion of it, since tactical map battles I usually play versus the AI. Giving me one more way to royally massacre them without giving them an equally cunning commander is not what I want. Hiding spears behind a 15 meter hill (30 foot? Or 45 lungs? Stupid imperial system...) to wait and stab the enemy general to death is not what I want if the Ai can't do the same to me reliably.
Diplomacy - what they meant (but the PC Gamer guy is obviously not a TW veteran by any means) was that people were complaining that the RTW/M2TW Ai liked to break off aliances by blockading some remote port with just one ship for no apparent reason, or liked to backstab you but did it ineptly - like laying siege wtih a halfstack of peltasts or something. I also didn't like realm divide, though it provided for a strategic challenge, by the time I took Kyoto I already had the production capacity to smother the rest of the map. Early game was what's hard in the highest difficulty setting in Shogun.
I am especially excited about the lessened tedious burden that is late-game mop up of remaining factions. Stainles Steel's AI scripts pumping out endless stacks out of thin air when I already own half the map was not my idea of increased difficulty, it was just annoying. I suppose EB does this too, though I never had the patience to play it extensively due to the historical unit names and the very laggy campaign map.
Civil wars and someone "crossing the Rubicon" - that's great. But how will you challenge a player who owns all the best trade cities and has 10-12 fullstacks to throw around? Even if rebel Caesar pops up with a scripted stack or two of elite legionaries, if this happens 200 turns after the start of the campaign the player will probably be able to stomp him with endless masses stacks. It will have to be something like the Mongol invasion in M2tW or Stainless Steel for it to have any meaningful effect, but some upstart general can't be equal to the biggest invasion Europe has seen since the Huns. So I'm sceptical about this too.
Also, in the previous games each tile had it's own tactical map associated with it, and that's defined in a text file for the map/mod. It's not "generated" and there was no risk of the game "not saving it". This guy doesn't know RTW or M2TW.. Perhaps in Shogun 2 they were randomly generated? I wouldn't know, autocalc broke combat for me there.
03-18-2013, 18:43
Barkhorn1x
Re: PC Gamer TWR2 Preview Online
Quote:
"Things that I am excited about if implemented correctly..."
And that's the worisome part isn't it - those two words.
I want to believe I really do but there is a track record here and it's not a very good one.
So I will hope for the best but expect something less than that.
03-19-2013, 22:13
andrewt
Re: PC Gamer TWR2 Preview Online
I'm not a fan of giving players an artificial challenge after a game has essentially been won. We have three game lengths (short, long, domination) for a reason. There's a short campaign for the people that don't like to clean up.
03-20-2013, 01:41
easytarget
Re: PC Gamer TWR2 Preview Online
I'm still trying to recover from the idea of one year turns. In fact, I'm not planning on getting over it, I've now gone from the pre-order camp to the sitting on the side lines till I'm convinced CA didn't screw the pooch this round. I find the idea completely indefensible.
Check out threads at TWC and main forum to see what I'm talking about.
03-20-2013, 15:25
Ca Putt
Re: PC Gamer TWR2 Preview Online
Quote:
I'm not a fan of giving players an artificial challenge after a game has essentially been won. We have three game lengths (short, long, domination) for a reason. There's a short campaign for the people that don't like to clean up.
While I agree that artificial challenge is bad, Lategame flood had it's advantages. One problem with TW games without something like it is that once you have all your really cool units and are generally happy with your empire, there is nothing that actually poses any threat to you thus nothing you can use your Uber elite units against. With large invasions you get the sort of challenge your grand army is worthy of.
I'm actually happy that they did not get back the 2years per turn(with every second turn being winter) thingy from M2TW, THAT was truly bad.
03-20-2013, 17:31
Barkhorn1x
Re: PC Gamer TWR2 Preview Online
Quote:
Originally Posted by easytarget
I'm still trying to recover from the idea of one year turns. In fact, I'm not planning on getting over it, I've now gone from the pre-order camp to the sitting on the side lines till I'm convinced CA didn't screw the pooch this round. I find the idea completely indefensible.
Check out threads at TWC and main forum to see what I'm talking about.
And that's the worisome part isn't it - those two words.
I want to believe I really do but there is a track record here and it's not a very good one.
So I will hope for the best but expect something less than that.
Amen!
The time between addons and new TW versions gets shorter and shorter.
The quality of the game itself keeps same, in the best case.
Tons of good ideas, seen with S2. But… how balanced was the avatartree? The unitbonus…
The so called "focus" on Multiplayer didnt happen, shown by the numbers of Multiplayer online.
I remember the time, as many people on boards asked for the foyer. We got one, yeah, but it was divided regionally… How great is that?
Even if many things got adjusted, wont really call it fixed, I personal expect a game to have a certain standard within the release.
We got an early beta sold as a game ready to play.
The longterm fun to play online is and was a joke. In the first 2 weeks things was fine, than people disappeared.
While years ago games was made to keep you hugged for quite some time, todays games are made to make you enjoy a few months and than buy the next addon or next game.
Lots of good detail in that second link but thumbs down on 1 turn per year and the return of Flaming Pigs (sigh). Hopefully neither the pigs or dogs will be integrated wit other units and not seperate. The game is RTWII and NOT "Animal Farm 3D".
03-28-2013, 20:48
andrewt
Re: PC Gamer TWR2 Preview Online
I'm not sure how people expect something as long as Roman history to be something other than 1 turn per year. It works for the Sengoku Jidai because of how short the time period was. But even a game as expansive as Civilization is only designed for 400 turns max. Advanced players barely even reach 300 against the highest difficulty levels.
Dunno how Rome can be 2 or even 4 turns per year unless CA chooses a very specific 50-year window in Rome's history for the game.
03-29-2013, 06:49
Ishmael
Re: PC Gamer TWR2 Preview Online
Quote:
I asked about sea-regions. They explained that yes, the sea will be divided into several regions, and that a navy in a particular region will have dominance over that region. However, it was mentioned that a zone of control effect would still be in play in some ways, such as raiding trade routes. Like armies, navies can be placed in certain stances (raid, patrol/defend, etc). I think this will make more sense as we get more previews and some campaign map footage.
I've always been terrible at controlling the seas (I always played as a land-based power in Empire, and converted to Christianity ASAP in TWS2), so I like the sound of this. It should simplify the process of securing trade routes and the like.
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Characters have more movement points than armies. One example I talked with Mike Simpson about is Scipio Africanus where he gave up command of an army in Spain and was in Sicily in a few months training a new army for the African invasion. In game terms he boarded a ship and sailed to Sicily in the one turn/year.
I am really glad to hear this. I love to roleplay characters to an extent, and itsounds like a great way to solve the problem of characters living for a quarter of the relative time they did in TWS2.
Quote:
CA is trying to lure players into pitched battles on open terrain - they feel siege battles should not be the focus of combat.
Now where have I heard this before...?
Seriously, though, I love the sound of pretty much all of this. Very excited.
03-29-2013, 15:56
easytarget
Re: PC Gamer TWR2 Preview Online
Quote:
Originally Posted by andrewt
I'm not sure how people expect something as long as Roman history to be something other than 1 turn per year. It works for the Sengoku Jidai because of how short the time period was. But even a game as expansive as Civilization is only designed for 400 turns max. Advanced players barely even reach 300 against the highest difficulty levels.
Dunno how Rome can be 2 or even 4 turns per year unless CA chooses a very specific 50-year window in Rome's history for the game.
I'll just assume you didn't read the threads at either the main forum or TWC on this.
03-29-2013, 20:33
andrewt
Re: PC Gamer TWR2 Preview Online
Quote:
Originally Posted by easytarget
I'll just assume you didn't read the threads at either the main forum or TWC on this.
Nope, TWC is blocked.
edit: Ok, I read the official forums a bit. Still don't see the point.
03-29-2013, 23:21
johnhughthom
Re: PC Gamer TWR2 Preview Online
Mr t, you might want to check the forum for a rather popular little mod here, Europa Barbarorum, which manages to make 4 turns per year in this timeframe rather playable.
