6 months on - it's much better!

After a break of several months, I returned to Rome 2 last weekend and I just wanted to share some of my impressions. I am not some marketing slave or bot, just in case I start to sound fan-boyish.

I had stopped playing Rome 2 soon after the Seleucid patch, as that was the latest campaign I had played. I can’t remember exactly why I tuned out mid-way through, probably a successive patch messing with my game in progress.

So with patch 9 installed, I started up a Roman campaign on Hard. I honestly found this quite challenging. It’s been a while since I played a Roman campaign but I don’t remember the Etruscan’s putting up such a resistance before, or being so stretched by wars on multiple fronts with shortages of cash. While I was securing the central region of Italy and Corsica, the Venetii declared war too, to add to the fun. After a few battles I was able to take Patavium which, once I’d finally the finished off the Etruscan’s, encouraged me to attack the Insubres (they’d knocked out the Ligurians) and take the rest of Cisalpine Gaul. This started a cascade of wars with new Celtic and Gallic neighbours in the Alps and Transalpine Gaul. I was beset by their agents constantly spamming arson attacks on Mediolanum and Genoa but managed to take the Helvetian’s settlement as well as Massilia. I made Helvetia a client state in the end (save scum alert) as when I tried occupying it the next tribe beyond the alps inevitably declared war in turn and I just didn’t have the troops or legions to go for everyone. However, while I was feeling smug and congratulating CA for replicating “wot teh Romans did” (i.e. setting up client/buffer states on key frontiers), the Helvetians surprised me and attacked after about 5 turns of control (perhaps also replicating “wot the Helvetians did” IRL), capturing an undefended Mediolanum . That would normally just be fun but at the time, my forces were spreading out too thinly in Tolosa and Bibracte and Carthage and friends had just started invading Magna Grecia where I had only 1 half legion to defend the whole boot. So I’m a shamed to say that I pretty much rage-quit, having been overextended and sucker punched by the AI.

I like my games challenging and I don’t mind rewinding key decisions if I mess things up, but I do have to eventually get the upper hand to feel some satisfaction and I really didn’t feel I was with that game – I might have been able to pull the legions back and give up a few territories but it seemed I was facing an inevitable cascade of war with all neighbours and I knew I didn’t have the cash or troops for that. So I started again, this time on normal (boo, hiss)…

I don’t know the mechanical differences between hard and normal but, having just reached the end of a big bad Punic war, I’ve still felt challenged and had to make lots of tough choices on where to spend my meagre denarii and legions. It has seemed marginally easier to sign non-aggression pacts on Normal than Hard but still tough to find trade partners unless sharing a common enemy. Which makes sense – for example: Once I conquered Libya and came into contact with Cyrenaica and Egypt, the former volunteered trade and non-aggression and I only later realised that they were at war with Egypt, who only grudgingly agreed to sign a non-aggression pact as we both got on well with Athens and Sparta. I don’t know whether my influence helped but Cyrenaica and Egypt then made peace and I was eventually able to set up trade with Egypt (albeit with a fat bribe), to my great satisfaction and relief as I was extremely short of cash and had almost no trade partners.

In the end, I beat Carthage & Co. in Africa & Mauretania but it was the Gallic mega-blob of the Avernii who finished them off in Iberia. Having common enemies made us firm friends so trade and non-aggression were easy to agree on. It strikes me that the pain of fighting 3 Carthaginian factions at once is marginally alleviated by generating large diplomatic bonii for having 3 common enemies rather than 1.

I’m now sitting pretty with all of Africa, Mauretania, Phazania, Sardinia, Magna Grecia, Italia and toe holds in the Balearics and the southernmost settlement in Spain. I’m pulling in 4k profit, which is a marvel after the war years where I often has less than 100 income per turn. I have friends and, perhaps too many friends, but I do have time now to recuperate and build my economy.

So what I’ve noticed about the game since I last played it is that:
-R2 is better now than it has ever been since launch. It bloody better be! But it is. I found the campaigns challenging and, ultimately, satisfying.

-The player has a lot less cash floating round and needs to think carefully about how to spend it.

-I don’t understand the trade mechanics but it seems you will trade better and more with more special resources, but you’ll likely have fewer trade partners if you are aggressive in securing such resources/settlements.

-If you manage the “political game” by actively balancing factions and ensuring no general/faction gets too powerful, you can mostly ignore that “feature” of the game. Basically, swap generals around so no-one sees too much action and live with the consequences of low XP generals.

-It’s probably best to turtle and be extremely deliberate/cautious in picking enemies and friends. On reflection, I came back to R2 after replaying shogun, which is (at least early on) much more of a blitz – so I probably should have bided my time a bit more in both hard and normal campaigns.

-The AI can and does use agents, mostly to attack settlements. This can be frustrating (short of killing/converting them, it doesn’t seem there’s much you can actually do to stop them) and may not always be the best strategy for the AI to use given that agents’ actions cost a fair bit, but it certainly adds a challenge.

-There’s a lot more “blobbing” (other factions growing/expanding) going on, which others have noticed, but is very very welcome in my opinion – the earlier versions of this game featured a highly fractured world in which only my faction seemed to be expanding. It may make the later game too easy though as I imagine the AI will be vulnerable to overstretching though miss-management of the limited number of armies. What I’ve seen though is that the campaign AI can be pretty determined and focused on a given enemy at one time, but struggles with multiple fronts (ahem, as do we all…).

-Diplomacy requires more thought and seems to actively reflect and influence actions, i.e. trading with a faction’s enemy means they are less likely to be friendly, and you have to be reasonably friendly to secure trade. The upshot is that it’s easier to form a coalition of sorts against common enemies, but I suspect it’s also easy enough for the AI to do so against the player as “common enemy”, so you have to watch your levels of aggression. I don’t know how this plays out when you are really powerful though and I can imagine that might be different.

-Sadly, the tactical AI is not overly challenging. Providing you have the right troop mix (I enacted the Marian reforms about a 3rd of the way through my Punic war), and don’t get yourself too out-numbered without a hill to defend from, the legions will succeed. Also, I only once saw the AI use pikemen in spear-wall and mostly charged my line with them – not at all the best use of a troop type common to about a 3rd of R2’s factions. Elephants are also more of a liability than a benefit to the AI, if not the player.

This is already very long so I’ll stop now, but the long and the short of this is that I am back to playing Rome 2 and finding it challenging and satisfying. At last.