Rome 2 Patches, Hotfixes, Betas and Such (patch 17 live!)

[Bramborough]

Am doing same. I tried yesterday but performance declined....yet now I suspect that the patch somehow didn't install correctly, and in fact I was playing essentially an unpatched version. I'm not technically smart enough to rationally explain why I think that...just my observation of what the game was playing like. This time I'm going to install and then log off and close out Steam entirely, and verify neither Steam or R2 is running in Task Manager, to ensure both programs go through complete loading process. I have this feeling that R2 was still running in background last time and that's why the patch didn't "take".

I know this sounds like computer superstition that I'm trying to solve via the intellectual equivalent of voodoo.....but I have a hunch it's going to work.

EDIT: Nope, the chicken sacrifice didn't work. Didn't even get to really play myself much, as I tend to save games right before hitting "End Turn", so the first thing I went through was the AI turn aftering loading the campaign. I did look around first; still not seeing any rebalanced squalor-food values in any of my buildings (one of the patch notes), still cannot sort provinces by food production (one of the patch notes), and cannot mouse-wheel scroll in province list (loss of a previous feature).

I did play one battle which was rather strange in how it worked out. Bithynia (my ally) got into a battle with a stronger force from Mascat (our common enemy). I, however, was within reinforcement range with an even bigger stack. It was treated as an ambush battle, most likely because Mascat was in FM mode (which is now supposed to result in ambush battle vs vic point in Patch3). In any case....Bithynia and Mascat were the "primaries", while I was supporting Bithynia. Despite being ambushed, the Mascat guys quickly destroyed the Bithynians while I was marching in. I then proceeded to annihilate the Mascatis and won. So far so good. Upon exiting back to campaign map, however, the game froze...as if it couldn't decide who had won the battle; both of the "primary" combatants had been destroyed. I let it try to work itself out of the bog for several minutes; no joy, so I had to Ctrl+Alt+Del out.

I did see some positive improvements in the battle with cavalry, as mentioned in the Patch3 notes. They disengaged after charging much better than I'd seen before, and did a far more efficient job in cleaning up routers. Also noticed some small but nice graphic improvements during the battle.

My impression is that there is some sort of bug in Patch3 which can revert the game back to pre-Patch2 instability, specifically on the campaign map. Promised battle improvements seem to be present, at least as far as I can see. Looking forward to Patch3 going live, if they can work these issues out. Uninstalling Patch3beta again for now...I'd like to soldier on with it some more, but every turn carries a realistic chance of CTD or freeze. Having left that situation behind with Patch2, not going back to it.

[RawPower]

Anybody else getting ctd with patch 3? I didnt have any problems before but i had to revert to patch 2. A tiny bit annoying!

[easytarget]

No, but I do find it troubling I can no longer alt-tab out of the game.

[Spoonska]

Alt Tabbing is fine if you're running in windowed mode.

[Sp4]

Orly? =P

[Myth]

The alt-tabbing thing is a known issue and will be fixed before patch 3 goes live. I started a new game as Rome. Here are my impressions with Patch 3 beta.

- Turn times near instantaneous. They only slow down for agent actions.
- The AI recruits a lot more armies and uses them. Sparta and Athen' declared war on me and the first time I tried fighting them + Macedon + a war in Africa I overextended and had to restart.
- My fight for Greece in the second game was a thing of legend. I held Athens with my Prima Legio Filii Martis and Legio I Italica versus impossible odds. There were two waves, one of Spartan elites outnumbering us 7000 to 5000. The second wave was of Athens' complete army, engaging right after we defeated the Spartans. The Athenians were even more in number and we - even less due to casualties. Both fights happened in the fields outside Athens, and I only won because i managed to consolidate my reinforcing armies and defeat the enemy reinforcements before they could merge. I also had Socii Equites Extraordinarii and Gladiators and those are the units that allowed me to chop up the phalangites, otherwise my legionaries would lack the damage to rout them. A unit of Royal Spartans made a vallant effort and managed to cleave through half a unit of pretorians while another two units had surrounded it.

After this fight came the war with Macedon and they had some scary armies - almost 3 full stacks. And they engaged me near Pella, but somehow used agent actions to cut off Legio I italica from reinforcements. Thus, outnumberd 3000 to around 10000 we lost both legions. I had to lick my wounds and raise 4 new legions in Italy before I came back and destroyed the Macedonians.

Meanwhile I had a bloody war up north with various Celtic tribes but now Cispalina is stable and bringing in money.

The re-balanced structures means that the trading ports eat food now, and that it makes more sense to make amphora factories once you max out your slots if you have at least 2 ports, and otherwise you make the brickworks in landed provinces.

Performance wise the game is great, I haven't encountered the stutterstep lag yet and the battles run as well as they can on my (slightly outdated) GTX 570. I plan on buying a new graphics card with 2 gb video memory so I can view full on 40,000 men battles at max details.

[komnenos]

I'm going to buy a laptop (with Ram: 8GB and Graphic: 2GB), so by these patches can I play the game in high quality without any problems or bugs?

[Barkhorn1x]

Anybody else getting ctd with patch 3? I didnt have any problems before but i had to revert to patch 2. A tiny bit annoying!

I have had rock solid gameplay w/ Patch 3.

For those having issues I strongly suggest the following:

- Right click on the Rome TW II icon in the Steam menu
- Select Properties
- Select Local Files
- Select Verify Game Cache

...as I suspect some files were corrupted or failed to d/l. The above will fix those problems.

[Bramborough]

I have had rock solid gameplay w/ Patch 3.

For those having issues I strongly suggest the following:

- Right click on the Rome TW II icon in the Steam menu
- Select Properties
- Select Local Files
- Select Verify Game Cache

...as I suspect some files were corrupted or failed to d/l. The above will fix those problems.

Y'know...I've noticed that button before, but haven't used it. Will give this a try.

EDIT: Don't really see much of a difference. Campaign map still feels more stutterish and glitchy than with Patch 2. That said, went several turns without a CTD or freeze, so I'll keep Patch 3 loaded. Hopefully the issues get resolved as Patch 3 goes live.