Mini Guide: Getting started with Rome II

[Myth]

Getting started with Rome II

So you got Rome II, installed it, patched it and are ready to seek glory in the ancient world! But you're stumped - everything is different! What is going on? You haven't played since Rome 1, or Medieval 2. Or maybe you played a lot of Shogun 2 but the changes to the food system don't make sense to you. Then read up and feel free to experiment (and contribute) to this mini guide.

For the purposes of this guide I will assume that:

- You know how to play the game (ie. move on the campaign map, lead battles, recruit units, conduct diplomacy etc.)
- You have played through the introduction campaign if you are a brand new player

I will illustrate what and how to do with the Roman faction (because this is Rome II: Total War, and because we must bring glory to the S.P.Q.R.!) but once you get the hang of it, you can easily transfer your knowledge to another faction with minimal adjustments based on their building and tech trees. I'm playing the game on Legendary so if you are playing on an easier difficulty you might find your faction more rich or stable and thus adjust accordingly.

Note: some of these things might and probably will be changed with subsequent patches. The guide is valid as of patch 1 and will be updated if/when I discover discrepancies with the most current patch.

So you start with Rome and some other cities, a couple of armies and a nice weak enemy faction to the north of your borders. I won't tell you how to do things step-by-step as I abhor cookie cutter guides. I will tell you WHY to do these things, and you will then decide how to play the game.

The advantages the Roman faction has (I would go with Junia for the PO and farming bonus):

- Very disciplined and high morale/high defence units. Your guys will rarely rout unless faced wtih really bad odds or you make a lot of mistakes. Once you get to Pretorians you will really have to work hard to get them to rout on you.
- Incredibly strong economy: you start in some of the richest provinces (or have early access to them). Italia, Magna Graecia, Africa, Lybia and Aegyptus are some of the top provinces out there. They have 3-4 ports per province, they have lots of grain, olive oil and wine.
- You will have no public order problems due to the buildings available to your faction.
- Your central position means you can expand everywhere you like.


I willl suggest that, for the start of the game, you chose one general from your family. If you don't have a general from your family - recruit one using the raise forces button (recruit him in Rome). if there are none, get an "Other Families" general. Because for the first 10-15 turns you will realistically be able to support only one large army, and it will be getting all the victories. You don't want a rival family getting that glory because you will have no means to counteract that and if your senate support drops you might find yourself in a pickle (unlikely, but possible).

How to recruit units in a warscape engine TW game

Move your army ("stack") to the edge of the border of the settlement you plan on conquering (Velathri for starters). Then you recruit (in this case: 3 units of Hastati). Your army can recruit the troops available for that province, regardless of where they are sitting so long as it's within the borders of a settlement belonging to the province. So if Rome is your main production center, you can raise your legionaries in any settlement belonging to the Rome province.

I suggest disbanding all the Vigiles units in your starting armies - there is no need to pay their upkeep and food, they are useless at this stage (and probably at all other stages as well). If you need more skirmishers, make use of the superior Veites units.

When/if you recruit a new general make his unit a Triarii unit, as they just do not die to early Etruscan/Carthaginian troops. Same if you've unlocked Legionaires.

After you recruit your Hastati and have consolidated your forces in a single stack, move in and take the two settlements from the Etruscan league, thus completing the province of Roma. Move on to the isles to your west and finish the Etruscans off. By this time, especially if you're the Junii who get a diplomatic penalty, Carthage will dislike you severely and might have already declared war. That's OK - go and take Karalis if you haven't already, thus completing Corsica et Sardinia as a province.

As the Romans, early on it makes total sense to run Bread & Games as an edict. Really, you can't go wrong with public order and food. Plus you don't have the necessary infrastructure to warrant boosting it with an edict.

Technology: what to get and why

At turn 1 start on Supply reforms. Beeline to Cohort Organisation.

> > >

This should take you around 10 turns. Reasoning: this gets you Pretorians/Legionaries with a max level barracks at that tech level. These troops are absolutely sufficient for a good while (and probably for the entire game if you like). Once you can, return your main stack and upgrade your Hastati/Principes to their counterpart legionary units.

Choose a single unit production center to start with. This has to be a province that will be mainly dedicated to making units only. It will get a negative public order due to the high-end military structures, so you will have little room to add other uses for it. It will also end up consuming food if it's smaller than 3 minor settlements. I highly recommend Roma or Brundisium in such a case, as they centrally located and they are 4 settlement provinces.

Let's say you choose Roma for your legion recruitment center.

In Neapolis get as high a Barracks as possible and get as high an Auxiliary Garrison as possibe. In Rome itself get a Temple to Mars and upgrade it as high as you can. Once you get to the Training Camp, add two to Rome as minor settlements can't build this line of strutures. The bonuses from different training camps stack, so yu can have an armidoctor and another one to taste.Workshop can be added as well to another minor settlement once you have the neccessary tech, and then a second one (one weapons focus, one armour focused). The other minor cities should be dedicated to the usual food+trade. As you add more military buildings in Neapolis, add more Public Order buildings in Rome proper to counteract their negative effects. A later goal would be to dedicate your legionnaire producing province to full time war production, meaning that you will distribute your buildings as follows:

Rome: Tier 4 temple to Mars, Colosseum, 2 x tier 4 training fields
Minor settlement 1: Tier 4 barracks, Tier 3 temple to Mars
Minor settlement 2: Tier 4 weapons smith, Tier 3 temple to Mars
Minor settlement 3: Tier 4 armour smith, Tier 3 temple to Mars

The bonuses from the temples stack when they are built in different settlements of the same province. This setup will consume an ungodly amount of food and thus you should aim for it only later in the game when you have vast food surplases and lots of towns with the grain resource upgraded to tier 3/4. The benefits will be 5 experience levels for the leginoaires (6 if you count the faction bonus for Rome), maxed out weapon/armour/ bonuses and around 50% morale bonus (not counting the morale boost from experience). This will trn your legionnaires into supermen.

Also, the unique advantage to Rome is the availability of Auxillary troops. Building an axillary barracks on Crete for example (where the minor faction of Knossos resides), would provide Cretan Archers at tier 4. Building one in select provinces in Africa would give you elephants and so on. Explore the options as you play.

Once you get your army tech down, get these in this order:

Land Management > Tax Labour > Water Sluicing

> >

Reason: 3 growth per city for free is great. It's essentially free food for cities, and it's very easy to get this tech.

From here on, research tech as you need it. Improve your buildings. I highly recommend Concrete so you can get a Gladiator School as it's a very advantageous building to have for province development and it's unique to the Romans (others have similar buildings but none have such a high bonus to PO!). From here on, get the tech to upgrade your minor settlements, farms and sewage systems as needed.

Attacking Cartage, adding more legions:

You should be able to steamroll Carthage, your units are vastly superior and the AI minor faction in Africa actually weakens Carthage quite a bit by the time you get to them. Consolidate the African provinces to the best of your ability and trade with as many factions as you can (but that won't be too many at this stage). I advise against picking a fight wit Syracuse as their armies are actually better than what Carthage or Egypt will field. Attack them after you can dedicate two legions to the fight.

Province development:

As Rome (and indeed any mediterranean faciton) you get acces to the Trading Port line of buildings. The barbarians don't have that. Threfore, it is folly not to use the increased trading income from those! Everyone can get fish, but only some can get a vast naval trade network.

I'll talk about minor settlements first as their development is easier. Go for level II Farms, Level II livestock and a level II trading port in all of them.

Only upgrade settlements that produce a resource, prioritizing those that produce grain and fish as they add food instead of consuming it (mouse over your settlement icon to see what it says. If it says Roman Hamlet (Grain) or (Olives) etc. upgrade it. If it says (Market) DO NOT UPGRADE IT. Not at first anyway. Later on, once you have a firm grasp on the food supply and demand of your empire, you may choose to upgrade choice settlements to get better income and roads.)

Why I advise you get trading ports everywhere you can and not fishing ports: early on growth is not that important and you can't eat all your food because you can't keep recruiting units and refurbishing conquered settlements with buildings of your own culture. Because your legions get very experienced very fast with fighting and champion training, and because with a tier 3 barracks and the appropriate tech you are vastly outclassing your enemies, you will be very effective even with just two legions at this stage.

Thus the extra food only brings growth, but you can't make use of that growth unless you have the money to get the extra buildings. Later on, if you start running into food issues and subsequently, you already get a lot of gold per turn, feel free to convert your trading ports to fishing ones.

How to add extra buildings and where

At the start it's more beneficial to have more slots in your minor settlements as they are cheaper. Adding +1 to three settlements is cheaper than adding the fifth slot in the capital. And the minor settlements are what gives you food and money at this stage.

Growth works like this: every province has a growth pool. It's supplied by global food surplus combined with the local factors such as how upgraded the settlements are. There is no point in making your main settlement in the capital province bigger if you have resource producing minor settlements which you will have to upgrade anyway, since they will not only add to your economy but also share their extra growth points with the entire province!

You start adding extra slots to the provincial capital and getting the high tech buildings there once your minor settlements can support them with food and money.

OK here is the tricky part - all the minor settlements are producing food from the farms and livestock and money from the trading ports. Those which are making resources you have upgraded to tier 2 or 3 as technology permits (thus increasing the produced grain, fish, leather, olives, glassware and so on. More produced resources = more trade, thus more money.)

But what to get in the provincial capital? Well the city center line is only available in capitals for one, and most temples are not worth it to be built in minor cities (excluding military provinces and hellenistic factions who have the Temple to Poseidon). Training Camp buildings can also only be built in capitals.

The first thing to understand is that provincial capitals are good for two things: public order (happiness) and extra stuff. For gold and food, you have minor settlements While technically you can specialize a provincial capital for monetary income (Industry buildings, Town Center line for income, income temple etc.) it doesn't really make sense. You get gold from increasing your total number of owned settlements, not dedicating a provincial capital to pure gold income and thus losing out on extra stuff and eating food for it. Gold will come as you expand, and since the armies are capped (and they are your main expenditure), this the value of gold is diminished the bigger you become. However the value of global bonuses, food and good units is universal.

To better illustrate how province capital and minor settlement interact, imagine a scale where the provincial capital is on the left, and with it: how happy the people are and what extra bonuses you can get (such as: global bonuses, research bonuses or unit recruitment). On the right of the scale are the minor settlements that bring with them food and money, and eventually - squalor which is negative public order/happiness.

Take a look at your province as a whole. How you develop it is based on how many minor settlements you have in that province. There is no point in pumping up high tech buildings in the capital if there are only one or two minor settlements to pay for them. The scale will tip to the left and thus other minor settlements elsewhere in your empire will have to help fund them.

So, the most valuable provinces are the largest ones (naturally). In the smaller ones, only add buildings that grant global bonuses such as the Cloaca Maxima or Circus Maximus and Pantheon and nothing else. I'll get to this later.

In big provinces wtih 3-4 minor settlements, you can decide what to get in that province. However, you must and should plan according to your faction's specific buildings. Let's look at what Rome gets as advantages over the rest. The first thing that is apparent is that Rome has a whopping 4 tier 5 buildings (other factions have only one, usually a temple). You can't build more than one of these buildings, but their Tier 4 variants are all great as well! Rome has a distinct advantage as far as building infrastructure and public order goes.

Circus Maximus

Requires Wine
Improved Bread & Games edict which is already improved once because you are Roman - a great bonus.
Global 5% to cavalry morale - awesome bonus
160 wealth from culture (not bad)
and 30 public order per turn at NO food cost!!! this is a MASSIVE improvement over the tier 4 building which costs 10 food to give lower bonuses to public order. Absolutely one of the best buildings in the game.

Where to build it: a rich province with 3 minor settlements and at least two resources. Ideally I would suggest Aegyptus as it has resources in all of its minor settlements and you can use the public order bonus.

Pantheon

Requires the Marble resource
Further improved Bread & Games edict - great!
+10 to security vs. agent actions (good)
+14 to latin culture spread (good later on when you can quickly get it and stabilize the whole newly conquered province)
+ 2 global public order (nice)
+ 20 public order at the cost of 10 food.

So this building grants (among other bonuses) a net of 22 public order for that province in return for 10 food. You see that it can easily counteract some farm/trade port squalor issues and is a prime candidate for building. If stacked with the Circus Maximus you can safely develop a rich province to max resources/food/trade production and have happiness to spare.

Cloaca Maxima

The level 5 pooping man (the image in the library is for the level 4 building) e is also a unique Roman advantage building and has some very good bonuses:

Requires the Lead resource
Moderate boosts to tax harvesting edict and spread of Latin culture (ok-ish)
+ 12 growth for that province (basically there is no reason to ever upgrade province capital cities if you only need the growth and not the garrisons and money increase, since 12 growth per turn from this baby is more than enough)
+ 3 global growth per turn
It can be built in a province not dedicated to troop production or sea trade. As a side note, Africa is a great province for ship building as it has 4 ports. Consider making military tier ports there. If not, 4 temples to Poseidon and trading ports will make it a great income province.

So how do you balance all these. Well, at first you will have level 2 buildings in your minor cities which only produce and don't cost anything in return. At some point you will build a Gladiator School in, let's say Carthage. That gives you 12 public order and drains 4 food. For that 12 public order you can upgrade Lepcus to a Roman Small Town (Grain) as well as get two farms up to Irrigation Ditch level. That will give you 25 food, and when we count the cost of sustaining a Gladiator School, we get a net profit of 21 food which is then distributed across your empire.

Trading ports, after patch 2, now cost food instead of public order, so most of the times you will keep them at level 2. They are a great source of income however.

Also, in provinces such as Africa, where you have 4 ports, and where you will have a Circus or other such a high PO boosting building, a port to Neptune will be beneficial as it doesn't consume food and it provices port income boosts. An Amphora Factory must also be considered in such provinces if you have the free slot.

In smaller regions that don't have ports (let's say a capital and 1 minor settlement) you will probably have excess public order and a tier 2-3 brickworks will be a good investment.

On the other hand, it doesn't make sense to add the Pantheon in a province that will not be able to make use of the public order it provides when counting in that it will have a Circus Maximus. Also, one slot in your minor settlements (excluding military production centers) should be dedicated to farms. The other slot can be livestock but it can also be a temple that boosts sea trade or industry, depending on how you want to shape the province.

You should experiment and find the best balance for your empire and don't be squeamish to demolish and rearrange the buildings in newly conquered settlements.

Also, consider the library class buildings which boost research, as they cost you a slot in the capital an some food, but their tier 3 and 4 variants are great to further your research, and later on can be converted to income oriented city center buildings.

After conquering Carthage

You should now be rich enough and strong enough to continue with your conquests. Egypt is a great candidate because of the grain resources there. Greece with it's squabbling nation-states is also a good direction to head to. Remember to always march your legions shoulder to shoulder - two legions on the campaign map are virtually unbeatable most of the time and you can autoresolve all but the most important battles thus you get to streamline your rulership.

As far as general and agent traits - always take bonuses to campaign movement range first. These are your #1 priority - the further you can go in one turn, the more value that army has. I'd prefer 12% movement bonus to 20% damage any day!

Use your diplomacy wisely and set up trading partners as all those resources you churn out will make you rich. Also, look at the campaign map and target provinces with resources you might covet.

Good luck and Roma Victor!