First Impressions

[Lord of the Isles]

Zero Hour + 1:05 here.

Unpacking the pre-load and updating took a little while but not too bad considering lots of people must have been doing the same. I had 37 Gb free on my SSD before preload, which went down to 9 Gb during the uncompressing before ending up with 19 Gb free. So you will need at least 28 Gb free space for the install but once done it uses up 18 Gb.

My Greek states DLC validation code hasn't arrived from Amazon UK yet (some people have been emailed it already IIRC?) so for now I'm without it. Minor annoyance.

I lasted about 30 mins of the Prologue. It was heavily scripted for newbies which is great but I'm ready for the main campaign now. Two immediate worries in the Prologue: I wanted to use Hastatii to attack some slingers who strayed too close but didn't want to waste their pila on such unimportant enemies. But there wasn't any button I could see to turn off fire-at-will for the pila - as soon as I selected then right-mouse-clicked on the slingers the Hastatii threw a volley of pila before attacking. A loss of control for the player unless I have missed something.

And even more worrying: with units selected there was a button in the bottom left of the screen which displayed this tooltip: "Toggle Cinematic Mode: This produces a small combat boost when turned on" or something similar. WHAT??! Pray to Zeus that this is either a mistake or just a prologue-only bit of nonsense.

[johnhughthom]

In RTW, you had to shift click iirc to attack without throwing pila first, might be the same.

Which factions are playable 'out of the box', you don't have to play as Rome first, do you?

Still unpacking, 2 hours to go. Sigh.

edit: Unpacking actually took 45 minutes in the end. Not as bad as I thought. Installing Direct X is step 1 of 10 though! Usually only 1 of 3 or 4....

edit 2: Flew through the steps after Direct X. Happy days.

[Seabourch]

An hour left depending on the download rate for me. I hope to enjoy this, favourite of all time has to be the first MTW, the one that got me hooked onto the franchise in the first place, a game which I can no longer play sadly thanks to the infamous bugs.

[johnhughthom]

I don't really think it's fair to describe incompatability with modern systems as 'bugs', unless you expect devs to be psychic.

[benjywa]

I had everything pre downloaded on steam
setup took 30 mins
V happy

First impressions without spoilers (my favorite in series is ME2, Shogun 2 was disappointing for me, unit variety meant I spent 10x more time playing ME2 since S2 release)

- Its quite a lot faster that ME2 and S2. The units feel like they are moving at the right pace relative to their size – kewl
- Its beautiful. I like the texturing/ contouring of the terrain
- The momentum thing is ace, if you hit a unit in the side with v heavy infantry you can see them impact and distort the unit shape
- I like the indicators above the flags for morale up or hidden etc
- The tree hiding thing – I must learn to exploit this asap
- when I set up and heard "sons of mars" there was a tingle down my spine

My plan - get a med/med campaign done and then play as the brits... thats right, I am British and blue crazy people appeal to me.
booked 2 days of at the end of the week - abandoning wife and child and moving to mates house for some coop - will keep you posted

[White_eyes:D]

Played it for about 4 hours so far....when I arrived at the main menu and saw the "Prologue campaign" option, I just ignored it. While some hand-holding is nice, I just wanted to get to the meat of it right away.

I notice a ton of complaints about the AI but I have yet to see any real issues...in fact the only real big issue I noticed is that the AI seems to be too static when defending and can generally be "bled" to death by skirmish/missile fire.

Just so everyone knows (though you may already, I know I didn't) a faction is not destroyed until all its army's and cities are all gone. I thought I would do something sneaky and take Pahavae's(?) last city to stop his doomstack from attacking my weaker/poorer/not walled city but he still went and sacked it anyway.

[Vuk]

Well, my sister got me RII as a Christmas gift during the Steam sale, so I installed it and gave it a whirl. I gotta say, this is worse than I ever imagined. This is it patched? I thought they said that it will run nearly as good as SII. I can play SII on nearly the highest settings without issue, but this barely gets 6 fps on the lowest settings. The animations are retarded and glitchy, the game is horribly unrealistic, and there is just no joy in playing it. It feels like it was made for 8 year olds. (or it would, if it were not so unecassarily sexualized)

I will probably never buy about CA game in my life after this disappointment. Back to the classics for me; I don't need this garbage. Congratulations on losing a fan of nearly a decade CA. I hope you are proud of your work.

[Mhantra]

Bummer, I am almost 300 hours in, still learning and enjoying.

[Hooahguy]

Sucks for you, Ive really enjoyed it and I only have lag when Im in a battle of over 12,000.

[BroskiDerpman]

I feel bad for your sister Vuk.

Going to go save up my money for something else. I can just see others play Rome 2 and already know what it's like. (Plus some of my friends from RTK see it as mediocre at best and some highly recommend me to spend my time on something better, I take their word; and no they're not from TWC)

[Kamakazi]

im over 300 hours in... still enjoying it myself