General impressions

[V.T. Marvin]

Hello EB2 fans,

hopefully your download and installation proceeded without too much trouble. Now we are eager to hear about your first impressions from playing the game for the first time. Your feedback is important for us to fine-tune various gameplay mechanics in order to provide even better experience in our next official release. So have fun and share your thoughts!

[I_damian]

Alright, been playing for 2 hours, though the vast majority of it was spent reading unit/building descriptions. First of all, I had no problems installing and I love everything. It's perfect.

The loading times are really fast, faster than I expected. I don't have an SSD but they're really fast compared to EB1.

I love how every province has a region description detailing the geography and history and any wonders there. I spent about an hour reading these alone!

In vanilla M2TW there was a feature in battle where you could "ping" all friendly and enemy troops, highlighting them. It's gone in EBII (unless I just can't see it) and I'd really like it back if possible. With each unit having so many different types of soldier (this is great) it can get really difficult sometimes to see who is who.

Bug - in battle, when sending a second unit up a ladder after the first unit has gone on the wall, the second unit stands on the parapets of the wall but does not move down on to the wall to fight. They get stuck as far as I can tell.

[moisesjns]

Just got done installing it. Got it running im installing your grahp mod. Game starts at first with small screen went to options changed it to my resolution. Restarted game after applying changes game starts full screen now. I have 2 crossfire 7850 amd and this may be exclusive to dual graph set up but nothing thats hard to fix.

second update. Game crashes for me at custom battle. odd. But oh well.


Everything is up and running. Im playing along in my campaign as Saka Rauka. Im hoping for indo greek units. But i doubt they are in.

Game is running great no slow time speed or nothing and im not even on SSD. Thank you very much EB 2 team i am really enjoying it. You guys are great at this modding.



4th Update. As of playing a battle and using campaign map. I have to say the blur from the EB 2 grahpics submod is too much for me to handle.

[kdrakak]

nope... here is what I got

Kingdoms disk in DVD drive. Correct Kingdoms install path... I guess

[I_damian]

I didn't install to kingdoms path, just the M2TW path (the one already in the box in the installer). Also you don't need the Kingdoms disk in the drive, just the normal M2TW disk.

[kdrakak]

I didn't install to kingdoms path, just the M2TW path (the one already in the box in the installer). Also you don't need the Kingdoms disk in the drive, just the normal M2TW disk.

That seems actually wrong damian. You DO need the Kingdoms CD. Bovi Thanx for the fix. That worked. Had grant write permissions to the EBII folder to extract there. But it worked. I think I'll enjoy my drink now, seed, catch up on a sitcom or other series. I can play EBII... the world is now right (more or less) and I need to change me signature. :)

[bovi]

nope... here is what I got

Kingdoms disk in DVD drive. Correct Kingdoms install path... I guess

Try this.

[Tonno]

Runing it for about 10 mins... this mode... everything Rome 2 should have been.

Tried Tutorial campaing, it crashed. :)
Grand works perfectly.

[Candiano]

This is just amazing. What a good job !! It's simply great and I must confess that I switched from Rome II to EB II without any regret at all. I'm using the disc installation (Steam sucks) and it's working fine and fast except that I have to use Kingdoms. The system refuses MTWII. Not a big deal. I'm playing a campaign for a day now and it works perfectly. However it's impossible to play the tutorial. The screen freezes. And also, giving One Point experience to ships equipped with canons might not be a good idea :-)
Again, congratulations and thank you

[Ludens]

Glad to hear that you are enjoying EB2.

Docus: there is a partial fix for the skirmisher problems. You can find it in this thread.

Candiano: actually, there is no tutorial. The team just forgot to remove the tutorial from the menu, hence the crash . And what do you mean with "ships with canons"?

[Nightshift]

Me again. Installed on a much older PC but WinXP and had not a single crash now in my Sweboz campaign after 150 turns. Even Alt-Tabbing diddn't cause much problems (in fullscreen) except ones when pics and colors got messed up. Took me almost 100 turns to understand the camp vs town thing not because I didn't read in game texts but because I thought of them beeing placeholders, the nomad buildings I mean.

After that I could imagine how my tribal society was settling and transforming, but before I guess I was irritated by descriptions like for caravan routes which were depicting steppe plains. Thats why I thought they were more like beeing missplaced. Hope this makes sense?!

I was a bit afraid after conquering what I would call my good starting position, because I thought the campaign could become too easy. But when I realised what needed to be done and build for a good economy I thought of raiding some towns for money. So I send out spys to get a better idea of what was going on around me. Well from that point on I was kind of overwhelmed with everything going on and didn't know what to do first - which is the best thing ever happened to me in a TW-game.

The Boii capital I wanted to raid was allready taken by my Lugioni allies, Roman armys were allready patrolling north of the alps, the gallo-celtics were closing in on my western border.. I had slept in my dark forests for too long.
Turned my raiding party to the last very big settlement controlled by rebells which bribed them away from me after a short siege. (Its now a stronghold defended by 2 full army stacks and samller patrols good buffer though )
Build another one to raid Britain wich was cut off after landing there by a pirate fleet. Now british troops are coming after me with their gallic allies, familly members are beeing assasinated, a plague decimated half of my capitals population and every turn I have to carefully think about wether to raise more troops or finally transform that gouvernment so that I don't need to be afraid of rebellions in my backyard..

Ok before this turns into an AAR, just wanted to tell how much I like it. Again pace of battle is just right for me except lethality for javelins and archers, wich makes some of the factions unplayable for me like: Numidieans, Sauromatae and Saka and Saaba so every faction that relies heavily on them. (don't have too much problems with skirmishers not throwing spears-just that they don't kill anything)

Again thx so much for this gem, looking forward for first patch allready ;) keep up the good work!

[Cybvep]

I'm using the more aggressive campaign AI, the skirmisher fix and a custom kill ratio (the middle ground between the unofficial fix and the mod's vanilla settings) and I'm enjoying the mod immensely. It's surprisingly stable for the first release - I've had no CTDs during the first ~55 turns in my Romani game so far. The mod is also very immersive, just as EBI was. The AI is better than in RTW, but obviously it needs some work and I'm sure that it will become better in the future.
Some battle balancing is needed, too. With the kill ratio change and the skirmisher fix the projectiles are ok-ish, but cavalry charges are extremely weak in terms of casualties they inflict, even when the enemy is charged from behind. The morale effect is just right, though :). The elephant units needs a buff, too. It's good that they are easy to kill by skirmishers, but they just don't have enough of a punch when they trample the soldiers, which shouldn't be the case. Also, while I'm glad that the phalangites are no longer invulnerable when they are attacked from the front, I think that the damage they inflict is too low.
I autocalc most sieges, because IMO they take too much time, involve annoying pathfinding issues and are rather boring, but it's typical for TW games, so nothing new here and not really the mod's fault. The good thing about this is that the game becomes a bit more challenging, because the casualties are usually higher in the autocalced battles than in the manually played ones, although sometimes I use the auto_win command when the garrison is pathetically weak and the outcome is a foregone conclusion.

The mod was well worth the wait :). Cheers.

EDIT: BTW, I think that the number of movement points on the campaign map should be a little bit higher. It takes too long to move units and leaders around, which is both annoying and unrealistic, considering that 1 turn is 3 months. I understand that fully accurate values could be very unbalancing due to the turn-based nature of the game and the AI's response time, but still, current values are too low IMO.

[Nightshift]

Could you please explain where to change kill ratio if possible for javelins and arrows because I could only find accuracy and range numbers, it's the first time I'm actually looking into these files.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Ok took a look into the descr_projectile and a tutorial I found: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...Projectile-txt

What I dont understand is why there are two values for accuracy:
;accuracy_vs_units 0.035
accuracy_vs_units 0.09

and wich value actually increases kill ratio? Also how are things regarding beeing shot in the back or beeing hit from right side as opposed to left side if target yields a shield?

If someone could provide a quick fix for arrows and javelins I'd appreciate a lot!

P.s. Are there certain special archer units that have composite bows - I mean not really but coresponding to this file just have better bows? And how does it relate to the ingame description of missile attack beeing 2 or 3?

[Candiano]

Well about ships; I'm now playing Epeiros. I just conquered Thermon. I must chose between "Allied Democratic State" and "Allied Oligarchic State" When you right clic on one of the two options you open a window explaining the difference between the two solutions. It says (ao) quote Experience bonus for ships with cannons recruited : +1 unquote.
By the way, I switched to Epeiros because I've been stopped in my Romani campaign that refuses to open either of the saves I made : not from quick save, not from a save with a name I gave, not from the automatic save. Has this bug been reported to you yet ?
Anyway : great game that will improve with time. Regards

[Thoras]

It says (ao) quote Experience bonus for ships with cannons recruited : +1 unquote.

Well just wait a "few" hundred years

not from a save with a name I gave, not from the automatic save. Has this bug been reported to you yet ?

Never had that.

[tobit]

A couple weird things I've noticed is pirate ships spawning I'm very small lakes causing storms that last for many turns. Lost a faction leader to it.

As Pontus I get a lot of births and adoptions for leaders but as Pergamum I barely got any and those I did get had a lot lower loyalty.

As Pontus when one of of family members died and made the province of Sophene or Gazaka ai controlled the ai was able to build a military colony allowing the recruiting of Greek units in both. I am sure that option wasn't there when I had a family member in it. WAD?

Also the Pontus faction leader has the VC trait even if I am playing a short campaign.