Is RTW Still Worth 95%?

[Mikeus Caesar]

I compared it to MTW recently. I thought i was playing two totally unrelated games. RTW definately isn't worth 95%, so i thought i'd be harsh and give it 35-40%.

[Barbarossa82]

I gave it 75-80%. There are maybe 4 or 5 games in my collection to which I would give a higher rating, including MTW.

It seems like it's becoming increasingly hard on these forums to express a view which is taken as a whole and not characterised as being either religiously pro-RTW or pathologically anti-RTW. Criticise any poor aspect of the game (no need to enumerate them for the 1,000th time), and certain people immediately leap to the attack to describe it as an unrealistic, juvenile, counterproductive rant by socially crippled, Total War-obssessed history nerds.

Equally, any praise for the game as being highly enjoyable, visually spectacular and very replayable (all true in my estimations), is seen as evidence that the author is clearly a member of the despised, staggeringly ignorant "mass market" for whose benefit the game was reduced to a facile parody of previous Total War incarnations.

For examples of this, see the later end of the "initial patch thoughts" thread!

I suspect I am like the majority of RTW players in that I am glad to have bought the game and glad to be playing it; I rate it comparatively highly, but I am surprised and very disappointed by the multiplicity of bugs, omissions and retrograde steps from STW and MTW. The game was hugely ambitious and seems to have been rushed out of development faster than it deserved, but is still overall a very enjoyable game. It had the potential to hit 95% at least, and it's a real kick in the teeth that it didn't fulfil its potential, but that doesn't somehow make it a terrible game.

[The Stranger]

to me the patch made the game worse. with 1.1 i also thought like you, but with 1.2 i haven't stopped modding the game, what's really bothering me is the campaign map turning black and that kind of stuff. Rtw is good but it just failed my expectations.

[derF]

@ the first few people who replied complaining about no explanation:

I didnt want to influence anyones decision.

[Bhruic]

I gave it 75-80.

Right now, the fundamentals of a good game are all present. There just are a number of factors getting in the way of that enjoyment. The bugs are highest on that list, and I would probably say a competitive AI is second. Fix those areas up, and it would deserve a 95.

Bh

[Puzz3D]

I think the rating of 95% is justified. Most people really do enjoy the game and unlike the more sophisticated users found on this forum, the average player will never get into enough depth with the game to have issues that detract from their fun. People play games for different reasons and expect different features from a game to make the experience fun.

Ignorance is bliss. Until I came here and read about the AI forgetting it was sieging on a reload and all the VnV's that don't work properly, I was having fun with the campaign. I'm not now because it's important to the gameplay that those features work properly. I don't play RTW multiplayer because cav beats phalanx which is backwards. If you started at 100% and took 1% off for every problem, you wouldn't even have 90% let alone 95%. The magazine reviews came up with their high ratings by ignoring the problems. The magazines are in bed with the publishers, and the objective is to dupe the consumer. Apparently, the average gamer doesn't know his ass from his elbow.

[nokhor]

Barbarossa82 speaks for me, and much more eloquently i might add.

[Orb]

I gave it 85-90% because I still think that it is a fantastic game but the AI and the amount of irritating little issues (elephants, triarii in three ranks, phalanxes etc) knocked the 10-15% off. I just have to mod little things so often. It is so annoying to have to modify all of these little things and the fact that I discover so many more every time I try the campaign.

[Quietus]

Compared to other games in general, RTW is worth 95%. As a TW fan, the game is 90% with the patch (much, much better than MTW, but still not as polished [read: fun and balanced] as the origiinal STW).

[Spino]

It really pains me that I have to downgrade my initial opinion of RTW which was quite high. Now that the excitement and hoopla surrounding Rome's graphics and new strategic map & gameplay has worn off we're left with a decent game that is marred by disappointingly mediocre tactical AI which on its own is bad enough but when coupled with the strategic element seriously affects Rome's long term replayability factor. Tactical battles are the heart and soul of the Total War games and to see such a revolutionary step in the series coupled with such shockingly lackluster and regressive AI is depressing. The handful of welcome improvements the tactical AI did receive are offset by the fact that it is, on the whole, less challenging than in the last patched version of Medieval: Viking Invasion.

What's worse is that there is no relief from the bad tactical AI in Rome's MP game. Thanks to the higher paced movement & killing rates and the serious lack of unit balancing Rome's multiplayer battles are not nearly as fun or balanced as Medieval's.

I gave Rome Total War a 75-80 with a strong bias towards 75. Thinking purely on a scale of 1-100 I think 75 is still quite good.

[screwtype]

I compared it to MTW recently. I thought i was playing two totally unrelated games. RTW definately isn't worth 95%, so i thought i'd be harsh and give it 35-40%.

Same here, I played MTW just before voting in this poll and the difference between the two games is so huge I could hardly believe it. MTW is so much more fun it's not funny.

There are a few improvements in RTW, for one thing battles in MTW are just too long, I've played three battles in a row that took more than two hours apiece, the routing period especially is much too long and takes forever which is stupid considering you've essentially won the battle at that point. Also I completely forgot when going back to MTW that the "skirmish" routine is broken and ranged units do not run out of the way the way they are supposed to, which is a bloody nuisance. But the battle phase itself is much longer which not only gives you more time to employ tactics but also more time for TENSION to build. Tension is what I find really lacking in the RTW battles - especially when even if you lose it's a matter of just whipping your army back to the nearest town and repairing all your units right away.

RTW does have one or two subtle improvements which were glaringly absent in the earlier games which I really like. These include (1) the ability to select a particular sequence of troops in a line or group by clicking on their icons in the desired order. The ONLY way to do this in MTW or STW is to click on the units themselves, and even then if you try and group them the AI will group them randomly in the wrong order. And (2) the way grouped units in RTW will maintain the exact formation you selected them in after a move, which is quite handy.

But apart from that, it's very obvious when going straight from one game to the other just how much RTW has been "dumbed down" for a mass audience. I really thought those old grognards who complained so much about the dumbing down were exaggerating, but going back to MTW after playing RTW for a while makes it palpably obvious that they were right.

I think some "dumbing down", or rather streamlining, was quite in order (like the shorter post-routing phase in RTW for example) but CA went too far and threw the baby out with the bathwater. Just as you say Mikeus, they are like two different games.

Other changes in RTW have been improperly thought out. It was fine to go to a more detailed campaign map, but the problem is that now you have heaps of little half stacks roaming around that are no contest to whip. In my last three MTW battles I fought against armies THREE THOUSAND strong - that is, the equivalent of three full stack armies in RTW! How often do you get a battle against a triple-stack army in RTW?

Also, the campaign game is still as one-dimensional as the previous games.

And finally, RTW still has many, many minor little bugs and glitches and also problems with the AI that make it seem, if not quite beta, then not fully "finished" either.

So I could only give it 50-55%.

[professorspatula]

I was tempted to give RTW no more than about 80%, but even though I've lost much faith and patience with the idiocies of the game and the fundamental flaws and lack of polish, I've still played it for hundreds of hours since I got it way back in the end of September last year. And the 3D battles (despite being more and more unsatisfying) are way ahead of anything else on the market. So a 85-90% rating is not out of the question.

Modding the game yourself (or using someone else's mod) to up the challenge is probably one of the few things that really have kept me interested though, as well as the 1.2 patch. Although I tired of that about a week later. CA's attitude to 'this is the last patch' and their inability to improve on basic errors and bugs and gameplay balancing issues is perhaps another thing that had me consider a lower score rating.

[Trousermonkey]

The implementation doesn't live up to it's potential. Developers are going after the dollar rather than the gameplay experience.

As a matter of fact, I dont' know why I'm still haunting these forums, I've moved onto other games where the developers appreciate their fans more.

[screwtype]

What other games trousermonkey? Just curious.

[Mikeus Caesar]

After you conquer maybe 15 or 20 provinces, why keep going? It's just more of the same. I'd like to hear anyone who has conquered all the provinces in one single campaign. Half of them? It seems like hard work to me, while doing it in MTW was great fun.

Tell me about it....in MTW, you'd play for hours on end, until there is only you and 3-4 other fractions left, all engaged in one big world war....now look at RTW, and it's just your one big empire steamrolling everyone. After all, have you seen the speed some people can complete it in? Just look at Maltz's short stories, he conquered the entire map in 30-40 turns. Now try doing this in MTW. Impossible!!

[MrWhipple]

Best RTS ever bar none, true blue, through and through!!!