RTW Bugs

[Mithrandir]

Post bugs you've encountered here.
No long stories, just a brief description of a bug you've been able to repeat.

[Colovion]

When you are in the pre-battle screen when you can see your force and the enemies force in numerical terms with your and their reinforcements there are unit Icons depicting the leaders of each faction.

I was able to click on my General's pictures in that screen and drag them around the screen. It was like I had lassoed it in Photoshop and was moving an image from one place to another. It doesn't affect the game in any way - it's just a little strange.

[Doug-Thompson]

One crash to desktop after hitting the "close" button on the Senate diplomacy summary screen. So far, though, the game's been exceptionally smooth.

[Colovion]

when units are grouped sometimes they won't move forward, attack an enemy or anything unless you give them individual orders.

it would also be nice if units could be in more than one group

[LittleRaven]

One crash to desktop after hitting the "close" button on the Senate diplomacy summary screen. So far, though, the game's been exceptionally smooth.

I'm 90% certain this happened to me too. I know I was looking at the Senate scroll, and I clicked something, (which I'm almost certain was the close button.) and blammo..dumped to desktop.

But other than that, this has run like a dream. Which is pretty damn impressive given my computer.

[Colovion]

Someone else has had this problem as well.

When you shoot fire arrows the game lags up a little. It's the one thing I've seen yet that was less optimized from the demo. It may just be how it is, but since in the demo it wasn't a problem I thought I'd mention it.

[Celt Centurion]

Someone else has had this problem as well.

When you shoot fire arrows the game lags up a little. It's the one thing I've seen yet that was less optimized from the demo. It may just be how it is, but since in the demo it wasn't a problem I thought I'd mention it.

Not only does using fire arrows foul up your control of the battle, (understandable, fire arrows are harder to aim) but also if the enemy uses fire arrows, it fouls up your control as well. I simply avoid using fire unless I'm using onagers. When an enemy is using fire, I TRY to get over there and destroy whatever is using fire. Sometimes it works, sometimes he has his archers very well protected.

Strength and Honor

CC

[Red Harvest]

I'm 90% certain this happened to me too. I know I was looking at the Senate scroll, and I clicked something, (which I'm almost certain was the close button.) and blammo..dumped to desktop.

But other than that, this has run like a dream. Which is pretty damn impressive given my computer.

I've noticed a bit of a pause when accessing the senate tab that I haven't seen elsewhere. I think there is something up with it.

[Thoros of Myr]

The pause is so it can load the in-game video...

I would add that reinforcement's AI is completly suicidal and needs to be fixed in the first patch.

[Dimeola]

Not sure if this counts but....when defending in a seige....move several units just out the gate....pulled them back in and exit battle. It counted as a successfull sally. No honor in a draw it said....but it lifted the seige.
Dimeolas

[Kraellin]

i reported this elsewhere... when i insert the cd in the cd tray and the auto-run brings up the menu and i click on 'play', the menu flash goes away and nothing happens. the game does not start up. the icon on the desktop works just fine, however.

K.

[Dimeola]

Built an ambassador and got confirmation but he was no where to be found
D

[Blodrast]

i've also seen the group bug: give a group orders, it does nothing, and you have to give orders to the individual units. However, I _think_, but I can't remember for sure, that the group becomes responsive again if you just give it a formation (SHIFT +nr).

[LittleRaven]

Built an ambassador and got confirmation but he was no where to be found
D

Are you sure he wasn't hiding under the Agents tab?

[Colovion]

When moving anything around the map once you order them to march somewhere you can't undo it - even if you accidentally clicked somewhere. It isn't a bug, but a grievance.

[Spino]

- Here's a really odd bug. At one point during my current short Julii campaign the 'Advisor' and 'City Details' buttons on the City Construction menu/page became grayed out and those features were unusable. I do believe I had completely turned off the Advisor prior to this happening but why would that deactivate the City Details button? Reloading an older save game didn't fix things. Exiting RTW, restarting and loading a saved game seemed to fix it. Now I have the Advisor turned off and I can still access the City Details button. Weird, eh?

when units are grouped sometimes they won't move forward, attack an enemy or anything unless you give them individual orders.

I can vouch for this as well. It's a HUGE pain in the ass, especially when timing is of the essence.

- Odd formation behavior - During combat (after the initial setup phase) it drives me nuts I get my units in a nice hand crafted formation and adjust their rows, put them in a group and click on a distant destination only to see them revert to the same positions and unit depths they possessed prior to my arranging them! It doesn't happen all the time but it certainly didn't happen in Medieval.

[Orda Khan]

-

- Odd formation behavior - During combat (after the initial setup phase) it drives me nuts I get my units in a nice hand crafted formation and adjust their rows, put them in a group and click on a distant destination only to see them revert to the same positions and unit depths they possessed prior to my arranging them! It doesn't happen all the time but it certainly didn't happen in Medieval.

From your above description I must ask this..Do you group these units before you deploy them or afterwards? I'll tell you why...I noticed this and also noticed that if the units you arrange are grouped, they will rearrange to their prior relative positions regardless of how you group them. However once you ungroup these units, arrange them as you want and then group them, they maintain their formation.

Just one of the many ' improvements ' from CA

Here's another gem.
Three Numidian Cav, send one to attack and select the special ability, Cantabrian circle. Now select all three units, click ability again and attack given targets. The two new units perform their Cantabrian circle while the first has reverted to ability off........Hah!! Same thing with three Sacred band, I had one in phalanx formation and then selected all three on phalanx. The original was switched off

Can you imagine the amount of micro management this requires in MP, with all units doing 100m in 9.65 seconds?
Yeah great job CA

.......Orda

[Del Arroyo]

Ouch, Orda, that sounds like a pain.

[Spino]

From your above description I must ask this..Do you group these units before you deploy them or afterwards? I'll tell you why...I noticed this and also noticed that if the units you arrange are grouped, they will rearrange to their prior relative positions regardless of how you group them. However once you ungroup these units, arrange them as you want and then group them, they maintain their formation...

You hit the nail on the head Orda. That is exactly what happens. I just discovered that last night. It is such a headache to have to group, ungroup and group again. Why did they try to reinvent Medieval's command system? Rome's command system isn't all that bad but it seems to be a case of two steps forward, one step back. The headaches caused by this stuff really puts a tarnish on such a brilliant game.

[Dimeola]

The info box for each town can cover up units....so if you produced a unit and cant find it run the cursor around `cause the unit is under the box.
D

[bhutavarna]

on one bridge battle, i saw one enemy unit run straight into the river instead crossing the bridge. they all drown except for the captain who miraculously reappear from the river only to rout. this happened as my own unit was half way across the bridge to attack.

[ShellShock]

I live in the UK and I can't get the game until Friday, and this is really bugging me. Does this count?

However, before the mods jump on me, do we need to be providing more information to CA about the bugs?

The following instructions are for Windows XP (2000 is similar):

1. Exact circumstances in which the bug occurs. This seems to be pretty much covered already.

2. System information. Run dxdiag, and click Save All Information; this will produce a text file which contains all the details about your system configuration. It would be useful to attach this to your post (dothe mods object?).

3. Crashes. This should produce a Dr Watson log. Run drwtsn32 (in Windows\System32) and note the Log File Path. This will be where the log is created. Open the log file in notepad and search from the end upwards for "Application exception". You have now found the crash log for the last crash. Check the App name is for RTW and the When matches the time the crash occurred. If so then copy from this point to the end of the file into another file, and attach the new file here.

Dr Watson can also produce crash dumps, which is a snapshot of your computer's memory at the time of the crash, but I've never had much success debugging with these. There is a better JIT debugger from Microsoft, called WinDbg, but it is a bit complicated, so I'll leave it to the more dedicated.

4. Memory leaks. It may be useful to CA to capture a log of the performance of RTW.

Go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Performance. Expand "Performance Logs and Alerts", and click on "Counter Logs". Right click in the right hand pane and select "New Log Settings" from the pop up menu. Enter a name (e.g., RTW), and click OK. In the dialog, click Add Counters.

In the "Add Counters" dialog, change the "Performance object" to Process, select "All counters" and "All instances", click Add and then Close. You can leave the sample interval at 15 seconds.

Click on Log Files tab, and click Configure to change the location of the log file.

On the Schedule tab, select the log to start Manually.

Click OK

You should now see "RTW" appear in the list of counter logs, along with "System Overview". Right click RTW and select Start from the pop up menu to start the log. Now play RTW - if it lags big time, it could be leaking memory. Exit RTW, and stop the Counter log.

You now have a performance log file that can be used for diagnostic purposes (or sent to CA?). To open the file, click on "System Monitor" in the Performance applet in Control Panel, Administrative Tools.

Type Ctrl+L or click the hard drive icon in the tool bar, and enter the Log file as the file you've generated.

Then type Ctrl+I, or use the plus icon in the tool bar, to add counters to the graph from the log file. The only Performance object available will be Process (as that is all we've logged).

For memory leaks, a good counter to view is "Private Bytes". The instance should be "Rome" (or whatever the RTW exe name is).


It could be CA can reproduce these bugs themselves, and do not need all this diagnostic information from us; however it must be difficult for them to match all the different types of hardware that us users have.

Once I get my hands on the game, if I get any of the bugs that other people have reported, I'm going to try and gather as much evidence as possible. Whether this will be of any use to CA is another matter

[AnnieP]

1. Was able to be in MP Foyer 3 days ago. Try the #ignore command. Horror. Doesn't work.

2. Try SP and now can't even get into MP foyer. Crashed to Desk Top.

3. Try uninstall, and uninstall process crashed.

The game didn't like me.

Annie

[Colovion]

The enemy AI doesn't know how to bunch their units into cohesive forces, nor lead their big stacks with their family members to build Generals up. I'm getting amazing 10 star generals so easily because I'm rolling over loads of small bands of Gauls led by captains and then the Generals are even leading small stacks wheras the larger stacks are rare and led by captains. If they would figure out how to group their units better it would be much more difficult, and less like I'm fighting a bunch of rabble.

[Dimeola]

Upon exiting last campaign system rebooted.

[Turbo]

The game does a poor job of autodetecting settings particularly for audio and video cards. I had a host of problems with bizarre behavior, CTD's, until I custom set my settings.

The lag - Rome is memory intensive. On my son's machines with 512, I noticed some hesistation-lag which was caused by the mem being swapped to the harddrive. On my machine with 1 gig, it was smooth.

Graphics - If you are using a video card over a year old, you should turn off autoaliasing and take the resolution settings down several notches. The game isn't as pretty, but it runs a damn sight better.

Audio - Updating my Audigy 2 drivers solved most problems. My son uses a Creative Live! card which even with updated drivers was locking up and hesistant. Switching the settings to the Miles 2D fixed the problems.

Hope this helps

[Turbo]

One thing that is that is REALLY a game ruining bug that really does ruin a HUGE aspect of the game for me. After you build a large stone wall in a city and the city is under seige, sallying forth is screwed up. When you opt to sally forth to attack the army that is seiging your city, the attacking army will run up to your cities walls and will stand there under attack from your arrow towers until they are all killed and they run away. It's really very very dissapointing that they are not smart enough to stand out of range. A few times I tried to sally forth anyways, even though I knew they were all going to die eventually, however they are so close to the gates that you are attacked before coming all the way out. You can come out through a side gate I suppose, but really the whole game is kind of screwed up by this problem. It is really an important battle, and I've found that it takes a lot of the fun out of the game knowing that the AI is dumb enough to stand there to die.

[Colt374]

GROUP MODE BUG : Has anyone else noticed how if you have your army grouped into several groups and you give one group an destination all the other groups also start heading for that destination. Don't know if this happens all the time but it seems to. Especially obvious in siege battles : Say I have an attacking army split into two groups, all the units with siege equipment in one group and all the other units in another group. After I send the first group of units in to attack the walls, if I then give the second group and order to advance closer to the walls, all my siege equipment units stop and head for the same destination as the second group.... even if they are already scaling/battering the walls!! Groups seem almost useless because of this.

Colt.

P.S. Yeh, I've also noticed the "Stand next to the walls and die" problem when you sally forth in a siege.

[Spino]

Andrewt posted this in another thread. I thought it deserved a mention here...

...This always happens with my legions. I put them on fire at will, stop near the enemy, unload all my pila, then charge. The stupid thing is that they don't seem to notice that they've run out of pila. The icon already changes to a sword icon indicating they don't have any pila anymore but they always pause, try to fire a pilum (and they have the firing missiles icon in their unit card), find out they no longer have any left, then charge. It always delays my charge because they go through the whole aiming animation before charging. It happens when I charge a legionaire with no more pila...

[zentuit]

Strategic Map / Settlement bug:
Open up a town by double clicking. Select the button to show the details. Click on the arrows to go to the next town. The details screen changes correctly. Click on the Trade Info button on the detail screen. Click the check button to close this screen. You are now at the detail screen for the previous town.
(Somebody missed an off by one error )