Rome EB...WOW!

[Xtiaan72]

I'm new to this forum....But a long time lurker.

I decided to return to Rome...I can't help feeling disappointed about Medieval II. I've played all the games since the beginning of the series but MII doesn't have the same kind of addictive game play. The two year turns take role-playing right out of the game.... And the whole thing just doesn't feel as epic and finished as Rome.

On a whim, after surveying all the available mods for Rome I decided to try EB. WOW! It's amazing...Balanced, challenging, with fantastic factions. What a great idea to create three tribes in Gaul. I just got through reading Julius Ceasars Biography and it's truly awesome to see some of the Gaulish tribes with appropriate character names to boot. The skins are amazing. The battles are much better. The four season turns and new traits make the game truly epic. I can't believe that it still plays so balanced after all the changes.

Thank you to everyone responsible for this mod. It breathes new life into the game. It's really what Rome should have been. Great job and obviously a labour of love...

Just out of curiousity, am I the only one here that thinks Rome is better than MII? There's no doubt in my mind that it is and that EB improves what was already great. Maybe it's just the era I like so much better.

[Noir]

Welcome to the org Xtiaan,

the EB forum is on the "hosted mods" section (this is the forum for vanilla RTW single player)

excetchzebe

edit: by the way you can choose your avatar - the one you use is the default one.

[JeromeGrasdyke]

Nice to see people still enjoying Rome :)

Originally the game was intended to have a bunch of "provincial campaigns", which would have been shorter and played on smaller maps, in addition to the main campaign. Caesar in Gaul, Scipio in Africa and Pompey in the East were the leading candidates... but the drain on project resources was just too much, and the feature ended up being canned.

But it's good that the modders have picked up on those very rich periods and events in history and made "good stuff" out of them.

[Noir]

And nice to see CA staff around the forums

In fact if you notice you'll see that RTW mod forums here have 60% to 100% the viewings of the M2 main forum at any time, which i guess means alot in terms of replayability of the game in this way...

[Barbarossa82]

Hi Jerome, nice to have CA drop by!
Interesting to hear about the provincial campaigns that were planned. Overall it was probably for the best that resources were concentrated on the Imperial Campaign. By making the game so moddable you've allowed others to come in and create all that extra content anyway, and that's the #1 reason RTW is still on my hard drive even after more than two years.

It also allowed people like Player1 to come along and tidy up some of the issues that slipped past QA, and people like me to bring out mini-mods that just fine-tune the original game to our taste.

Now if only there was just one last tiny patch to fix the civil war, siege tower and messages bugs...!

[Slaists]

Nice to see people still enjoying Rome :)

Originally the game was intended to have a bunch of "provincial campaigns", which would have been shorter and played on smaller maps, in addition to the main campaign. Caesar in Gaul, Scipio in Africa and Pompey in the East were the leading candidates... but the drain on project resources was just too much, and the feature ended up being canned.

But it's good that the modders have picked up on those very rich periods and events in history and made "good stuff" out of them.

speaking about 'canned', just wondering whether the MTW2 feature, which would allow armor upgrade values to match their respective animations, was canned permanently or just temporarily? the commented out unit description text suggests this was an intended feature.

[Ludens]

speaking about 'canned', just wondering whether the MTW2 feature, which would allow armor upgrade values to match their respective animations, was canned permanently or just temporarily? the commented out unit description text suggests this was an intended feature.

I don't think Jerome can answer that. AFAIK he is not on the M2:TW team.

[Upxl]

You’re just getting old fashioned Xtiaan, happens to the best of us.
Us old timers have a hard time to accept those new waves of youth.

For security reasons (school and such) i haven’t been able/willing to buy MTWII yet.
Getting addicted to a new game is something i just can’t afford now.
Though next vacation it’s MTW II time!
In the meantime I’ll try this EB mod of which you speak off.
Hope it’s as good as you say it is.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

We want to give people as many reasons as possible to keep picking up copies of RTW for a while more. We haven't been able to get into modding MTW2 yet, but when modders make some more discoveries about how to do some important things with it I think we'll move more that way.

[Xtiaan72]

I don't think I'm waxing nostalgic. EB feels like an entirely new game. The earlier starting date ( and everything else) is much more interesting. I picked up MII. But I'm afraid I'm going to have to wait till it's patched up a bit. Would love to see what the EB team does with it ( if they do). Is a Rome port in the works for MII? Or perhaps a more historical Medieval campaign with an earlier starting date. Would love to see that. A starting date before the Norman invasion would be much more interesting.

[khelvan]

Quite simply, EB would not exist were it not for CA's excellent game. While it may feel like a new game, it is not. We're just boys playing with toys in a sandbox that CA developed for us, and quite an excellent sandbox it is.

If we're lucky we'll get to play in the new, improved sandbox in the near future. But please remember that we're a group of people with little to lose in terms of what we can get into our releases. If we take "too long" people grumble and complain. If CA takes "too long" people may lose jobs and/or cancelled projects.

Just keep that in mind when evaluating what we have done. We don't have to pay anyone to make this, and we don't sell it. Perspectives differ.

[Xtiaan72]

khelvan, please don't take me comments out of context. I'm not knocking CA at all. I've played all their games and bought all their games and loved all their games. I don't mod so I would never demand anything of you guys. I was just curious about what you guys were up to.

I can appreciate your comments about the sandbox. It's sort of like the difference between playing with plastic army men when your a kid or molding and painting lead models with painstaking accuracy. ( Which I used to do with my dad). It's pretty clear which crowd EB appeals to. However, I can appreciate that some kids would just want to dive into Ca's version and that EB would go over some people's heads. Especially people with little interest in history. I understand that CA has to appeal to a wider audience than hard-core gamers.

But don't selll yourselves short. What the EB team has done is really quite impressive. And I know I'm not the only one who can't go back to vanilla after playing it. That says a lot.

[SSJVegetaTrunks]

Nice to see people still enjoying Rome :)

Originally the game was intended to have a bunch of "provincial campaigns", which would have been shorter and played on smaller maps, in addition to the main campaign. Caesar in Gaul, Scipio in Africa and Pompey in the East were the leading candidates... but the drain on project resources was just too much, and the feature ended up being canned.

But it's good that the modders have picked up on those very rich periods and events in history and made "good stuff" out of them.

You even left references to Caesar in Gaul in some of the files!

Has anyone ever made a "Caesar in Gaul" provincial campaign? The only provincial campaign I've ever seen for download is one for Sicily.

[Roman_Man#3]

yes, there was a mod like that, which has crassus in the east, ceasar in gaul, and pompey in greece.It was called imperator I think. you will have to look for it.

[Warmaster Horus]

The mod is The First Triumvirate - TFT for short. It is made of 5 different campaigns, though your goal is the same - to conquer the world!
It permits you to follow Caesar's path through Gaul and beyond. There is also the Gallic Rebellion of Vercingetorix - will you pillage Rome once more?
You can be Pompey during the Civil War, whether you beat Caesar is up to you.
The two others are Crassus and Parthia - two sides to an unnecessary war.
You can find stuff about it here, as well as information upon upcoming historical campaigns: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=46