Rome 2 Patches, Hotfixes, Betas and Such (patch 17 live!)

[Bramborough]

There is an option for a defender to sally forth (into a field): at times, the AI uses that. Probably, the likelihood of such sallies should be increased especially if the AI has a decent army in the town.

Yep, and AI defenders use this option quite often. I haven't kept tabs per se, but I'd say roughly 50% of the time, perhaps a little more. IIRC, this was an added tweak in Patch 3. For my current Pontus campaign for I'm keeping up an AAR thread (which has turned into a bit of a Frankenstein's monster, lol), so I've AR'd far fewer battles than before. I've been a bit surprised by how frequently settlement defenders sally out, even against extremely heavy odds.

[TargetSlayer]

[Bramborough your earlier comments about seiges]

While I do not object to the concept of VP, both the AI and human cannot properly defend against a seige when the attacker has range units. Personally, if Rome showed up with range equipment, I would likely retreat back and behind buildings or better topography and let them exhaust their ammo, then attack segments of their army as they entered the settlement. But with VP one cannot afford to be too far away from these strategic points, even with the delayed time introduced in one of the latest patches. That or the AI still doesn't want to.

As Rome my conquests have really been too easy. I have routinely expended all my ammo from my range units before entering, and sometimes I do not even need to enter as the Victory has already been awarded to me.

I realize that if I show up with a superior force I will win. However, there has to be something better for the AI than just standing at a pre-determined spot while being slaughtered by my range units, though I do enjoy all the taunting the AI soldiers say while under fire. :)

In Shogun 2 they charged - well most of the time they just slowly walked up to my frontline (if they survived that long). I cannot remember any TW title where the AI hide itself inside their settlement, though the range for these Roman "giant" units seem excessive to me (but I use them so I can't complain). I keep going back to Empire and Napoleon where AI armies almost always fielded range equipment against me. This seems to have been lost in the programming since that time.

Regards

[Hooahguy]

Patch 4 is officially out now!

Full list of changes.

[Slaists]

Sigh, the campaign AI may be more proactive now with patch IV, but it is still hopeless as far as army coordination is concerned. In my fresh Epirus campaign, I arrived at the gates of Rome with an army filled with levy pikemen and hoplites + 1 ballista. Guess what army Rome sent to intercept me? None! Zero! Nada!... They had 3 full stacks (each of those would be able to crush my army in autoresolve) roaming around the sea, but no one in Rome... Bah!...

[Bramborough]

Sigh, the campaign AI may be more proactive now with patch IV, but it is still hopeless as far as army coordination is concerned. In my fresh Epirus campaign, I arrived at the gates of Rome with an army filled with levy pikemen and hoplites + 1 ballista. Guess what army Rome sent to intercept me? None! Zero! Nada!... They had 3 full stacks (each of those would be able to crush my army in autoresolve) roaming around the sea, but no one in Rome... Bah!...

Gotta agree...more than once I've approached an AI capital with 2 or 3 substantial stacks nearby, and think "Cool! Get to fight some decent-sized battles next turn!". Then they promptly all run away, leaving the garrison to its fate. WTF?

[Alcibiade]

Yeq, it seems some pre-patch 3 troubles came back with patch 4.

I'm sarting to wonder if those amphibious armies are not confusingg the CAI in an unfixable way. As soon as I'm at war with too much factions and every AI factions jumps in the bandwagon to declare war on me, even the one on the other extremities of the map declare war to me as well. Just because the amphibious armies and their access to the sea make them consider me as a neighbour.

It's also stupid that the fact a faction is at war with many is such a decisive factor for other factions to declare war on it. GGRRR, I love this game (and it's the only computer game I play) but god, this fixing patch stage is going to be long !

[Slaists]

Yeq, it seems some pre-patch 3 troubles came back with patch 4.

I'm sarting to wonder if those amphibious armies are not confusingg the CAI in an unfixable way. As soon as I'm at war with too much factions and every AI factions jumps in the bandwagon to declare war on me, even the one on the other extremities of the map declare war to me as well. Just because the amphibious armies and their access to the sea make them consider me as a neighbour.

It's also stupid that the fact a faction is at war with many is such a decisive factor for other factions to declare war on it. GGRRR, I love this game (and it's the only computer game I play) but god, this fixing patch stage is going to be long !

LOL, not sure what game you playing. I am playing a legendary Pontus campaign started post patch IV official release, around turn 35 now. No one has declared a thing on me. The AI's throw NAP agreements at me and pay cash for them.

[Alcibiade]

LOL, not sure what game you playing. I am playing a legendary Pontus campaign started post patch IV official release, around turn 35 now. No one has declared a thing on me. The AI's throw NAP agreements at me and pay cash for them.

It's a campaign I started with patch 3. Don't know if all those war declarations are conditionned by it but they happened just 3,4 turns after I activated patch 4, that is turn 65 or something like that.

[Ituralde]

Has anyone found out which units can now go into Loose Formation? The patch notes say it has been introduced to a few units. Curios to see which ones it will be!

[Lord of the Isles]

LOL, not sure what game you playing. I am playing a legendary Pontus campaign started post patch IV official release, around turn 35 now. No one has declared a thing on me. The AI's throw NAP agreements at me and pay cash for them.

I started unpatched TWRII with Rome on Hard but abandoned it at about 70 regions. Then played patch 2 with Athens (H) and Iceni (VH) to a (more-or-less) economic victory. Then Parthia (VH) on patch 3 to about 60 regions. I abandoned the latter to try out patch 4 (I have learned over the years that a new patch for a TW game is best played with a new campaign; too many potential issues even if the release notes say it is compatible).

In all those games I've noticed what people have mentioned here: sometimes the starting position means an anxious early few dozen turns but after that (and sometimes not even with that) it gets easy. No one DoW's you so you can just pick off regions that go rebel with no penalty and gradually gobble up small neighbours without too many allies. Treasury grows, research expands and eventually you have enough to take on anyone you wish. Civil war provides a nice challenge but it is over too soon and then nothing stands in your way. All that is still fun for me but I can see a day when I'll get bored and uninstall.

However, I found one exception to this rule. I tried patch 4 initially with Carthage on VH. Twice. First time I tried to hold on to all 4 starting provinces. Clearly a big mistake. So I restarted and tried to hold on to just Karalis and Carthage, withdrawing my Iberian troops back to Africa so I would have 2 proto-armies to concentrate on 1 theater of war. Seemed like a promising plan as I lost Qart Hadasht & Lilybaeum around turns 10-15 when I only had 3 or 4 nations at war with me. I hoped that not having a border with many others would keep me under their radar, so I could concentrate on Africa & Mauritania when the inland nations inevitably declared war on my clients, Libya & Nova Carthago.

So much for that plan. By turn 30 (IIRC), I was at war with (not in order): Gaetuli, Masaesyli, Garamantia, Nasamones, Turditani, Syracuse, Rome, Edetani, Cantabri, Knossos, Athens, Sparta, Delmetae, Veneti, Liguria. I may have forgotten a few but you get the point. And these weren't just the normal DoW-and-forget things: when a full stack of Veneti transports appeared outside my last region, Carthage, to join the Knossos, Syracuse and one other full stack in the blockaded harbour, I gave up.

Not sure if I can moan about that, having found the game too easy. Perhaps having the challenges spread a little between the factions rather than making just one almost-impossible one would be good for CA to do. Anyone else found any other faction a challenge like Carthage?

Mind you, I'll do it eventually. Next time I'll try abandoning everything except Iberia - that might work.

[Kamakazi]

See I want a campaign like that ^^^

AI in all my campaigns no matter the patch have been my whipping boys.... no aggression or spunk

[Bramborough]

I've had factions DW and move on me early in the game...appears to me that AI is aggressive enough when the player's faction is equal or weaker in strength. So aggression/passivity may not be the root problem.

It doesn't take very many turns for the player to build up where neighboring AI factions are significantly weaker. Perhaps AI passivity is really a different manifestation of another fundamental problem...the AI doesn't build or expand well and quickly gets economically outstripped.

[Kamakazi]

Even factions across the map from me never grow bigger. You would think that they would infight and expand with all the declarations of war I see but I only ever see 3-5 provinces owned by a single AI and if they get bigger than that they implode into several rebel holds

[Hooahguy]

Has anyone found out which units can now go into Loose Formation? The patch notes say it has been introduced to a few units. Curios to see which ones it will be!

A number of infantry units can do it now, notably most Roman infantry units. Not sure about everyone else, though it seems as if barbarian faction units cannot go into loose formation.

[Slaists]

Patch IV, legendary Pontus, turn 75 or so: an AI finally managed to take a town from me. I had forgotten about a pesky faction since two of my vassals were beating up on them. The faction was one of the steppe roamers: the ones from the North-East. Then, they sneaked a stack right into my rear and grabbed a settlement before I could march my armies to intercept. Of course, the very next turn I retook the town. Funny, my vassal had two stacks sitting not far from the settlement taken from me: they did not move a finger to intercept the intruders. I later checked the affairs near the steppe folks home-town: my vassals had 4 stacks there, all in raiding stance, doing nothing. Meanwhile, the town in the province they were raiding was completely empty (that's where the stack that grabbed my town [4 turns march distance] came from).

[Myth]

I never use vassals myself. I preffer to pain the map my colour.

[Slaists]

Someone on the main forum suggested that CA has confirmed somewhere that the difficulty settings currently are "not working as intended" and will be fixed at some point in the future... Duh...

I did not get the exact reference yet though.

As to vassals: a habit from S2. I used vassals extensively there to have someone to trade with post RD and secure borders in areas where I did not want to expand. Here, in R2, vassals also add a bit of challenge since they tend to drag you into unintended wars ;)

Anyone else notice a new siege crash-bug that has appeared with patch IV? Usually happens when selecting several of your units and asking them to go inside a walled settlement (through a breach). The game freezes. This was not present (in my games) before patch IV, but now I've seen it already 5 times. The bug appears persistent too: a battle replay results just in another crash so have to use autoresolve to get through.

[Jacque Schtrapp]

I started a new VH Parthia campaign after the release of patch 4. The Dahae are my only ally and seal off my northern border east of the Caspian Sea all the way to the edge of the map. Consequently, I've been busying myself with dealing with the Parthava-Sagartia-Arachosia confederation to the south and west. I have no troops in the north and rarely even look at that area. The Dahae have sent all of their troops down into Mesopotamia in support of my campaign.

Recently, while scrolling through my cities looking for buildings to upgrade, I noticed that a unit of Baktrian rebels had spawned in one of the Dahae provinces bordering mine in the far north. I had no troops available to deal with them, so I figured if they managed to take the province, I'd send an army to destroy them and add it to my empire. About a 5 or 6 turns later, I took a look at that province again to see if the rebels were still there or had been defeated. There were now 6 Baktrian rebel armies, each with 4 units, standing there using the same animation an army does when recruiting. On a hunch, I started checking the province every turn and counting the number of armies. Sure enough, each turn, a new Baktrian rebel army with 4 units would appear and begin the recruiting animation. None of the armies every recruited any units beyond the four they spawned with.

I decided to send an army north and destroy all of the Baktrian rebels, there were 13 four unit armies by the time I could get there, to see if they would stop spawning once the last one was gone. It took a while to chase each one of them down and destroy them all, and new ones spawned until the last one was destroyed. I realized after I did this that I should have taken screen shots. I can't seem to find any mention of a similar issue on the main forums, so I'm guessing it was just a really odd sequence of events that led to this occurring. I think I may have a save game from around that time. If so, I'll have to post a screen shot of the infinite Baktrian rebellion of 224 BC.

[Sp4]

Someone on the main forum suggested that CA has confirmed somewhere that the difficulty settings currently are "not working as intended" and will be fixed at some point in the future... Duh...

I did not get the exact reference yet though.

That's actually great f*cking news lol.

[Bramborough]

... Sure enough, each turn, a new Baktrian rebel army with 4 units would appear and begin the recruiting animation. None of the armies every recruited any units beyond the four they spawned with.

I decided to send an army north and destroy all of the Baktrian rebels, there were 13 four unit armies by the time I could get there....

I saw this happen in my last Rome campaign (Patch 3), in Libya. Paraitonion was held by Pergamon at the time, so they happened to be Hellenic rebels. Same thing...about a dozen 4-unit rebel armies in that region.

It smells like some sort of bug. What's supposed to happen (and usually does) is that one rebel army spawns, and then gains an additional 4 units each turn.

I wonder if it's terrain-related. I haven't played in the far eastern regions like Baktria. Is it open terrain? Most of the European-mainland provinces have large inaccessible mountain/forest areas, the available space to place an army can be limited. By contrast, desert/steppe provinces are wide open, an army can move or plop down pretty much anywhwere (albeit with attrition in desert).

[Jacque Schtrapp]

It smells like some sort of bug. What's supposed to happen (and usually does) is that one rebel army spawns, and then gains an additional 4 units each turn.

I wonder if it's terrain-related. I haven't played in the far eastern regions like Baktria. Is it open terrain?

The province in question is about 70% grassland and 30% forest. I also forgot to mention that I auto resolved all of the fights and, whenever engaging one of the Baktrian armies with reinforcements, the reinforcements would show the Roman Julii insignia behind the portrait of their general on the auto resolve screen.

Maybe I should see if I can dig up a save game and submit it to CA.

[Bramborough]

whenever engaging one of the Baktrian armies with reinforcements, the reinforcements would show the Roman Julii insignia behind the portrait of their general on the auto resolve screen.

Your comment jogs my memory...saw the same thing. At first I was wondering "What are the Romans doing here....I'M the Romans, dammit!", but they were labelled Hellenic.

[Seyavash]

Just started a new campaign with Carthage patch 4 and I am getting wars declared on me by practically every faction that has even remote contact. I sent a spy and fleet around to make contact so I could make trade contacts, but nope, apparently I need 5+ Dow per turn.

Playing on normal and didn't see this with either of my prior games, one unpatched at the start and the other patch 3. Anyone else getting DOW spammed?

[nearchos]

QUOTE]Someone on the main forum suggested that CA has confirmed somewhere that the difficulty settings currently are "not working as intended" and will be fixed at some point in the future... Duh...[/QUOTE]
Thanks CA for confirming the obvious.
The only difficulty level, was legendary and only with patch 3, not now with p4.

[nearchos]

Sigh, the campaign AI may be more proactive now with patch IV, but it is still hopeless as far as army coordination is concerned. In my fresh Epirus campaign, I arrived at the gates of Rome with an army filled with levy pikemen and hoplites + 1 ballista. Guess what army Rome sent to intercept me? None! Zero! Nada!... They had 3 full stacks (each of those would be able to crush my army in autoresolve) roaming around the sea, but no one in Rome... Bah!...

I started an Epirus campaign on legendary after patch 4, the same thing, very passive AI, twice i had to defend agains invasions at Apollonia, from Rome and from Syracuse, but thats all the exitement.everybody ofered NAP, many trade agreements and just picking my targets as i like.

Im in second imperium, and i operate with 4/6 armies and 1 10ships navy.
Also an other thing needs fixing, Rome, Egypt, Seleucid empire have been destroyed already, Carthage is about to die and the other now powerful factions are, Blemyes, Caramandia, some iberian factions and Armenia.

[Alcibiade]

Just started a new campaign with Carthage patch 4 and I am getting wars declared on me by practically every faction that has even remote contact. I sent a spy and fleet around to make contact so I could make trade contacts, but nope, apparently I need 5+ Dow per turn.

Playing on normal and didn't see this with either of my prior games, one unpatched at the start and the other patch 3. Anyone else getting DOW spammed?

I never played with Carthage. Did you have any wars right at the beginning of the campaign ? Cause I start to think those DOW spams happens when you already have more than 3,4 wars going on. With Egypt, it's automatic since you're at war with the seleucids from the beginning which means their numerous strapies are also at war with you. Then, the DOW spam starts.

And yes, ths CAI is not very reactive, in general. I also wonder what Athenians, Aierdi and Dalmatians fleet are doing in between Karalis and Lyllybeum, they just stands there since 10 turns at minimum and none of those factions are at war nor allied with any of the factions around. It looks like they are just here to enjoy the view, as a war is going on in between Syracuse,Rome and Carthage. Maybe the CAI is getting bored too.

[gedingradski]

Not sure if this is bug or not, so thoughts are welcome - but either there is a way around the diplomatic reaction with client states/defensive allies to declare war if you engage their parent state or ally, or the penalty is not high enough...

I installed patch 4 and started a new VH Rome campaign, and was happy enough that trade agreements were much easier make (though, perhaps a little too easily as hardly anyone resisted in the first couple of turns, even with the Cultural Aversion penalty from being house of Junia...). Among them, I had agreements (no non-agression pacts) with Libya and Nova Carthago (Cathage's clients). Eventually I had to declare war on Carthage, so usually in this situation I find someone else who they're at war with (Syracuse in this case) and see if I can get a bit of cash from them for declaring even though I was going to anyway... After I did that, I suffered a minor (<10 negative diplo points) with Carthage's clients but they continued trading with me. I thought that was unusually fortunate, until it happened again with Sparta but this time their defensive allies (Makedon, and by this time Athens) didn't declare war on me and continued to trade (except Makedon, with whom I had no previous agreement).

Has this happened to anyone else? It appears to me that: 1) declaring war in this manner seems to by-pass the trigger whereby allies or clients can join the war as opposed to when it is a direct declaration; and 2) the penalty doesn't seem to be appropriately large enough with their allies or clients for them to join the war in their next turn(s).

Anyone else noticed anything similar? I reckon it might be scripting glitch for that diplomatic action, or something the AI is recognising (or programmed to recognise) as a trigger for war... I don't think it used to do this though...

[Kamakazi]

Ive gone to the point of declaring on everyone to get a challenge. My only allies are Knossos and Pergamon. But im at war with pretty much everyone else and will be declaring on cimmera soon

[Seyavash]

I never played with Carthage. Did you have any wars right at the beginning of the campaign ? Cause I start to think those DOW spams happens when you already have more than 3,4 wars going on. With Egypt, it's automatic since you're at war with the seleucids from the beginning which means their numerous strapies are also at war with you. Then, the DOW spam starts.

And yes, ths CAI is not very reactive, in general. I also wonder what Athenians, Aierdi and Dalmatians fleet are doing in between Karalis and Lyllybeum, they just stands there since 10 turns at minimum and none of those factions are at war nor allied with any of the factions around. It looks like they are just here to enjoy the view, as a war is going on in between Syracuse,Rome and Carthage. Maybe the CAI is getting bored too.

Yes they start with a war against the Turdetani but this faction has no client states at the beginning. I have no issue with DOW from factions near me but when various German factions and land locked Galatians in Anatolia declare war without reason that seems a bit ridiculous. Basically there seems to be an imbalance between passive and aggressive AI that still needs to be sorted out better. Based on other posts here and on TWC it does seem Carthage is more prone to this issue but I do hope future patches improve this feature to be challenging without being silly.

[Hooahguy]

New patch coming out tomorrow!

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Hi everyone,

Thank you for playing our patches and reporting issues you find on the forum. Without that help we wouldn’t be able to turn around the patches as fast as we have been doing. We’re achieving in weeks what, on previous projects, took months.

Over the next few weeks there’s going to be a shift from dealing with stability and config to working on gameplay and features, while performance and AI remain high priorities. I expect the pace of patching to slow a little as gameplay and deeper AI changes need longer to test and tune. It’ll still be weeks rather than months between patches though, and we're going to continue to patch the game regularly for the foreseeable future.

Gameplay and AI fixes take a long time to test, and we have to play a lot of 200+ turn games to be sure a change has worked as intended. To make the regular patches possible we have to overlap them, so while patch 5 will go live tomorrow, we've already started work on patch 7. This does mean it takes a while for your feedback to manifest as changes in the game, so please don’t be too disappointed if your top issue isn’t fixed in the latest patch. We are listening to you, and we will get there.

Our long-term plan from here is to get as fast as possible to a point where everyone is broadly happy with the state of the gameplay and AI. After that we’ll shift modes again to long-term support – something which is new for TW and was very much our plan for the title all along. Our games already have a long lifetime, but by releasing occasional DLC packs and free content updates we keep working on them for much longer. This means upgrades in a number of areas which help the game evolve, and stop it becoming obsolete.

I’m not going make any detailed claims about what we’re going to do in the short term. The best way – the only really credible way - we can let you know what we’re doing is by delivering it in the game. But rest assured that we’re constantly reading the TW forums and a variety of others, and the feedback you’re giving helps us to prioritise the issues we deal with, as well as getting a sense of which features work well, which are not liked, and which features from previous Total War games which weren’t designed into Rome II are missed. This is an interesting topic actually, as a lot of people think that we’ve ‘cut’ features to make Rome II and it isn’t as simplistic as that assumption.

A lot of the game is designed from the ground up. We develop many features in parallel, some of which work differently to how they did in previous games: we aim to create a different experience every time, and that’s very important to us. New features are added, and certain features from previous games are therefore not included as they must naturally make way for different features. What’s been interesting – and very useful for us – is listening to you telling us about which features you like and don’t like, and what you miss from previous titles. We take your views seriously, and we’ll take them with us in the future.

For now, we’re about to roll out our largest patch yet, which contains a number of key fixes and changes. The next update will also bring you new, free game content which we’ve been talking about for a while… we hope you like it. Alongside this, you’ll see our next major step towards mod support for ROME II.

Enjoy the update, enjoy the game, and thanks again for your ongoing feedback.

Mike Simpson

I am cautiously optimistic, cant wait to see what is coming! If I had to guess the Selucids will be released tomorrow, maybe a blood pack? I would be so happy if so. We need more blood in the game.