Quote Originally Posted by Myth View Post
Always glad to read a positive post (including contructive critcism and feedback). I've been happy with the game since they removed the red skies and removed siege battle lag, and everything afterwards has made it better and better. Even if development stopped right this instant It would be on par with Rome 1 for me. Sure it lacks a family tree and seasons but it has a lot of other things.

And if anyone tries to convince me that patch 1.5 CAI and BAI are worse than Rome 1's "let me blockade that port for you", "fear the might of my endless 2 peltasts stacks" and "my general shall charge at your pike phalanx! Woe upon you!" then they are delusional. Rome II is a great game for me and as it is right now I could probably sink hundreds of hours in it untill i get bored with all the factions and variations.

With a few more patches and DLCs Rome II will earn the title of best strategy game. It has it already but I think those were ahem... purchased a bit prematurely. But we have to blame some marketing nerd for that. The actual people who develop and make the game are die hard Total War fans like us and they've been giving us what we want, and then some.

I think the herd mentality online is a dangerous thing. As soon as hating CA and calling anyone who enjoys Rome II a "CA apologist" becomes the new cool thing to do, all the 14 year olds jump on the bandwagon and start doing it. Soon, everyone is doing it because that's how we fit in the online community, right?

But, to gauge the true worth of Rome II, imagine you got it right now, post Nomadic Factions DLC at launch in September. How much would you love it? I daresay most of us would be singing high praises and sacrificing to Wodanaz or Mars.
This is a pretty important point that I like. Naturally its impossible to de-experience the release problems, but if I were to have gotten the game at hand today as the first contact with the product I would probably feel quite satisfied, if perhaps a little nervous for how future support would work. You can tell by now that there are people working on this game that have a love for what they're doing and what they're making. Sure, I can go on about how much I would have liked them to have a few more months of polishing, but Im content due to them working quite extensively post-launch to polish what they can. The open-beta-analogy isn't terrible. Maybe CA should look to Ubisoft's development of Heroes 6 as inspiration? A pre-order of that game (if you didn't get it otherwise) gave access to a pretty long "closed" beta to locate problems like exactly what Rome 2 suffered from a month ago. The whole "post-release-we'll-fix-it-when-we-fix-it-now-bugger-off"-thing took some of the shine off, but you can't flack CA for doing something like that. Now re-introducing gamebreaking bugs like rain-freezing... that's bad. Or clumsy if you will.

Its also quite true that in terms of AI Rome 2 is already leaps and bounds ahead of Rome 1. The trick is to manage what to expect from development in the 9 years between the game versus how much hype-spiralling you might have inflicted upon yourself. I know Im prone to the latter (so await a 10 page complaint thread about XCOM: Enemy Within and Thief 4 in the games forum!), but having some expectations towards improvement should be possible. Of course the strategic part of the game is quite a bit more complex in Rome 2, which does strain the AI a bit, but still... well, it has really been improved lately, so here's to the best in the future!

I already sacrifice to the current glory, but, as mentioned, it goes to Newell's altar. Im heretic like that.