The Total War: Rome 2 Thread

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LostCrusader

Lurker in the shadows
Feb 3, 2011
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So far the only big disappointments for me has been that there are no videos for the spy actions (was honestly the best part of the first Shogun) and the bodies disappear off the battle field very quickly. The bodies haven't been taken off screen in any previous total war game that I have played, and I always thought it always was a cool way to show the scale of a battle. Other than those, it has been positive and just getting used to the new UIs and campaign map.
 

BloatedGuppy

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Feb 3, 2010
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Played through the tutorial and a few turns of a campaign. Some thoughts...

1. Some general UI angst. While much of the Total War experience remains intact, especially on the combat maps, there's enough little changes that are obtuse enough that I had a surprising amount of "new game" vexation trying to figure out what was what. It's possible this is just first day learning curve, but there's a niggling feeling there that the UI isn't as elegant or intuitive as one might've hoped.

2. Combat does resolve a bit too quickly. It's not as bad as Shogun 2, where units seemed to melt instantly against their foil inside that game's ludicrous rock/paper/scissors balancing, but it's considerably faster than Medieval 2, which I felt got the pace about right. I'd have been fine with slightly faster, but this is a LOT faster. It's not so bad that I can't live with it, but I'll miss those big, boiling melees that dragged on for what felt like hours. They gave real weight to the combat. I'll also say that javelins at least traverse their firing arc way too quickly. They feel more like ballista bolts. Blink and you'll miss the volley.

3. Unit placards are hideously stylized and way too large. They also don't show unit numbers, relying instead on a decreasing health bar that is tougher to track at a glance. Thankfully they can be turned off, but that robs you of some fairly vital information. I'd love to see these addressed in a mod or a patch so we can A) scale the size and placement of them and B) choose to replace the health bar with numerical info.

4. Campaign and battle maps are pretty enough, but most certainly not preview quality. I toyed with some settings to give myself what I thought would be my best bet...the game will auto-set you to settings you really shouldn't be on, and then scale you down without actually telling you, so I decided to manually tweak and settled on "very high" for most things, with medium shadows and ultra textures. It's reasonably handsome, but it's not anything special. Fortunately 90% of the combat takes place from an aerial view anyway as you move and re-align troops.

5. Holy shitballs there are a LOT of neutral factions. No grey armies this time, there's a motherfucking LOAD of neutral factions. Watching them speed by during the AI turns was boggling. There must be 100 of them. I've also heard there's something on the order of 700 unique units in the game, compared to 40 or so in Shogun 2, with huge variation between factions. Big thumbs up, although the turn length will probably trend towards "horrifying" in long campaigns.

6. Load times are nice and brisk, a huge improvement over Shogun 2's interminable waits.

7. Sound assets are nice. Music was a little underwhelming.

8. Family trees seem to have been streamlined out of the game, and like Shogun 2 generals are now a set of player determined level up rewards instead of a set of randomly/genetically determined traits ala Medieval 2. Some players might like this, I feel it robs the game of significant RPG and AAR potential, and leeches away a lot of character. Big thumbs down.

9. Seasons are now gone from the campaign map, as turns are now 1 year long instead of 3 months long. You miss the slight visual changes for winter, along with some of the interesting tactical/logistics concerns of winter, and you also end up with your characters aging 4x faster than previously...another blow to RP and storytelling.

10. City infrastructure has been made significantly more complex, at least from the Medieval 2 era, and more than mildly confusing. There also appears to be a political system in place which is equally confusing (and if reviews are to be trusted, more than a little janky).

11. The map seems a little more "gamey", with provinces larger, and routes between cities deliberately piped through mountainous chokepoints. Whether this is good or bad remains to be seen.

12. You can no longer recruit armies distinct from generals, so no more randomly roaming mini stacks. Whether this is good or bad remains to be seen. I'm leaning "slightly bad" as it's a little weird.

13. Your armies now have fanciful names, which is kind of fun. Not sure if you can give units fanciful names as well. I rather suspect not. Pity if so, as it would generate attachment to have a named unit get killed, as opposed to Random Dudebros #5.

14. AI is still pretty typical Total War...not too bright. It's not showing signs of disastrous/broken stupidity yet, like standing gormlessly at the bottom of a hill while I rain missiles on their defenseless heads. But there's still time.

Will write more as I play more, assuming I have something of value to add. So far so good, I'd say. There's definitely some disappointing elements here, but there's a lot to like too, and the game feels considerably less arcade and streamlined into oblivion than Shogun 2 did...at least to me. I like it considerably more than the forums gave me call to believe I would, although perhaps slightly less than my hopes for the title pre-release based on marketing hype. There's a good foundation here for iteration through patches, expansions and mods.
 

ERaptor

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Oct 4, 2010
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Im hoping for some fast Patch / Update Action on CA's part. But i have honestly no idea how their policy on this was perviously. I have hopes tough, since Rome 2 was really hyped. I think their not gonna risk too much bad mouthing because of Bugs and issues, and will patch accordingly. Well, at least i really really hope so. There are so many tiny things that could be fixed relatively quickly, and some cruicial other parts as well.
 

Gennadios

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Aug 19, 2009
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My biggest gripe is the jacked up unit placement in the combat system. Previously, based on where your armies were on the campaign map you could tell which direction your reinforcements came from.

Imagine my surprise earlier when I had a reasonably small force attacked by a larger one. My initial placement was near the edge of the deployment line where I thought the reinforcements were likely to come from, away from an objective point.

Well, reinforcements came from waaay behind the enemy, took forever to get there, the objective point was taken by a group of archers, and the battle was a loss without a single shot being fired. Then my two armies scattered into the wind and got their asses handed to them individually.

Personally I don't think there should have been objective points outside of city defense, the mechanics they throw in just feel wonky.

Aside from that, the look and feel took me a while to get used to, not my favorite from a TW game, but after about 6 hours I guess they're functional.
 

teebeeohh

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Jun 17, 2009
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Haven't played it yet but I picked up a book to read because my proper rig died and I will have to play this on my backup for the time being. I honestly very much prefer the setting to Shogun.
One question for those of you who have played it: are there siege engines that can be effectively used against armies? Or do the ballistas suck like they did in three original Rome?
 

Eduku

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Sep 11, 2010
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For those having performance issues, people in the Rome 2 forums have been testing out different things to try and figure out what's wrong, and the problems do seem to be at least partly driver related. Apparently Nvidia and AMD have been slow in releasing new drivers for the game, so I suspect in the next day or two they will release new drivers. And sometime in the next week or so, CA should have released a patch by then as well.
 

Subscriptism

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May 5, 2012
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I have two complaints

1)More than once the AI had landed ships and just stood there on the shore while I shot them.
2)It takes 45-60 seconds at the end of every turn to cycle through all the factions, I don't need a medium sized coffee break every five minutes.

and one more bonus complaint that is of course universal to TW games, the AI can be pretty retarded.
 

SwagLordYoloson

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Jul 21, 2010
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Sea Battles, wtf. The difficulty rating on the map is 100% win for me, Go into the battle and get absolutely rofl-stomped...
 

ERaptor

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Oct 4, 2010
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Ultratwinkie said:
New mechanic. Your general must be right next to those troops otherwise they run. No longer can you park your general in the corner and win the battle. If the general isn't in the thick of it, the Ais run when they get a little scuffled.
That would explain the Enemy routing so fast. As usual, the AI is often very eager to either keep the General uselessly behind the lines, or charge him into his death. Still, a Morale and HP Boost would benefit the Game greatly, the units die way too fast.
 

wooty

Vi Britannia
Aug 1, 2009
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Not happy with it. All this hype on "cinematic" graphics and new textures, physics, blah......the game looks like arse, even on extreme settings, the FR drops like a horse turd and the gameplay just feels very...."sluggish" to me.

I can't say I'm happy with the overall experience so far.
 

ERaptor

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Oct 4, 2010
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wooty said:
Not happy with it. All this hype on "cinematic" graphics and new textures, physics, blah......the game looks like arse, even on extreme settings, the FR drops like a horse turd and the gameplay just feels very...."sluggish" to me.

I can't say I'm happy with the overall experience so far.
Try applying Custom Settings. It seems the Game has issues with setting them automatically.
 

SwagLordYoloson

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Jul 21, 2010
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Another thing, being able to use your armies as naval death stacks is soo overpowered. Enemy decides to turn entire army into navy, crushes my naval blockade. Sure, summoning sailors and triremes out of nowhere is historical.
 

Nurb

Cynical bastard
Dec 9, 2008
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I can't play it. It looks awful, worse than Shogun 2, and the performance is really bad no matter what setting. Textures are bad and smudgey and setting shadows to "very high" turns them off! I've read the graphics problem is very common.

So now everyone has to wait on a patch