The Total War: Rome 2 Thread

[BloatedGuppy]

Well that helps, I guess, although I still don't quite see the point of giving me three different ways to assassinate a unit depending on whichever stat is highest. Why give me three options if I'm only going to use the one with the highest chance of success?

Now, if they had the little assassination videos, and you got a different one based on which skill you were using, then I could see a point to having three different stats instead of just the one.

It's just another example of a simple, elegant, intuitive system that they had been perfecting in Shogun 2, made needlessly complicated.

Hey, I didn't design it, and I agree. Your post made me curious, so I went looking for an explanation, and that's the explanation I found. On generals at least it seems sensible, if a bit dull compared to M2's traits.

As for Shogun 2, you'll have a hard time getting me to agree with anything positive said about that game. Pong is elegant. They streamlined away EVERYTHING that made Total War special. At least Rome II has put SOME of it back in, albeit messily.

 

[BeeGeenie]

Well that helps, I guess, although I still don't quite see the point of giving me three different ways to assassinate a unit depending on whichever stat is highest. Why give me three options if I'm only going to use the one with the highest chance of success?

Now, if they had the little assassination videos, and you got a different one based on which skill you were using, then I could see a point to having three different stats instead of just the one.

It's just another example of a simple, elegant, intuitive system that they had been perfecting in Shogun 2, made needlessly complicated.

Hey, I didn't design it, and I agree. Your post made me curious, so I went looking for an explanation, and that's the explanation I found. On generals at least it seems sensible, if a bit dull compared to M2's traits.

As for Shogun 2, you'll have a hard time getting me to agree with anything positive said about that game. Pong is elegant. They streamlined away EVERYTHING that made Total War special. At least Rome II has put SOME of it back in, albeit messily.

LOL, good point. Shogun 2 didn't get my vote in the "Best Total War game" thread either, (Medieval 2 FTW) I just like how they handled agents.

 

[Floppertje]

the tutorial is a lot better than what shogun 2 had, but it still left me a little confused on a few things. other than that... i friggin LOVE the artillery! It's almost like bowling!
still need to get the hang of things, but I'm having a good time with it.

 

[InfinityX]

snip

Thank you very much! I was curious about these stats as well

 

[Carnagath]

What little playtime I managed to put in through crashes and the 20 FPS that I get on low settings, the AI seems mediocre, the UI takes up half the screen and looks horrendous, and the battles are completely broken, units break formation immediately, everything happens so fast that by the time you have organized your flank half your shit is already routing, all kinds of nonsense. I think I'm gonna pretend that this doesn't exist until after a year of patching and user modding. Extremely disappointing.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I might have asked you this before, but what did you dislike about Shogun 2?

While I also disliked some of the changes they made I thought Shogun 2 was quite solid.

- Removal of a lot of the colorful RPG/AAR aspect from the Medieval 2/Rome era. Can't say if that was a continuation of a trend through Empire or not, as I never played the post M2 games.

- A host of more or less cut and paste mirror factions.

- A setting that holds no particular historical interest to me.

- An extremely thin roster of units, exacerbated by initially confusing names (I know instinctively what to expect from a "Levy Spearman", less so an "Ashigaru") and the absurd introduction of a rock/paper/scissors dynamic between what was essentially three different unit types.

- Hyped up battle speed, making everything feel like a twitch RTS instead of a cerebral grand strategy title.

The resulting game just felt completely inert to me. I played for a few hours, found it pretty and clean, but utterly lifeless. I just couldn't bring myself to care about ANYTHING that was happening. Had I not got it for $10 in a sale it would've ranked high amongst the worst purchases I ever made.

 

[Realitycrash]

My problems are mostly minor annoyances that I hope they fix.

1: When enemy units rout, my units does not automatically chase them. Why?

2: Trying to kill routing units that aren't even defending themselves is now apparently impossible. Even with light cavalry chasing a broken unit of slingers, my cavalry only kills one routing slinger every fifteen seconds or so. Holy shit, really? In every TW game, mopping up units with fast cavalry was NOT that hard.

3: Balance the ranged units. It's nice that javelins no longer suck as hard as they used to, but Archers being worse than slingers? Uh, okey.

 

[TheCommanders]

I was really surprised by all the negativity on the Total War Forums. I had played the game for about 8 hours on easy (with rome) just to get the hang on the new system before I started a harder game with a harder faction. I went over to the forums to see what factions people liked the best and saw 90% of the threads were proclaiming the death of the franchise and the betrayal of the fanbase. Yeesh. Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've had zero performance issues (with a slightly above average pc), and no bugs at all (that I've noticed anyway). I really like the way battles feel; a large army marching feels and sounds like a large army marching, and after orders have been issued and a large melee is underway, I like to drop into cinematic view and enjoy the spectacle for a moment or two.

I've heard a lot of complaints about the new interface, and I think they are mostly unwarranted. It looks simplified, but all the information you'd expect is still there, it's just either a click or two away, or requires you to mouse over an icon. This may slow you down a few seconds, but as a result the main screen is much less cluttered, which I think is an acceptable compromise (YMMV).

There were only two things I was really annoyed by (so far anyway).

1. Why the hell are there control points in open battles? I started a battle on a map against a larger force, and deployed some troops in a forest with the intent of using my skirmishers to lure their force into an ambush. All well and good, but suddenly, after their troops had advanced a bit I lost the battle. Before any troops had engaged. What? So I checked the replay, and then noticed a random circle on the grass somewhere near the middle of the map that the enemy army walked over for about 15 seconds, and then "captured" (how you "capture" a circle of grass is beyond me). That feature needs to go away, but I'm pretty sure a mod will give the option to remove those... or at least I hope so.

2. No one (meaning any of the AI) wants to fight open battles! That example I listed above was such a surprise... because it was the only battle I engaged in (non-naval) that didn't take place in a city. Maybe it was just because I was on easy (yes, yes, I'll get to a harder difficulty soon, shut up) but the AI armies did exactly two things. Defended their settlement, or went directly to my settlements to try and capture them. I much prefer open battles (lots more options) so this is very disappointing. Again, it could just be because I was playing on easy. I'm about to start a game on hard as Parthia, so we'll see what happens.

Anyway, despite a few annoying little niggles, I really like Total War: Rome 2 so far, and was really surprised by all the hate!

 

[Dogstile]

I can see myself enjoying the game quite a bit, though the performance issues are really crippling the experience for me. The graphics seem quite muddy overall (to the point that I get a headache when I play for more than 30 minutes) and the anti-aliasing is either awful or not working. That and my FPS is just trash, which is strange since I run Shogun II almost completely maxed.

This is my exact issue. I play shogun maxed out. I should not be lagging with all my settings on low, something else is up here. I do have an ATI card, maybe that's the case (again).

Naval battles are dumb, if their ship is a tiny bit bigger than yours and they ram you, your entire ship goes down and they can love tap their way across an entire fleet like that. If your ships go over sunken ships they blow up. Transport ships can contend with war ships, etc etc.

Romans are stupidly overpowered. You can get the marian reforms in around 10-12 turns and romans don't usually die from other units. Even the counters (javalin men) firing into their flanks will run out of ammo before routing a single unit.

I have no idea why I lag more on the campaign map than i do in battle with thousands of units fighting. I also don't like crashing every other battle. I'm actually running my PC with the case off just to make sure its not an overheating issue.

People, WAIT TO BUY ON THIS ONE. At least until christmas when they'll iron out the bugs. CA games always launch buggy and unoptimized.

Edit: Oh hell, I didn't even get onto the quick battles. This is what it looks like when you put your men in front of a capture point and let the enemy "attack you". What they'll actually do is try and run past your guys into the capture point and get slaughtered. 1650ish kills in less than five minutes.

http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/616154295831875472/1D42E4D9C292578538AFF07AC598F7EC236C2D7B/

 

[Elfgore]

So I didn't mind the game until now but after I failed a mission because my troops didn't listen to me, I'm putting the game on hold till they patch it. I fucking ordered my general ten times, ten FUCKING times to stop fighting the swordsman that ambushed him and run like hell. Do they do it? Of course not because that makes sense to run away, instead they decide to run back and save the one guy who was still being attacked. I then get attacked by spearmen and my general dies. I've noticed this before too. If my soldiers are fighting they will not run away unless I click it ten times. Makes hit and run cavalry attacks downright impossible because you lose your entire fucking cav force because they refuse to run when they get charged by five units of elite spearmen.

 

[Xjin]

By the looks of things there going to consoleize it on SEGA's beck and call. The arcade feel/speed of battle and mass bugs lend credence to the murmurs going about after some things that SEGA has talked about.

The AI can do much better at sea battles now, and shows glimmers of intelligence during land battles. I'll post more latter, I'm sick and dog tired.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

The AI seems smarter. I had just a city siege where they use useless units (tribals with clubs) to push the ladders up the wall and burn my door, weakening my defenses, then come main force running out of the nearby forest... only to disregard the ladders and go right through the burned through door. They ran off when I used my useless units to cap the main door's ramp and put my real units behind the meat shields. Because their commander didn't come with them, and I put mine right behind the capped door.

Okay, maybe the AI hasn't changed.

I haven't played the game yet, but from what I've seen from some videos on youtube, the AI is kind of buggy.


Not sure how prevalent stuff like this is in the game, but I've seen AI fuck ups like this in multiple videos, this one just embodies it best.

 

[Bleidd Whitefalcon]

By the looks of things there going to consoleize it on SEGA's beck and call. The arcade feel/speed of battle and mass bugs lend credence to the murmurs going about after some things that SEGA has talked about.

The AI can do much better at sea battles now, and shows glimmers of intelligence during land battles. I'll post more latter, I'm sick and dog tired.

They can't. The only nextgen console it would really work on is the WiiU because of the gamepad. On ps4 or xbone, the battles would just turn into massive clusterfucks because you can't do a good RTS with analogue sticks - they're not precise enough. And I doubt that ANY of the nextgen stuff could run Rome 2 on the lowest settings

 

[Eduku]

Just so everyone knows, the first patch for the game will hit this Friday (tomorrow over here), and the game will subsequently be patched every week from now:

Hiya guys,

At Creative Assembly we are very pleased with the response to ROME II, with hundreds of thousands of players enjoying the game so far; but we do know that, as with all large PC releases, the variety of hardware and general system specifications can cause issues for some people and we are urgently working to help get them the right experience.

As announced last month, we are also planning to tweak the balancing, AI routines and other features now that we?re getting real-time metric feedback from thousands of players.

The result is that the first update to the game will drop this Friday, with the intention to update the game on a weekly basis in the immediate future.

Full patch notes will be available on Friday, but the update will address known instances of crashes due to hardware conflicts alongside several other performance fixes.

In addition, anyone experiencing graphical issues including low resolution textures, should check our support forums at www.totalwar.com/rome2support which contain suggestions for settings which will improve visuals in almost all cases.

There are also a variety of other fixes suggested in our support forum, please head there to find out more or report your own problem directly to the CA team who will assist you.

Thanks!

Heh, 'very pleased with the response'...

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

I really want to like Rome 2 and I have this urge to continue my current campaign... But then I remember that it takes between one and three minutes to complete a single turn and that the AI seems afraid to do anything that might even slightly upset the player and I just kind of lose interest. Hopefully speeding up the end of turn phase is among the things getting an early patch, because until that is fixed I spend more time waiting to play than actually playing.