Rome II

[TheCommandTent]

When you load the game up, before it actually engages you will get a box that contains red boxes. The mod manager is one of those red boxes. It works similar to the mod manager in Civ V.

Excellent then I should at least start downloading them.

[undercovergeek]

you need steam workshop first and then just sort it by most popular - youll find the big boys at the top

[mikeck]

Not trying to get everyone spun up but I just saw that angry joe has Rome 2 as #9 in his "worst games of 2013". Anyone who has played Rome 2 should see how absolutely ridiculous that is. I figured this guy had an agenda and this proves it to me.

Rome is a great game... Certainly not one of the worst

[HistoricalGamer]

mik I'm pretty sure his point is AT LAUNCH the game was a train-wreck and never should have come out in the state it was. The launch was a debacle and Creative Assembly should be called out on it. The game is far better now but you shouldn't get a pass for creating a broken game and fixing it after launch.

[Gusington]

I do think that the release and then patch way of things is by design now. CA was held to a tight schedule for release and the way to do that was to have a series of patches ready. Not a great way to do it, I admit, but not necessarily a crime against humanity either.

[HistoricalGamer]

Crime against humanity no but fair to call out a company that puts out a disaster of a project as well. If you watch the video Joe talks basically about it being on the list for the horrible nature in which it was released, he even admits its been patched up to a much better shape but he expects a far better and more stable launch than what they got, sounds like fair criticism to me. Not sure how it's proof of some kind of agenda.

[Gusington]

Every single TW release has been called a disaster. I don't think Rome II was a disaster of a project. Imperfect release? Totally. Bad business model using patches to make up for limited time? Yes.

[Bison]

I must be crazy because I like the game at release and had fun playing it. 

[agathosdaimon]

At launch the game was an abomination given the ca had to actually put out an apology for the state of the game. Angry joe had no agenda from what i could tell, he was venting his enormous disappointment at the time.
We all know compared to genocide and other crimes violating our human rights this was not an issue , in fact if we lived our lives with such comparisons all the time no one should be complaining ever, but what annoyed many is that CA were specifically hyping up the game AI as being the best ever when it is in fact possibly the worst ever - can AI still actually carry out a siege battle and use siege equipment?

[HistoricalGamer]

Nope, I just put a unit or two on walls and they never try and climb the ladders they break the gate and charge on through a fatal funnel to their death even if they outnumber me 10-1 I always win because they go in piecemeal and get slaughtered.

[solops]

For all of its good qualities, R2 really is "not ready." It takes real effort to contrive to lose a battle at any but the hardest levels as Rome, and even then...
About the only challenge is to pick a barbarian state at or near the hardest settings. This thread had me convinced to avoid the game, but I wound up getting it as a birthday present. Learning it was a lot of fun, but now.... mods help a lot, but the battle AI is just hopeless. Perhaps it will get better.

[mikeck]

I loved Rome 2 from day 1. As for winning battles, I usually win in every vanilla total war game. I find Shogun2 and Rome 2 to have the best AI by far. I think people went WAY overboard about this game at release. It had bugs but u was enjoying right off the bat

[undercovergeek]

I loved Rome 2 from day 1. As for winning battles, I usually win in every vanilla total war game. I find Shogun2 and Rome 2 to have the best AI by far. I think people went WAY overboard about this game at release. It had bugs but u was enjoying right off the bat

Got to agree with mikeck - totally playable from day 1

Twc is still infected by unbelievable amounts of moaning and bitching even from people who haven't played the game - just caught up in the negative shit storm by those who refuse to play their game because of laughable short comings

[MengJiao]

I must be crazy because I like the game at release and had fun playing it.

  I am with you on this.  I think the game was okay at release and has improved a lot.  The negative hype stems from the fact that hating certain games had become something of a cottage industry that feeds on itself.  There are unbelievable numbers of games out there that are nowhere near as good as the TW series and nobody devotes much time to hating them, so obviously the hating at Rome II had no basis in the game itself, except that maybe games are getting so good at basics that 99% of the game can work better than any game before and the game still gets seen as defective.  I've been calling this problem the uncanny valley, but perhaps its just that games have such a broad range of design choices to make that -- no matter how functional the game -- a lot of people are not going to have much sympathy for a lot of what it does successfully.  Or to put it another way: in some games a lot is going on and a lot of people would rather that a lot of that was not there at all or at least very different.

[MengJiao]

Nope, I just put a unit or two on walls and they never try and climb the ladders they break the gate and charge on through a fatal funnel to their death even if they outnumber me 10-1 I always win because they go in piecemeal and get slaughtered.

  I find the battle AI can put up a good fight even if they only have say a 1.5 advantage and better troops.  I think they can even win a siege if they have enough missile troops.

  I've had some extremely good battles in Rome II.  The AI is very good at sea battles so all of those are good.  Other monents I recall: dismounting my Persian Spear Cavalry to stand off a very large cavalry force in wooded terrain; scouting with the cinema view to find the enemy rear in a forest.

  And of course, visually, these are the best images of the ancient world you will see being generated to represent a battle in progress.