Rome II

[W8taminute]

I was in our local Target today and saw Rome II on the shelves.  I couldn't resist buying it, even at full price, because it's been ages since I've actually seen a PC game on store shelves that's worth buying. 


Oh dear...what have I done?




Installing disk 2 of 3 as we speak...

[Sir Slash]

Welcome to the Hive Wait-a-minute. Resistance is futile. Who you gonna play first?

[W8taminute]

^Don't know yet.  Although all 3 disks are now installed there is the 10 step first time play setup it seems to be going through now.

[Boggit]

My Roman galleys got hammered the other night by a selection of Samnite Transports...!!! I thought transports were going to be easy, but was wrong. A couple rammed my ships, and the rest javelinned my assault ships into nothing. I agree that naval combat is more of a challenge.

[Nefaro]

^Don't know yet.  Although all 3 disks are now installed there is the 10 step first time play setup it seems to be going through now.

Well.. it's on Steam, so you may have to re-download the whole damn thing too.  :P

I highly recommend opting-in on Beta 3, in the game's Properties page.  It has made some marked improvements.

[undercovergeek]

yeah, i dont understand what the disks are for - i fell for this with Empire, bought the discs and still had to download thru steam

[tgb]

The discs are to make the less-Steam-savvy consumer feel like they are taking something home for the money.  I remember when I bought Shogun II from GamersGate - I waited something like 3 hours for it to download from the GG site, and another 3 to download it from Steam.

[Gusington]

It seems like this third patch is taking longer than the first two to become unbeta...

[MengJiao]

My Roman galleys got hammered the other night by a selection of Samnite Transports...!!! I thought transports were going to be easy, but was wrong. A couple rammed my ships, and the rest javelinned my assault ships into nothing. I agree that naval combat is more of a challenge.

  Transports are tricky, but I think the ships themselves aren't very strong or fast compared to warships.  They seem to have one specific trick at least:  turning broadside to invite a ram and then mobbing the rammer.  I vaguely recall the last time I saw a lot of transports I made sure to sort of ball them up before I set a few on fire and then finished them off by ramming.  I apparently have learned to avoid going straight in to ram them.  It's possible they were under "row-fast" orders and their morale collapsed once some burning and ramming occurred.

  I find naval battles very challenging.  I can win land battles even with almost 2-1 odds in favor of the AI, but at sea all bets are off and even when the assessor says its even the AI has a very good chance of doing some serious damage or handing me a close defeat.

[Bison]

The way troop transports are handled in this game is my least favorite aspect of the game. 

[W8taminute]

Actually once the disks (the system actually asks you to load disk 2 of 3 and then 3 of 3 and I heard the disk tray spinning) were installed the only thing downloaded from STEAM was the patch.  I didn't have to wait very long at all so I'm not understanding the claim that you take home the disks and wait for 100000GB download from STEAM. 

Now I definitely recall waiting a long time for Napoleon to install from STEAM even though I purchased the physical copy (from Target :) ) so that was kind of bewildering. 

Anyway can't wait to sit down with this game over the weekend.  I'll check out that Beta 3 you mentioned as well Nefaro.

[Nefaro]

It seems like this third patch is taking longer than the first two to become unbeta...

They've been making improvements to Beta 3.  I think there's been two or three additional updates to it.  The latest one made a BIG difference to the gfx performance on the campaign map for me.

The way troop transports are handled in this game is my least favorite aspect of the game.

I saw mention of the devs taking a look at making transports less powerful, and upping the actual naval vessels strength. 

At this point, there's not much sense in building a navy since you can get dual-use by sending a ground army into the sea.

[Sir Slash]

I was looking through the Total War site last pm and there's a crapload of mods out already including 2 new unit mods by Radious that look splendid. I'm going to wait until the patches are all straight before trying one out though and I hope that at some point Steam will support mods the way they did for Shogun 2.

[MengJiao]

It seems like this third patch is taking longer than the first two to become unbeta...

They've been making improvements to Beta 3.  I think there's been two or three additional updates to it.  The latest one made a BIG difference to the gfx performance on the campaign map for me.

The way troop transports are handled in this game is my least favorite aspect of the game.

I saw mention of the devs taking a look at making transports less powerful, and upping the actual naval vessels strength. 

At this point, there's not much sense in building a navy since you can get dual-use by sending a ground army into the sea.

I haven't tried this.  Usually the land armies have enough to do without getting sent to sea.  I was wondering what kind of Ships the Elephants end up with.  Probably just a handfull of missile troops per elephant unit.  Similarly with cavalry.  Not much nautical punch with a cavalry unit I suspect.  Often I use Fleets as units to strengthen garrisons in cities that are likely to suffer some attacks but nothing too big.

I've been thinking the other way around: what's the best fleet to drop its troops into a land battle?  But maybe there's some other optimum: what's the best land army to use in a sea battle?  Lots of archers.  A few swordsmen?  No elephants.

[Sir Slash]

I bet it's damned hard to get elephants to row together. I wonder if defensively you can deploy your ship-troops inside a city or do they have to be deployed at sea to begin with? I assaulted a city which had ships lining it's docks and so my own ships couldn't land there. Docks and the beach inside the walls I should say. If you can use your empty ships to block access to landing points, that opens up a whole new tactic for them.