Rome II

[Bison]

Problem with 1/2 speed is you lose sound

I never noticed this before, but I'll be damned it's true.  Odd design choice.

[Gusington]

It's been that way since at least Napoleon.

Take and hold a Samnite town eh...I think I'm at that point. Can't wait to start a real campaign though, maybe in the next day or two.

[Nefaro]

A word of warning, however.  You may not want to bother sieging cities because the sieging army will take casualties every turn, and start getting hit with constant plague outbreaks that reduce your manpower even more.  While that's fine, there was one thing CA overlooked in implementing siege attrition:  The defenders in the city have no attrition at all!

There is a tech for grain storage in the second tier of the siege tree that reduces attrition rates by like 60%.

Yes, there are attrition reducing extras, leader abilities, etc.  I performed this siege starting on about the fourth or fifth turn, after driving off his main army.

My point is this:  What's the use of laying siege to a city if the only people who will be starving are the besiegers themselves?  It's pretty ridiculous.  Just who is besieging who now?  ::)

I like that they put this in but they shouldn't even bother if it's not gonna be far more effective on the people within the besieged city.  As it is now, they don't suffer at all.  Probably an unfinished game mechanic that needs attention.  I brought it up so that you guys know not to lay siege, unless it's to build ladders for a couple turns before assaulting (if your army has xp'd up and received the option).

I've not really experienced much fps slowdown in tactical battles, after tweaking some gfx settings.  My biggest gfx drops are on the campaign map, just like it was with Shogun 2.  It's actually worse in this one.  There's no way to turn off all the fog and clouds floating around, and it's all these little extras (along with the larger size) that drags it down at times.  Not bad unless the camera starts zooming across the map to some event or while the AI turns are processing.  Dunno about you guys, but I don't really need a bunch of extra eye candy on the campaign map. 

********

On another note, I just started a game as Pontus on my notebook. 

While I was leaning towards Epirus, Parthia, or Egypt at first,  Pontus looked to have a better opportunity to expand into some barbarian territory fairly close by.  Plus they have mostly Greek style armies with a little Eastern flavor tossed in.  Looks like a lot of fun.   Epirus starts in a tough spot, with negative diplo penalties toward relations with all the Greek states.  No wonder I saw them dogpile Epirus in my first cold run as Rome!  :o  Egypt looks like it only has a small bit of easy expansion to do before getting into a big conflict with the Seleucs (as it should be), but I'll try that one later.  Egyptian pike Phalanxes are probably very useful in the relatively flat lands thereabouts.  8)

Makes me wonder what faction DLC will come after they do the first Black Sea steppe horse-centric "barbarian" one.  That should be pretty fun, too, but I'd like to see a playable Armenia option.  And one of the Iberian tribes (Cantabrians?).  Dacia.  Fixing the bugs and optimizing the engine should take first precedent, of course.  :)

[Con]

Problem with 1/2 speed is you lose sound

If you play at double speed it plays the Benny Hill Theme Song

Con

[Yskonyn]

Man, I have wasted what gaming time I've had today trying to get Rome II to work for me.  No joy.  Completely freezes a minute into any battle....

I know the haters are out in force on the TWCenter forums etc, but not all the reports of bugs, gfx issues and mysterious hardware incompatabilities are exaggerations, alas  >:(

I have had one lockup too. Right after the battle Loaded and I started to zoom in on the navy battle map in the prologue.
I had just fiddled with the graphics settings.
Did you try running on medium to low detail just to test yet? Freezes might be caused by too high a setting of some sort.

[Martok]

I'm finally gonna fire up this bad boy in another couple hours.  Here's hoping it runs smoothly! 

I've certainly lost campaigns in Shogun 2. The tactical AI might be lackluster but that strategic AI is a demon!

Aye, that's the truth. 

Not that the tactical AI in Shogun 2 strikes me as poor, but the strategic AI has been excellent so far.  It's caught me off-guard numerous times already, a fact which has yet to cease delighting me. 

Eurogamer notes some other problems

as does joystiq

They have reviews out already? That strikes me as...a bit premature. 

[undercovergeek]

im not a fan boy, far from it, and TBH if all theyd done was reskin Shogun 2 with Rome troops i would have been happy - but there seems to be an awful lot of dog piling on the game over what seems to be some of the most trivial things. Ill admit, if it doesnt work on your system then thats a bastard and i feel for those guys, but as Martok rightly prophesised theres so much 'its a scam', 'its worse than Colonial Marines', 'we've been lied to', 'its worse than Empire' out there.

Some of it is hilarious 'the Alpha Carthage battle looked amazing and now we have THIS'!!!!!! for pages and pages before 1 guy posted a picture of his battle and said 'it looks pretty spot on to me' and then they all disappear into the wings muttering to themselves whilst looking for the next complaint.

For me, i dont understand why the unit icons in the UI dont tell you how many troops are left in that unit anymore, but unlike some its not the end of my world. Still loving it, still learning, still totally immerssed - its Epic, as it should be

[Yskonyn]

Oh yes Epic it is! I am absolutely loving the Cinematic camera in this game!
I just launched a naval invasion on a town where I viewed the landing from the cinematic camera on one of the boats. Just wow!

Another thing I have found a little hard is to find out how you economy is doing and what you should and should not do. One thing I have learned from the prologue so far is that you just can't click willy nilly to keep on building stuff. It made me go bankrupt quickly.
So where and when I should build things is something I find a little hard at this point, but I am sure its all a matter to learning.

On the strategic map the AI is pretty aggressively exploiting your errors. Even in the Prologue and it seems to know how to field harassment tactics too. ;)

Loving the game so far. Yes there are flaws and the UI is not really my thing so far (aestethically speaking and having the info I need at hand at times is lacking), but other than that absolutely love it.

[undercovergeek]

Oh yes Epic it is! I am absolutely loving the Cinematic camera in this game!
I just launched a naval invasion on a town where I viewed the landing from the cinematic camera on one of the boats. Just wow!

Another thing I have found a little hard is to find out how you economy is doing and what you should and should not do. One thing I have learned from the prologue so far is that you just can't click willy nilly to keep on building stuff. It made me go bankrupt quickly.
So where and when I should build things is something I find a little hard at this point, but I am sure its all a matter to learning.

On the strategic map the AI is pretty aggressively exploiting your errors. Even in the Prologue and it seems to know how to field harassment tactics too. ;)

Loving the game so far. Yes there are flaws and the UI is not really my thing so far (aestethically speaking and having the info I need at hand at times is lacking), but other than that absolutely love it.

Found this for provinces and building -

The province system also allows for more interesting decision-making in regards to construction. Each region contains a settlement, which can support a number of buildings or developmental areas, such as farms or training grounds. I develop Rome as a military centre of excellence, always sending my legions there to recruit new members and maintaining it as a sort of Death Fortress par excellence. This does mean that the province's food and cash reserves mostly come from elsewhere, so the coastal cities are essentially fish factories. They're great scaly unpleasantries where everybody is unhappy because of the stench and the high probability of slipping on fish guts while walking down the street.

I find it useful to have a centralised military production centre but, playing as the Iceni, I experimented with different strategies, making each settlement a more balanced model rather than a specialised unit. It's a viable tactic and means that any loss has a lesser impact. The risk with my Roman model is that any invaders knocking out a single region could cause a ripple effect, severely disrupting the capital by cutting off its supply of food or labour. Cities can essentially be respecced, by demolishing the contents of an area and replacing them, but it's an expensive and time-consuming habit.

[Staggerwing]

If you play at double speed it plays the Benny Hill Theme Song

Con

That piece of music is called 'Yakety Sax' in case anyone ever needs to know.

[Yskonyn]

Found this for provinces and building -

The province system also allows for more interesting decision-making in regards to construction. Each region contains a settlement, which can support a number of buildings or developmental areas, such as farms or training grounds. I develop Rome as a military centre of excellence, always sending my legions there to recruit new members and maintaining it as a sort of Death Fortress par excellence. This does mean that the province's food and cash reserves mostly come from elsewhere, so the coastal cities are essentially fish factories. They're great scaly unpleasantries where everybody is unhappy because of the stench and the high probability of slipping on fish guts while walking down the street.

I find it useful to have a centralised military production centre but, playing as the Iceni, I experimented with different strategies, making each settlement a more balanced model rather than a specialised unit. It's a viable tactic and means that any loss has a lesser impact. The risk with my Roman model is that any invaders knocking out a single region could cause a ripple effect, severely disrupting the capital by cutting off its supply of food or labour. Cities can essentially be respecced, by demolishing the contents of an area and replacing them, but it's an expensive and time-consuming habit.

Thanks! I did discover that the cities in one province should be 'configured' so that you reap the benefits for the province as a whole. It took a while to figure that out (again due to the minimalistic UI), but I think things are starting to fall into place now.
A big help is the excellent in-game Encyclopedia where you can quickly review techtrees and such to make better informed decisions.
It will be interesting to play with the different routes of development as you have outlined above. :)

Oh and 'respeccing' cities; yes that's darn expensive! An empty plot will result in civs building Slums on the plot, which you will have to dismantle again for a hefty sum of gold. So only expand to new plots of land if you need them AND if you have the cash to quickly develop them.

Also I am not really 'getting' the recruitment mechanics yet. Say my General has skills to command 20 units in his army.
I can recruit Principe's, Hastati and Velites for example.
I do so, but after a few units I cannot recruit Hastati anymore eventhough there is place in the army, but I can only recruit some Mobs from there on. Why is this? Is there an equipment resource of some sort, that if you run out of equipment you can only rally civillians?

[JudgeDredd]

I'm BACK people. Computer is fine. Took it into work and had it stripped down, put it back together and reset the CMOS and BAM...all working.

As for the game - I fired it up with my GTX 460 graphics card and ran the benchmark and had avg 25 FPS (dropped waaay down in battles) but with my mates 6950 the avg dropped to 19 - so there was no benefit to a better card. Likely the better card suffered because the MB couldn't utilise the architechture of the card.

Anyway - looking forward to giving this a try tonight.

As for the Romans and the UK...I live in a place called Colchester - Englands oldest recorded town. It used to be called Camulodunum and this is a snippet from Boudica's wiki page

In AD 60 or 61, while the Roman governor Gaius Suetonius Paulinus was leading a campaign on the island of Anglesey off the northwest coast of Wales, Boudica led the Iceni as well as the Trinovantes and others in revolt.[2] They destroyed Camulodunum, which is modern Colchester. Camulodunum was earlier the capital of the Trinovantes, but at that time was a colonia—a settlement for discharged Roman soldiers, as well as the site of a temple to the former Emperor Claudius

[Gusington]

Now you're just bragging JD :)

Nefaro keep posting on Pontus...I am intrigued! And also depressed that I won't be able to get back into the game for another 14 hours. Had a good run with the Prologue and will bump up my graphics settings a bit tonight.

[Bison]

I'm BACK people. Computer is fine. Took it into work and had it stripped down, put it back together and reset the CMOS and BAM...all working.

As for the game - I fired it up with my GTX 460 graphics card and ran the benchmark and had avg 25 FPS (dropped waaay down in battles) but with my mates 6950 the avg dropped to 19 - so there was no benefit to a better card. Likely the better card suffered because the MB couldn't utilise the architechture of the card.

Anyway - looking forward to giving this a try tonight.

Good news JD. 

[Bison]

I miss the start of the turn popups notifying you of completed units, buildings, and such.