Rome II

[W8taminute]

Last night after thinking all was lost with my very first campaign as Pontus things turned around.  I consolidated my two battered armies into one keeping the second army with only one unit plus the general.  He acted as bait while the larger army trailed him.  Managed to sucker the ai into attacking my 2 unit army while my 12 unit army came in as reinforcements.  I have averted disaster and now that my occupied town has stabilized and is at 60 loyalty I am making a profit again albeit a small one. 

Then Crimea declared war on me and sent two fleets across the depths of the Black Sea.  When my single fleet met them I noticed that they (the Crimeans) had suffered attrition but I was hopelessly outnumbered.  Fortunately the next turn the Crimeans sent one of their fleets east to the Bosporus while the other continued on to Sinope, one of my cities.  I intercepted that fleet and destroyed it.

Dignitaries play a big role in getting occupied towns loyalty back online especially if they have at least +1 authority.  This single dignitary and the small garrison army I left really went a long way towards calming the occupied populace.  Man I love this game!  It's actually quite logical.

[Gusington]

W8 regarding your post a few pages back, I really didn't begin to 'get' the economics of the game until about 25 turns in. But I got a great feeling of satisfaction from my momentum growing and my coffers filling. Now my Romans are the biggest kids on the block in central Europe and are getting ready to reassert themselves in the Med against imperial Athens. The year is about 165 BC IIRC.

[MengJiao]

Naval fleets on land suck.  Primarily because they only have approximately half the warm bodies that a single land unit has.

And when land units enter the sea, they turn into naval vessels.  No, not the largest types, but they currently still overpower the early naval vessels and their smaller crews. 

They're supposedly gonna work on this.  At the moment, I just keep the initial naval force we start with for cruising around, uncovering the fog of war.  The more neutral nations I find, the more potential future trade offers I'll get.

  I ran an experimental Parthia branch off of my regular, lucky normal Parthia campaign.  Experimental Parthia (X-Parthia) tried using land armies as fleets and fleets as land armies as much as possible.  At a point in the game where even third-rate powers like Sparta, Athens and Pontus have some kind of fleets X-Parthia had heavy losses, though it was instructive.  X-Parthia expanded slightly faster for a time, but then ended up having a lot of fleets and armies in repair.  More unfinished forces ended up being thrown in and X-Parthia's campaign to control the Black Sea ended up throwing the Imperium off balance.  I went back to Regular Parthia and had somewhat less trouble taking the area in the long run.

  While in the early game transports may work okay as naval units, by say 170 BC, even the best armies take heavy loses as fleets and fleets do incredibly bad jobs of storming towns.  Transports are definitely more fragile than warships of about the same size, plus they don't have rapid rowing as a option and things seem to go very wrong with ramming and boarding (I suspect they are wrecking themselves with ramming and collisions, though there also seems to be a boarding-gone-wrong event -- possibly a collision that wrecks the boat that is hard to see?).  Fleets versus land units: the artillery is not effective and things go wrong during debarking -- some kind of morale problem when hit while debarking?  Plus of course, there just are not all that many troops in your average fleet.

[W8taminute]

I meant to ask this the other night but forgot until now.  The recommended specs for running this game call for among others a graphic card with 1GB of memory.  I have that covered yet I still see a message during game load that says something like 'You're running out of graphics memory.  This session will be downgraded.  You can over ride this by selecting use system memory.'

Has anyone seen this message and used the 'use system memory' feature?  I'm thinking of trying it to see if it improves graphics and performance but wanted to check in here first before doing so.

[MengJiao]

[Now go compare your experience with those on the Rome 2 or TWc forums...or the angry joe review. It's a good game. I don't get all the screaming about how everything sucks. If you haven't, download the beta 3 patch. Helps with AI and performance

  Yep.  This was one game where the negative stuff everybody was saying didn't really have much to do with how the game really worked.
I'd say two basic things caused some negative stuff: the actual, functional complexity and the actual, functional visual world.  The invisible problem was that the game mostly worked so well that its functioning didn't strike the non-analytically-minded as functioning at all.  So most of the game was effectively invisible and there were nothing but problems to see (because the non-problems were either too complex or too "natural" to nudge their way into analysis).

  For example -- naval battles -- these are actually the best naval battle simulations ever presented anywhere in any medium.  They were not noted at all in any early negative verbiage that I saw.

[Gusington]

Yeah W8 I got that message, have a 1 gb card and use that override option. Haven't had any issues. The weird thing is that I didn't get that message until one of the patches was applied.

[W8taminute]

^Thanks Gus, I'll give it a whirl tonight then.  I recently bought a 16GB flash drive which I'm using as extra memory via the Vista/Win7/Win8 Performance Boost app.  Let's see how this will come into play upon running the game.

[Nefaro]

Carthage has already fallen in my latest campaign.  I hadn't even uncovered the fog of war in their region yet.  Carthage has been knocked out early in every game I've played so far.  Sort of sad to see one of the two big empires knocked out within the first 20 turns or so of a campaign.

They start off with some smaller weak allies who get DOW'd by their neighbors.  When they join these wars to help defend their allies, their list of enemies just keeps stacking up for awhile at the start of the game. 

The other faction that usually gets wiped even more quickly is Epirus.  Most of their neighboring Greek states all have some kind of alliance and Epirus has a Diplo penalty with all of them.  It also starts in a war with Athens and the rest (Sparta and Macedon) will see this as a weakness and quickly declare war.  Gang bang.  Epirus is usually the one of the first to disappear, in my games.

[mikeck]

I meant to ask this the other night but forgot until now.  The recommended specs for running this game call for among others a graphic card with 1GB of memory.  I have that covered yet I still see a message during game load that says something like 'You're running out of graphics memory.  This session will be downgraded.  You can over ride this by selecting use system memory.'

Has anyone seen this message and used the 'use system memory' feature?  I'm thinking of trying it to see if it improves graphics and performance but wanted to check in here first before doing so.

Yes, I have seen that. Use the unlimited memory. I do and it's fine. If it gets choppy, just pause and turn down shadows or unit detail

[LongBlade]

I meant to ask this the other night but forgot until now.  The recommended specs for running this game call for among others a graphic card with 1GB of memory.  I have that covered yet I still see a message during game load that says something like 'You're running out of graphics memory.  This session will be downgraded.  You can over ride this by selecting use system memory.'

Has anyone seen this message and used the 'use system memory' feature?  I'm thinking of trying it to see if it improves graphics and performance but wanted to check in here first before doing so.

Yes, I have seen that. Use the unlimited memory. I do and it's fine. If it gets choppy, just pause and turn down shadows or unit detail

Thanks. It looks like you can manually set this with the Advanced graphics options. There's a check box to the right of the advanced options that says "Use Unlimited Memory." I think that's it.

I'm going to try this. I've been messing around with Fraps to see how I might do at some video capture. So far when I run it, Fraps says I'm getting as low as 1 FPS, then it crashes and closes. Hopefully this will work better and I can run it for longer than 20 seconds.

[Yskonyn]

Earlier CA warned us to not use that option until a last resort because it has a detrimental effect on performance? *confused*

[Gusington]

I've been using it for a week with no issues.

[LongBlade]

Earlier CA warned us to not use that option until a last resort because it has a detrimental effect on performance? *confused*

Funny you say that. The images looked like they were rendering somewhat slowly, but the framerate was around 25 per second.

Next thing for me to do is to compare framerates with Fraps going, too, to see how closely they agree. Although I don't really know why I should be troubleshooting their game at this point.

[Sir Slash]

Patch 3 is now available to everyone. 80 MB. And I can confirm that the Suebi victory conditions require the looting or razing of 50 settlements. That doesn't seem entirely fair. What if you want to be Sensitive Suebi?

[LongBlade]

Patch 3 is now available to everyone. 80 MB. And I can confirm that the Suebi victory conditions require the looting or razing of 50 settlements. That doesn't seem entirely fair. What if you want to be Sensitive Suebi?

Yes, they do. Economic domination only requires 30, I think.

I have almost broken my ability to win the game. Having conquered pretty much all of Europe the only territories left are in North Africa and that's a tough slog. So my choices are to suffer stunning attrition levels in the desert, give up, or monkey with the game by allowing my very stable provinces to become unstable, raid them for victory conditions, and then fix them. Neat, huh?