Rome II

[Yskonyn]

At about 5am local time I crept into my dark study to check that Rome II was ready and it was. There was also an IM from Yskonyn sent over checking to see if my copy was fully loaded (he is in the Netherlands IIRC). What I can't explain is how Bison is squeezing in some time to play when he allegedly works for a living.

Yskonyn - your best solution is to play some LAN MP with the baby.

Only about 11 hours until I can sit down and start! Should I play through the prologue?

I am just lucky my days off are now (until friday), so I can get some playtime in. After that its back to work for me too.

Yeah I keep trying to explain to him how he controls his units, but all he ever does it smack the mouse on the table, biting it or throwing it on the ground! It's a bloody Barbarian! What am I to do?

Being the Total War veteran you are, Gus, you won't learn much from playing the prologue I'd reckon, but then again, it's a nicely narrated piece of content. Easy, but fun. And as such it gives you all the time to relish in the details of the battles without having to worry about the outcome.
I think its a nice starter to get into the mood. :D

Oh and Bison my AA option was already enabled. It just doesn't seem to provide much AA at all. :S

[Yskonyn]

Holy sh**!! Those wardogs are brutal!

[mikeck]

Holy sh**!! Those wardogs are brutal!

Are they "flaming" war dogs??

[Nefaro]

It seems like the Anti-aliasing in the game is of the lesser full-screen blurry type (MSAA or MLAA?).  It just kinda blurs the whole screen a bit, in order to wash out the jaggies and isn't all that effective IMO. 

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!

I had besieged a city for five turns.. 1 turn left before it falls so the AI sallied it's garrison out on the last turn.  Every unit in my army had lost half it's men by that point, yet the enemy garrison was at full strength.  ::)  Another thing I didn't realize, is that you are hidebound to the victory location on the tac map when being attacked.  So if you, for instance, move your army over to a nearby hill for defense, and the enemy takes the tiny victory point, you will lose in a couple minutes if you can't get men into the circle.  ???

Just some warnings..

Oh.. one more:  Be careful attacking a port or a force near the coast of an enemy city.  All the troops in the area will load up on their own ships and join the battle.  Boarding combat is overly easy so land forces look like they could easily overpower your navy in a fight near the coast.  They just turn into ships with the soldiers on them.  ???

I have some complaints about a few things they didn't implement too well, such as these, but it's still fun at the moment.

[sandman2575]

Anyone else having crash issues?

Getting hard lockups, both in the benchscreen test, and then trying to set up a Custom battle.   :(

Should have plenty of horsepower to run this baby, and I've even toned down several of the settings to see if that would help.  (i7 3770k, GTX 680 4GB, 16 GB RAM, Windows 7 x64) --

My system is in general very stable, although I've had trouble with crashes on CoH2 as well... what is it with these big ticket items being so unstable for me???

I guess I could try reinstalling gfx drivers... but I hate doing that....

[undercovergeek]

im ok here - game defaulted me to extreme on everything apart from soft vegetation or something, ive left AA and AF as default, and then the hardest thing ive had to do for a while - quit out to go pick undercoverjunior up from school

[Bison]

Thanks ysk - good news on the specs - I think ill whack upto Max and then work down from there

Got this bad boy running with extreme graphics.

What type of gfx card?

Nvidia gtx 680

[Nefaro]

Anyone else having crash issues?

Getting hard lockups, both in the benchscreen test, and then trying to set up a Custom battle.   :(

Should have plenty of horsepower to run this baby, and I've even toned down several of the settings to see if that would help.  (i7 3770k, GTX 680 4GB, 16 GB RAM, Windows 7 x64) --

My system is in general very stable, although I've had trouble with crashes on CoH2 as well... what is it with these big ticket items being so unstable for me???

I guess I could try reinstalling gfx drivers... but I hate doing that....

I've not had any crashes, but there have been some brief lock-ups when giving an order or at the end of turn resolution.

I did notice that while I had the game minimized and was using my web browser, the whole computer would freeze every few seconds.  Not just some micro-stuttering but for a whole second or two and on a regular basis.  Must be an issue somewhere.  I'd venture a guess that it's graphics related (and I experienced this using an AMD card & processor, not Nvidia).

[Yskonyn]

Holy sh**!! Those wardogs are brutal!

Are they "flaming" war dogs??

The ones I've witnessed are normal dogs. But the animations of them attacking the soldiers are just plain brutal!
I love that there are now actually individual soldiers and ditto animations for a unit. :D Carnage!

[MengJiao]

Being the Total War veteran you are, Gus, you won't learn much from playing the prologue I'd reckon, but then again, it's a nicely narrated piece of content. Easy, but fun. And as such it gives you all the time to relish in the details of the battles without having to worry about the outcome.
I think its a nice starter to get into the mood. :D

Oh and Bison my AA option was already enabled. It just doesn't seem to provide much AA at all. :S

  At about 8:30 this morning, having observed the auguries of flights of vultures taking to the thermals over my house yesterday afternoon, I proceeded to the Prologue and ran through the Capua theatrics.  It was pleasing -- I guess things have to start with a messy bang these days.  I kind of miss the simpler tutorials from earlier Total Wars.

   Other than finding that the game ran okay and had some new cool features, I mostly found myself wondering about Consul Rutilius.  The only Rutilius that I can recall was a late pagan poet from about 700 years after 272 BC.  Of course there might well be thousands of Rutiliuses I've never heard of.

[Yskonyn]

Wouldn't that be thousands of Rutilii?  :-X

On a more serious note; I am watching a Twitch TV livestream from a guy playing Rome 2. And he gets caught up in a naval enagement.
If you have missile troops on a boat you can use it as a ranged combat ship (obviously), but if you have melee troops on a boat you can either ram enemy ships (there seems to be some form of physics model involved as smaller ships don't seem very effectiv, which is nice) or you can line up and board enemy ships to engage the unit it's carrying.

First, his boat which carries his general get swarmed by 5 to 6 smaller enemy boats, pretty much making it unable to move.
He doesn't really do anything to engage the blocking boats with his other boats, while suddenly (didn't catch wether he was giving the unit an order) the general decides to jump ship and all the soldiers jump into the sea, drowning themselves! O_O

A minute or two of swearing ensues and he angrily shouts that this is the exact reason he won't ever play naval battles in ANY TW game and aparently Rome 2 will be no different!

It was a rather funny scene! On the one hand he wasn't doing anything to relieve his boat of the blocking by the enemy, but if the AI tried to board one of the other boats to engage in mele, but instead made all the soldiers jump into the water I can see where this will prove enraging for a lot of battles to come. :)

[mikeck]

LOL...yeah, never in recorded history have naval soldiers drown because they jumped into the water to escape certain death on ship in a panic...so unrealistic. (Sarcasm alert)

[MengJiao]

Wouldn't that be thousands of Rutilii?  :-X
It was a rather funny scene! On the one hand he wasn't doing anything to relieve his boat of the blocking by the enemy, but if the AI tried to board one of the other boats to engage in mele, but instead made all the soldiers jump into the water I can see where this will prove enraging for a lot of battles to come. :)

strangely and even more seriously, Mr. Rutilius the Poet only has one surviving work -- a nostalgic travelogue of a journey down from Gaul along the no-longer pagan coast of Italy.

But hmmm...boarding in FOTS required an order to the ship, probably a melee order to the melee troops on a ship in Rome II doesn't get them to do the right thing.  The real Romans had to work out mechanisms on their ships to get that all to work.  Perhaps his Corvus was fouled.  Perhaps he had disregarded the sacred chickens during the pre-battle aurguries.

[PanzersEast]

I've read reviews and they have not been favorable, however I always wait to hear from the Grog community.  I ended up not preordering and decided to wait this one out......


PE

[Tuna]

I've read reviews and they have not been favorable, however I always wait to hear from the Grog community.  I ended up not preordering and decided to wait this one out......


PE

Waiting as well, even though the temptation was strong.. but I've been told to behave money wise, so will wait for a later sale...

Playing Rome I...

I also ignore the reviews, cause I love Total War.. all of them!.. so I know that I will love this!