Rome II

[Bison]

How does it compare to STW2? I really like that a lot. I think that one is well-polished.

The short answer is no it is not as polished as STW2 yet.

[Nefaro]

Even bright & early in the morning, TW Center is bogged as hell. 

Trying to pick up the combat mod and maybe the open field one too, but that may be a long undertaking.  :-\

[Gusington]

Has anyone fought a night battle yet?

[Boggit]

Just seen this review. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/06/total-war-rome-ii-review

Damn, I've placed my order, and although Game cancelled it without telling me (a cockup on their part), after a morning moaning at them they've reinstated the order with an apology. I wish I'd read this before. Anyway, if it's as dire as the review suggests, I'll mod it as I have with other TW games... Sadly, Darth Vader says he's retired from modding - we need him back! ???

[Nefaro]

Has anyone fought a night battle yet?

I have a general with the ability, but haven't seen the option yet.  Perhaps he hasn't attacked yet.  I do have six armies now so they don't all get used in every war.


****

I'm about 114 turns in on my Pontus game, and I'm now seeing another major issue with the campaign AI. 

It cannot properly build structures to handle public unrest.  There is only one city in approximately fifteen that I just checked, in which the AI has unrest higher than -60.  A few are -90 to -99.  They're all in the pits and steadily dropping.  Rebel armies are regularly spawning in AI zones and some of them are being slowly torn apart from the inside.  It's the same for large or small factions.   

I'm on the verge of hanging it up for awhile.  Sad panda.

[FlickJax]

I do really like the game, just not happy with campaign at the moment. It is very hard to keep everyone fed and happy.

[Nefaro]

I do really like the game, just not happy with campaign at the moment. It is very hard to keep everyone fed and happy.

I'm doing great with the balancing act in that regard.  The AI, unfortunately, is not.   

It's easy once you maximize efficiency for food & public order.  Just prioritize building the structures that provide the most food and public order first.  There's a temple that provides a lot of PO.  Farms and Inns provide lots of Food.  Those should be the basis for every province, and only when there is a surplus of them should you put up wealth & army buildings.   Keep a province specialized for recruiting armies at the expense of some food producing buildings as food surplus is faction-wide.

[MengJiao]

Ok, I spent an hour or so with Rome 2 last night finally and I guess I'm going to be the dissenting opinion here.

This is hard to articulate, but I kind of "get" the haters who are less than thrilled with Rome 2.  For me, it's not something as easy to quantify as bad AI or some missing feature.

I can understand some of the annoyance with stuff in the game, but (and I keep repeating myself) if you look at what is presented and take it all as the usual extension of a TW game, it all amounts to a tremendous and promising leap forward.  If you play it as a game and don't go out of your way to find problems with the AI (ie fight your battles as battles, not sets of procedures to mess up the AI) the whole thing can be experienced as a pretty tightly-woven and well-worked out game about the Mediterranean world in 272 BC.  Sure it has some odd ways of representing things like rebellions and Factions that have no cities, but within its conventions, it is consistant.

I've found the battles quite challenging and interesting as battles (I don't try to manipulate the AI -- I just fight the battle as a battle).  In fact I've had some of the best TW battles I can remember over the last few days of playing Rome II.

For example, I went after a beseiging army with a relief force and had the besiegers trapped between three forces (including the "garrison Fleet" )  all went as planned, but I made a few mistakes with my elephants and lost -- just barely.  In terms of terrain and the interaction of forces it was one of the best TW battles I've ever fought.  I think I spent too much time in first-person charging with the units -- but that shows how much pure fun I was having, I think.

In another example, a 4 vs 4 ship sea fight -- the sea and coastline were gorgeous.  This has got to be one of the most visually rewarding games of all time (so far).   I had a huge two-tower Octiere.  It rammed one of the small enemy ships head-on and  sank it very convincingly.  Then it was itself rammed and boarded and attacking its tormentors wasn't useful since their crews had gotten on the Octiere.  I thought all was lost, but then the other ships of the fleet opened missile fire on the boarders on the Octiere and saved the day.  It was an great sea-fight and the smaller more agile ships almost won.  Or at least almost took my biggest ship.  I've never seen any game with that level of sea fighting sophistication.  And it looked great too.

So, the game is basically brilliant, in my view. 

[Boggit]

Well at least the feedback here is much better than the review I just posted... phew... :-\

[MengJiao]

Well at least the feedback here is much better than the review I just posted... phew... :-\

  Even that negative review admits in passing that if you actually just play the game as a game it is fantastic (he wrote):

Which is why it's such a pity that, when you actually get into the battles and it's running smoothly for once, Rome II gives glimpses of a classic. It's easy to forget that the game's called Total War for a reason, and its gigantic throwdowns not only look the part but deliver substance, too. There's nothing like a late-game Roman army filled with mighty legionaries and cavalry, backed up by ballistae and naval support, crashing into a Carthaginian force of equal size and led by war elephants.

The detail up-close is extraordinary, but it's the ability to zoom far above the battlefield and command as a disembodied god that feels amazing. An especially nice new touch is an overhead tactical map that can toggled mid-battle, and switching between this to give orders and the up-close cinematic camera simply has no equivalent; it's a breathtaking sweep.

Since it has alway run smoothly for me you can even drop the "for once".  But this is what I don't get about the negative reviews -- they say the game is too "bloated" -- the fact is it is moderately complex on many levels and its a big world AND it isn't just about Rome -- but it is pretty arbitrary to say that is "bloated".  Sure you could have had a small game focused on Rome, but that would be more of an historical analysis than a game.

[jejo68]

I I've found the battles quite challenging and interesting as battles (I don't try to manipulate the AI -- I just fight the battle as a battle).  In fact I've had some of the best TW battles I can remember over the last few days of playing Rome II.

uhm can you elaborate on this ?
The biggest reason I dont play total war series anymore is because the AI is to easy to beat to be frank. granted I like to use a fair amount of Archers/bowmen with cavalry as flanking troops, but it really makes the fights a one way trip 9/10. It shouldnt be like that.

I cant even be bothered to Count the times where I have just stood there shooting the ai army to pieces while it did absolutely nothing, or my cavalry outflanking him in plain sight while the ai didnt do a thing to counter this.
I hope they will fix this someday but im not holding my breath anymore.

Its really a shame because tbh I would love to play a total war game Again as I really like the idea, but not the execution

[MengJiao]

I I've found the battles quite challenging and interesting as battles (I don't try to manipulate the AI -- I just fight the battle as a battle).  In fact I've had some of the best TW battles I can remember over the last few days of playing Rome II.

uhm can you elaborate on this ?
The biggest reason I dont play total war series anymore is because the AI is to easy to beat to be frank.

  I take the battles as representations of battles in a specific context or more particularly, I accept the conventions of the game as a game that seeks to offer a representation of an event with the limitations of battles at that time.  So there were really not that many orders that commanders could reliably transmit (charge, retreat, shoot, skirmish etc.) -- no one in say 236 BC had the option "Fool the AI" -- so I take the AI for what it is: an attempt to represent what an army could do.  It's true that for some percentage of battles in TW moderately absurd things happen (though I haven't seen any of them in Rome II), you can write those off as the fortunes of War going way too far your way.

   In Rome II, from what I've seen, the terrain is more closely coded to what the AI can understand, even though there are new complexities in Rome II (in one battle I had a detached tower on the edge of town where I posted my best slingers).  This suggests some new level of sophistication in the Battle AI -- though of course it remains AI with all of its usual limitations (or so I assume, I don't spend time testing its limits -- I just notice when it seems to make a perfectly good set of moves -- which is most of the time).

   Another thing I recommend for getting along with the AI is to let your mind (and viewpoint) wander:  I try to spend as much time as I can in cinematic mode in Rome II battles.  It lets you enter into the spirit of the moment, get swept up in the representation.

[Gusington]

I have to try that...having used cinematic view yet.

[bboyer66]

I I've found the battles quite challenging and interesting as battles (I don't try to manipulate the AI -- I just fight the battle as a battle).  In fact I've had some of the best TW battles I can remember over the last few days of playing Rome II.

uhm can you elaborate on this ?
The biggest reason I dont play total war series anymore is because the AI is to easy to beat to be frank.

  I take the battles as representations of battles in a specific context or more particularly, I accept the conventions of the game as a game that seeks to offer a representation of an event with the limitations of battles at that time.  So there were really not that many orders that commanders could reliably transmit (charge, retreat, shoot, skirmish etc.) -- no one in say 236 BC had the option "Fool the AI" -- so I take the AI for what it is: an attempt to represent what an army could do.  It's true that for some percentage of battles in TW moderately absurd things happen (though I haven't seen any of them in Rome II), you can write those off as the fortunes of War going way too far your way.

   In Rome II, from what I've seen, the terrain is more closely coded to what the AI can understand, even though there are new complexities in Rome II (in one battle I had a detached tower on the edge of town where I posted my best slingers).  This suggests some new level of sophistication in the Battle AI -- though of course it remains AI with all of its usual limitations (or so I assume, I don't spend time testing its limits -- I just notice when it seems to make a perfectly good set of moves -- which is most of the time).

   Another thing I recommend for getting along with the AI is to let your mind (and viewpoint) wander:  I try to spend as much time as I can in cinematic mode in Rome II battles.  It lets you enter into the spirit of the moment, get swept up in the representation.

We all get the battles are cinematic and very pretty. But that is nothing all that different from any previous Total War title.

Also you  do not have to use tricks to beat the AI. Its so bad it just kind of beats itself most of the time. If you have any concept of military tactics, you should not lose a battle unless greatly outnumbered.

Im still waiting for someone to tell me what this game does better than Shogun II. Yes we all seem to enjoy the time period and setting more than feudal Japan. But other than that, I find the game to be seriously lacking in almost all areas.

The Guardian review summed it up very nicely " but this game as a whole is a failure of project management. So many elements are polished to a shine and yet at no point do they even threaten to come together. And so Rome II comes to depend purely on its battles and the fumes of nostalgia from a game more than a decade old – an inspiration that, in all honesty, it is not fit to be compared to."

[MengJiao]

We all get the battles are cinematic and very pretty. But that is nothing all that different from any previous Total War title.

  I think what it might be easy to overlook is that "cinematic and pretty" is cinematic and pretty because the terrain and the interaction of
units with the terrain is far better than in any TW so far.  It's hard to see it because it looks like ordinary reality.  ie it looks too real in a sense.

  I think this game has entered an area of representationality that falls into something like an uncanny valley for many players.  They see the images and interpret them as "Well of course.  What do you expect?  That is what thousands of people attacking a town look like."

   So it is easy to pass over the basic facts of how well the game is working because it looks like just plain reality (or what we would assume the ancient world looked like).  So the basic operation of the game (which is I think very tight and very functional) is passed over and people more on to pick out everything that annoys them -- essentially without experiencing what actually works very well.

   So this brings up the problem of a game that works so well and so close to some kind of reality that anything that troubles players gets all the attention and most of the game becomes more or less invisible.  I think this explains the otherwise inexplicable "bloat" that negative reviews put forward -- that bloat is all that they have seen but not really processed because it was just what you'd expect to see in the ancient world.  It's all there, but they can't quite see it as a game so it's bloat -- an indefinite region of their own inability to fully process what they did actually perceive but then dismiss as merely real (though it wasn't real at all -- in fact it was the essence of a game they didn't see).