Rome II

[LongBlade]

This is my motto when playing Rome 2.

Sounds about right.

[Gusington]

Finally have got control over provincial happiness! Using a combo of the advice above including generous use of force, building of temples and active tax fluctuating, I now have happiness on the rise everywhere, including newly conquered provinces. The legions have marched deep into the Alps and I have seen the first snow in this game. A few more turns stabilizing everything and I will be ready to march into...well somewhere. Probably Illyria. Oh and Carthage was destroyed along with her ally Nova Carthago. So I'm only at war with the Frisii right now.

[Bison]

I still think the rebels are not really working as intended.  There is really no reason for a major power like Carthage or Rome or Egypt to be basically destroyed by rebel forces.

[Sir Slash]

Hey Longblade. Playing as Suebi myself, I can say you're doing great. The thing about the Germans is trade and diplomacy is much rarer and harder to get. And very little difference in unit types, much less trust between factions. And to the south are the Celtics(not Boston) who hate you. Unifying Germany is one long tough fight. But there are some great resources to be had there and in time you can make a hefty profit. And then... Be like a spear. Make a point. HAHA. ;D

[Gusington]

In my game Carthage was brought down by a combo of 3-4 powers but the straw that broke the camels back was a giant rebel army.

[Nefaro]

In my game Carthage was brought down by a combo of 3-4 powers but the straw that broke the camels back was a giant rebel army.

Should get used to it after awhile.  The AI isn't very good at balancing it's building and stability after the game progresses a bit.  I don't think they've fixed that yet.

Some good news.. the Patch-3 Beta is now out.   The bad news is that the Rome 3 patches constantly stall out.  None of the other games' patches have been doing this, so I think Steam has imposed some kind of download limits on TW Rome 2.  An 80MB update shouldn't take 10 to 20 minutes to download.  ::)

[LongBlade]

Hey Longblade. Playing as Suebi myself, I can say you're doing great. The thing about the Germans is trade and diplomacy is much rarer and harder to get. And very little difference in unit types, much less trust between factions. And to the south are the Celtics(not Boston) who hate you. Unifying Germany is one long tough fight. But there are some great resources to be had there and in time you can make a hefty profit. And then... Be like a spear. Make a point. HAHA. ;D

Thanks. I reached a point when I had three or four provinces captured and stabilized. All of a sudden I got spammed by trade requests. I don't even know how many trade agreements I have right now. Somewhere between six and twelve. It happened right after I called a truce and started to shore up my internal support. I guess going to war, succeeding, then calling for peace before I totally overran a country (along with a critical mass of size) sparked an interest in all these little guys wanting to trade.

Yeah, it was a real slog unifying Germanica. The cultural differences are tough. One thing I found was the blue research track has one section that is wholly dedicated to expediting cultural shift. I now get +8 cultural change per turn. Combined with lots of temples, that makes pacifying a conquered land much easier and faster. You also need to keep an eye on industries that cause cultural unrest. It's tempting to keep them if they're high level and produce money, but I've found I can spend 10 - 20 turns waiting for a province to simmer down if I keep them all. Instead I've found that destroying at least one (usually has a -10 to unrest) helps a bunch and keeps my steamroller of military conquest moving at a faster pace.

Edit: also be on the lookout for corruption. As your empire grows, so will corruption. There is also a blue track of research to squash corruption which will slow/prevent unhappiness/unrest in your core provinces.

[Nefaro]

Here's the newly-released Patch 3 Beta fixes:

http://wiki.totalwar.com/w/Total_War_ROME_II:_Patch_3

Gonna fire it up for awhile today, now that the stalling 80MB beta patch finally downloaded.  >:(


Looks like a notable amount of changes to make combat last longer, and slow units down, went into this one.  Ahhh, progress.  :)


EDIT:

Just be careful not to change your resolution or alt-tab with this Beta.  Evidentally there is an issue with it at the moment..

Disclaimer: There are one or two known issues with the beta that we are looking to resolve before rolling this out further, with ALT-Tabbing and changing game resolution. We are aware of these issues and there is no need to report them in our patch feedback threads.

[Nefaro]

Good News:

Beta Patch 3 makes the melee combat last longer.  I assaulted a walled city and got into a bloody grind at the gate that took quite a lot of time to get through (and eventually casualties).  The AI also seems more active now, and after taking this walled city the same faction sent a whole army right over to besiege me inside in the next turn.  I've never seen that before.  Yay, progress!


Bad News:

The Beta Patch 3 is less stable than patch 2 and even the release version, for me.   I've had a couple crashes already this afternoon, in areas of the game where I had never experienced any in 65 hours of playtime since release.  IIRC, I only had one crash in that whole time and I just had twice as many in the last two hours. 

Also.. my framerates on the campaign map are bottoming out more in Beta patch 3 than it did after patch 2.  They did some further tweaking that supposedly improved it even more from #2, but from my experience it's worse.  Notably when I select something and the map pans to it.  It used to hang for a second before moving to the location in the original release version, and wasn't quite as bad after patch 2, but now it moves to the location then hangs while it's trying to draw out the higher-res textures for longer than it ever has before. 

I've also seen some other bugs pop up anew.  Nothing game breaking but they're there.

Hopefully they can put a lot of work into this patch because it's not as clean as the second one was.

[Bison]

It's another sizable patch.  I'm still very confident that this game is going to end up being a classic.

[LongBlade]

Ugh. I just played about three hours of Rome II and my brain is in a fog.

I was so into the game that it was kinda zen-like. But now my brain is shot. I think I need a break.

[Nefaro]

I actually witnessed an AI army perform an ambush.  Dunno if this is just a real rarity in Rome 2, but I hadn't seen it do that since Shogun 2.  :)

I'm also taking some more casualties in the battles, now that they've been slowed down and damage lowered.  It definitely seems like the AI units aren't running away easily now, either.  I've had a few of their heavy infantry stick around and slug it out for quite some time.  Overall, the combat adjustments in Beta Patch 3 have definitely increased the fun I'm having in the tactical battles. 

IIRC, they've also removed the random flags from open field battles in this update. 

Despite the decrease in performance on the campaign map, and the occasionally instability, I'm enjoying the improvements in this one.

[LongBlade]

Despite the decrease in performance on the campaign map, and the occasionally instability, I'm enjoying the improvements in this one.

I'm liking it as a turn-based game. I avoid the real-time battles at almost any cost.

[Gusington]

Good stuff above. I am now stabilizing 3-4 provinces and I too have noticed that diplomacy in general is more likely to succeed. Looking forward to the trade offers to pour in. Going to take the next 5-10 turns to stabilize everything and then take what I have learned and show the Greeks who the new kid in town is :)

I also thought that Normal/Normal difficulty might have been a little too much but sticking with it, after about 20 hours, I finally began to 'get it' with many game concepts.

Through the miasma of negative forum chatter, patches and oddities, I can also see a classic beginning to form. It's not there yet, but it's on its way. I guess asking for two classics in a row upon release is a little much to ask.

[GibbyG]

Despite the decrease in performance on the campaign map, and the occasionally instability, I'm enjoying the improvements in this one.

I'm liking it as a turn-based game. I avoid the real-time battles at almost any cost.

Does the game play well this way?  I haven't really ever played any TW game because of the real time battles.  Does playing the turn-based campaign with auto resolved battles work well?