Rome Total war 2

Sierra Oscar

karma_ wrote: »

What I don't understand is that CA have over a decade of experience in making these very successful games, or watching the ones that were not as successful (looking at Empire) being modded into great games and they turn around and essentially gut some of teh best features they ever had and release a game that looks very much like a Total War game but misses the target so wildly.

I think the game is pretty spot on except for the post release stability issues. Hopefully they can sort those issues out quickly.

McSasquatch

nesf wrote: »

PM me. I can sort you out with a temporary GPU replacement.

Crap! Sorry nesf, I'm only seeing this now (had been avoiding the thread). I should be sorted in the next week or two, but thanks a million for the offer. Very much appreciated!

Griffin87

what about the whole caputure points on every battle map. forcing the AI to just rush that point.

surely it make no sense for a army to give up its tacticual advantage. Height terreain protected flank etc to try and hold a gameified imaginary capture point.

shoutman

Agreed, if the capture points were strategic spots then that makes sense - on top of a hill for example or a narrow point along a pass, or outside of a military building within a city etc.

Griffin87

what about the whole caputure points on every battle map. forcing the AI to just rush that point.

surely it make no sense for a army to give up its tacticual advantage. Height terreain protected flank etc to try and hold a gameified imaginary capture point.

Generic Dreadhead

What I'm reading here is totally at odds with what the user reviews on Metacritic tell me.... Aside from the fact everyone agrees on waiting 6 months before buying (when its patched and on sale)

Sierra Oscar

Cormac... wrote: »

What I'm reading here is totally at odds with what the user reviews on Metacritic tell me.... Aside from the fact everyone agrees on waiting 6 months before buying (when its patched and on sale)

I'm enjoying the gameplay so far, except for some of the bugs I have run into. If they can iron them out, like they always do, then I will be delighted.

Outkast_IRE

Cormac... wrote: »

What I'm reading here is totally at odds with what the user reviews on Metacritic tell me.... Aside from the fact everyone agrees on waiting 6 months before buying (when its patched and on sale)

Im loving it so far, I have encountered bugs, but no game breaking ones.
I am very happy with my purchase so far.

I was never a fan of the first rome total war, this one I am a fan of already.

karma_

Sierra Oscar wrote: »

I think the game is pretty spot on except for the post release stability issues. Hopefully they can sort those issues out quickly.

City building has been reduced to a few button clicks, nothing of interest there.

Dramatic changes to how armies are assembled. Number and how individual units traverse the map.

Family trees completely absent and replaced with a very bland political system that does little more than exist to incur gold penalties. This one is a big one because in previous iterations it was one of the most engrossing aspects to the game. This has also led CA to make the characters extremely uninteresting with little to differentiate them.

Public order/food management is way up the left.

Unnecessary flag capture points which actually makes the AI job harder to get right.

Guard mode gone.

Loose and tight formations gone.

The way they changed the payment system, can no longer enter payments and they are a % of your treasury, this of course means that these get really crazy when you build up gold after a while. It's a lot like the intrigue system, only exists to incur financial penalties to the player.

The military traditions thing, I'll admit I liked that idea but in reality if we lose an army do we deserve to get it back in that kind of shape?

Outside Rome there is no depth to the game, you get pretty much all available units very early in the game.

All units now auto run, is there even a stamina penalty?

Some missile units will not attack unless charging.

Instant free navies that can wipe out dedicated ships with ease.

The unit and information description cards completely gone.

What about the system in previous games where you'd get a message of an important civilisation advance or historical facts, completely gone too.


Some of this can be fixed with patches yes, others are there to stay.

grizzly

Amazon resent me a new Greek States DLC code - due to the mess up last week. PM me for the code, if you've not got it already.

karma_

In other news, I've just received my third Greek city states culture pack code from Amazon. So if anyone needs one.

bizmark

Sierra Oscar wrote: »

I think the game is pretty spot on except for the post release stability issues. Hopefully they can sort those issues out quickly.

I dont understand how you could think this unless you genuinely havent run into the game breaking ai issues imho any rts game where the ai is incapable of launching a siege of a city with a wall or fielding field armys to counter you is broken.

Not even to go into the rest of its issues already so well outlined here.

If they fix the ai and the graphics performance and tbh they need to give back guard mode that was the lynch pin of pritty much every tactic iv ever used in the game then it could be good

BlitzKrieg

problem I find is there seems to be too much of an effort to redevelop the wheel with some new elements and not a lot of effort made in others.

the complete overhaul of the campaign and family system borders on unnecessary.

But I can understand why.

The original Rome was a major point in the franchise where it moved from the old chessboard pieces and voxal graphics to a fully 3D world.

Empire naturally from its setting alone required further overhauls

And when they did both shogun 2 and medieval 2 I thought while slightly indulgent, the leaps made in Rome meant there was plenty enough new content to show by revisiting both periods.

Coming back to Rome surprised me. I was convinced that the next entry based off how fall of the samurai played out that they were going to take a stab at doing America Total War and do the entire north american continent from colonization right up to the american civil war.

Going back to Rome worried me a bit cause I wasnt sure if the design of the total war series had moved on enough since the original to warrant a sequel, but I'd thought they were just going to go bigger and louder and it was a relatively simple update take the shogun 2 system and just throw everything of the classical era in on a scale that dwarves the original.

Now I rather wish they had. So much of this title seems different in a rather oddly forced not thought out fully way.

Zambia

I had a dream that was a rtw with better graphics, from what I hear this is not it

doccy

I’d say I’m the part of the casual side of the market that Sega/CA were aiming for but I’m loving the game, definitely not experiencing a lot of the issues people are complaining about. The graphics run smoothly, the AI is not as dumb as I’d heard. Capture points are generally not in open battles which was a relief.
I’ve had 3 or 4 crashes in ten hours of gameplay, and an issue I’d heard about slingers not departing their boats so I couldn’t finish a battle. Loading times are a killer though. Still, for 30 quid off Amazon I’m well pleased.

shoutman

I think i'll install this mod before I play the game next, looks to be addressing a lot of concerns.

http://forums.totalwar.com/showthread.php/87856-Use-this-MOD-to-save-your-game...?

Griffin87

Ill just leave this here

bizmark

I wish he wasnt such a parody of a man child but he makes all the right points imho though 6/10 is a bit generous at this point

A letsplayer on youtube im quite fond of with a 200 part rome total war letsplaye give rather concise reviews of it as well

One F Jef ‏@jefmajor 12h
Honestly, Rome 2 is to Total War what Civilization Revolution was to Civilization.
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One F Jef ‏@jefmajor 12h
I've played a lot of Rome 2 over the past few days and here is my full review: At least I got some TF2 hats.

ZeroThreat

that's odd, I already applied the greek content code successfully but got this e-mail yesterday ..

Hello,

We understand you may have had an issue with your Total War Rome II pre-order incentive code for ***-*******-*******.

Due to a technical error, it appears that our system failed to send the pre-order incentive code to you correctly.

Please find below your new Total War Rome II - Greek States Culture Pack code, along with redemption instructions.

BlitzKrieg

heh

bloody fail on my armies part.

Doing a Naval assault on a minor settlement, I was already outnumbered, but most of their infantry was low level illyian spearmen and I had 4-5 full legions of veteren legionnaires.

Sailed in and banked my ships, first one unloaded then the...

why are none of my ships unloading?

Only one legion unloaded, all my other ones are sitting in their ships banked up on the coast. they are recognised as infantry and not ships but I cant get them to disembark.


fuuuuu

unloaded any other ship I could.

Ended up with only a third of my army being able to unload, the rest got stuck.

So I was already outnumbered, then I lose 2/3rds of that army to a bug

so I'm even more outnumbered.

2 mercenary hoplite legions and my legionnaires.

Against 8 or so spearmen and 3 missile legions.

and.....


I still won?


Yeah veteren legionnaires are pretty much unstoppable it seems.

especially if its the class veteren legionnaires but you actually got a tonne of your own vet on it, and the army as a whole is pretty vet.

I literally just ran them down the street of the settlement and they broke through 3-4 lines of enemy infantry without stopping, it was hilarious


and depressing.

shoutman

I downloaded and applied the mod I posted about yesterday. It makes the game more playable in that it seems to balance out city unhapiness a bit. Also allows for more armies. Unfortunately it doesn't really seem to allow the AI to account for their economies when it comes into their Armies, i.e. a one city nation has six 20 stack army units defending their one city when they appear to have no trading partners...

At least the battles are improved slightly, although AI are still not the smartest.

ZeroThreat

ZeroThreat wrote: »

that's odd, I already applied the greek content code successfully but got this e-mail yesterday ..

Hello,

We understand you may have had an issue with your Total War Rome II pre-order incentive code for ***-*******-*******.

Due to a technical error, it appears that our system failed to send the pre-order incentive code to you correctly.

Please find below your new Total War Rome II - Greek States Culture Pack code, along with redemption instructions.

Well, following up on getting a 2nd DLC code despite having no problems with the first one, I just checked my inbox this evening, to find this :

Hello,

We're sorry about the issues you experienced with your pre-order code for Total War Rome II.

As a goodwill gesture for the inconvenience caused, we'd like to offer you a GBP 2.00 Promotional Code to be used on Amazon.co.uk, valid from Wednesday, 11 September 2013 until Wednesday, 10 September 2014.


I guess Amazon are assuming everyone had problems with the DLC, still seems strange though.

Taylor365

Ive had that too.

First time they sent me a botched email with the code for the £2 voucher replace with ''%promocode''.

Maybe amazon are having intern/graduate problems.

grizzly

Today from Mike Simpson Creative Director Creative Assembly;

Hi everyone, We’ve just put up a hotfix that significantly improves campaign map frame-rate on a variety of hardware combinations that were getting frame rates less than 15 fps. It took us until Monday to get a case of this happening in the studio, but it was a very simple fix, so we’ve decided to put it out as a single issue patch. This bug was introduced very late in the process, but we absolutely should have found and fixed it before release.

This release has obviously not gone as planned for some people, and I want to apologise to everyone out there who had issues with the game, whether they were hardware issues or disappointment in the performance of game features. We obviously don’t plan to release a game with any bugs, performance and AI issues. How this has happened is something we’re beginning to post mortem in detail now. Fortunately, the same tech that gave us the rope to work on the game right up to release lets us keep working on it after it’s out, and the flaws in the game are mostly just bugs, not structural defects. We can and will get the game to where we wanted it to be for everyone.

The top priority is stability and performance – both frame rates in battle and campaign, and end of turn times and loading times. Then gameplay spoilers – AI flaws and exploits, balancing tweaks and the level of challenge on higher difficulties. Then minor bugs, lesser features that really didn’t pan out, UI improvements, and longer term adjustments to features and systems that could be better. Because there are a lot of us working in parallel there will be a mixture of different priority fixes in each patch. Much of this work would be part of the usual planned improvements we would make to our games post-launch anyway, but we are aware that they have now taken on extra significance and importance. We have a major improvement to end of turn times in the pipeline, along with around 100 fixes in the next patch. We have another 100 or so fixes already being tested for the patch after that. At this point the limiting factor on getting issues fixed in patches is not our ability to fix issues, it’s our ability to test them and guarantee that we don’t repeat past mistakes by putting a patch out that breaks something new. We’ll also be putting each patch up as a beta you can opt in to before releasing it.

It’s our aim to continue patching more or less weekly until all the bugs are dealt with. Then we can start the kind of dialogue we always want to be having with the community – which new features you like, which you don’t like, which deleted features from previous games you really miss and so on. That’s a good conversation to be having, and since it’s our intention not to fall in to the trap of just re-skinning the previous game each time, it’s one that hopefully you’ll be having for years to come. Lastly, I’m hoping we can fundamentally treat our releases differently in the future. Long open betas are the way things are going, and while that model hasn’t been compatible with the way Total War has been built to date, that could be the way forward.

degrassinoel

i gave up playing the campaign because of those specific bugs with enemy turns taking up to 5 minutes to run their course after about a hundred turns. If that's been fixed i'll start playing again.

Sierra Oscar

degrassinoel wrote: »

i gave up playing the campaign because of those specific bugs with enemy turns taking up to 5 minutes to run their course after about a hundred turns. If that's been fixed i'll start playing again.

I would imagine that it will be fine tuned some more, but to be honest it always took a few minutes for turns to complete in the more recent Total War games. It used to be the same in Empire Total War.

The solution is to kill off some factions.

Unless of course you mean that some enemy units are just standing idly by for an age before they finally move? I remember a bug like that with Empire Total War and it used to drive me mad.

BlitzKrieg

Sierra Oscar wrote: »

I would imagine that it will be fine tuned some more, but to be honest it always took a few minutes for turns to complete in the more recent Total War games. It used to be the same in Empire Total War.

The solution is to kill off some factions.

Unless of course you mean that some enemy units are just standing idly by for an age before they finally move? I remember a bug like that with Empire Total War and it used to drive me mad.

Good luck killing them. You either get new factions springing up each turn or their remaining forces hang on ages after you took their lands harassing your cities well after they've been conquered

"People should know when they've been conquered"

hots

BlitzKrieg wrote: »

Good luck killing them. You either get new factions springing up each turn or their remaining forces hang on ages after you took their lands harassing your cities well after they've been conquered

This is such a pain, had an army left over from a faction that died with 10 men left in it attacking one of my garrisons. Each time I auto-ed 6 would die but then next time the same 10 guys would come back and attack... In the end I fought the battle on the map and had to chase the f*ckers down!

Sierra Oscar

BlitzKrieg wrote: »

... remaining forces hang on ages after you took their lands harassing your cities well after they've been conquered

"People should know when they've been conquered"

Thanks for mentioning that, it is something that is annoying me somewhat so far. Why did they feel the need to change that aspect of the game, did they give any real justification? I wouldn't mind if they could hang on for a couple of turns or and had to retake a city within a certain timeframe. I have noticed that some factions just leave their forces out to sea when defeat and just stay there. Not very realistic really.

BlitzKrieg

They are meant to die off. A glowing red skull above them appears when you take their land and they lose men each turn


*BUT*

CA have put the threshold for units disbanding really low for Rome 2 (0.15 or something) so despite bleeding units they can hang on for a really long time

And I suspect the threshold for disbanding a unit is lower then the max number of units that can be lost from attrition so units won't simply die off and will always require you give the finishing blow