Clive Howlitzer said:
It is gradually creeping towards what it should have been at release. Another 5-6 patches and it might finally be playable.
WALL OF TEXT WARNING!!! ROME 2 RANT LEVELS AT 11!!!
Make that 18 patches + a free expansion pack or 3 + a public execution of the idiots in charge of this game. I demand seppuku for this SHAMEFUR DISPRAY!!!
The amount of stuff half finished or just flat out broken in this game is staggering. If you named a single element of this game I could talk for hours about exactly how horribly broken it is up into the minute details of stat changes during combat!
The entire political and family system? Rubbish. After the civil war it just gets switched off for no reason. Apparently up to about 100-150 turns into the game it matters who you raise and promote but after that who the fuck cares?! Gravitas is utterly broken, character traits make no sense because they either raise gravitas to a ridiculous level and still do nothing or basically guarantee your gravitas will always be 0 because your noble, brave, brilliant general is apparently untrustworthy for some reason. What do all these things mean? Authority? Cunning? Why did you change the general leveling from Shogun 2? Were you afraid it was too enjoyable and transparent? I don't have any clue what I am upgrading nor do I care because who are these people? How are these people related to my family at all? I have no clue they just seem to pop into existence at age 16 whenever I raise an army. The agents, why do we even have 3 agents? They are all 100% interchangeable except the dignitaries ability to spread culture, which is negated by temples that spread culture and general skills that spread culture. Why do we have 3 agents that can assassinate, interfere with armies and spread unrest? Why this utter interchangeability between the 3? What happened to the very specific types of agents from the previous games?
The economy is a joke with basically the same 3-4 buildings built in every village and the same 6-7 in every major city over and over and over again will net you so much money that by turn 50 you don't have anything to spend it on. The idiot that thought provinces would be a good idea and then limit the amount of edicts you could use should be fired along with the moron in charge of the AI. What motivates me to capture an entire province if the maximum amount of edicts I can issue is already decided? What motivates me to conquer nations if I am already swimming in more cash than I can spend? Literally I have 1 million gold in the fucking bank and am making 100k a year! Why is this economy so fucking broken! Why would I ever want to conquer new territories if all the stats are maxed out and I literally cannot raise more armies or more ships? Why does the economy even fucking exist if the limiting factor to my power is an arbitrary number decided by the devs rather than my economy? There is no point to building an economy any more, you can't raise more units based on a strong economy and you can't spend it on anything because you build the same buildings every time that give you massive amount of money and the building progression is locked to your technological advances so you are set on a timer so nothing you do in the game really matters because believe it or not your progression in Rome 2, a total war game, is 100% linear.
Whilst we are on the subject of technology and linearity. Why is half the technology tree nothing but boosts? -3% army upkeep, -2% reload time, +5% charge speed, we don't need units that run even faster than these marathon sprinters, fuck when the game was released spearmen ran almost as fast as cavalry. Why is the tech tree SOOOOOOOOOOOOO boring! What happened to unlocking formations? News methods of making things? Special buildings or new units? Why is half of it basically copy pasted boosts for different areas of the game? Who gives a shit about unlocking a barely noticeable 2% boost to farming income when in the past you could unlock canons!
Unit formations still blob up into incoherent messes of units rushing past each other. The AI still tries to run through your units sustaining massive loses when in a siege battle. Pikemen are HILARIOUS to watch because they won't attack and continue to move up if the enemy moves. No they will walk up to an enemy and stop just short of actually hitting them. So you have to manually manoeuvre these guys constantly. The funniest part is where you attack them in the back and they just do an easy 360 degree shuffle with 6 meter long spears and break your cavalry in half. Not to mention the HILARIOUS imbalance with units! A bunch of thorax swordsmen can just hack their way through 6 elephants. No problem for them! Up until like patch 4 you could basically rout any spear unit with a basic cavalry unit, even in frontal charges, that's how horrible unit cohesion was and still is, at least cavalry get properly slaughtered now if they decide to run head first into pikemen though they can still run through it if the blob is large enough. Rome 2 Total War: The Blobbening
Naval battles! Oh don't get me started! You basically auto-win every naval battle as a Hellenistic faction because of your artillery ships that you can recruit at about turn 5. Nobody stands a chance against you, just pelt them from afar because the AI is too stupid to build them and no ship can reach you in the 3-4 hits it takes to bring them down. Ships just sink to the bottom after wards even if you have boarded them for no reason. Goodbye very expensive ram head! It's not like you literally cost more than the ship itself to make, who'd want to get prize money for captured vessels?! Not to mention that the entire battle is nothing but a game of bumper boats, where the enemy tries to ram you over and over again rather than deploy archers to set boats on fire, board your ships and such and you have to ram them over and over again because otherwise you lose entire ships. No just ram into a ship, back off for a bit then ram into it again. Momentum what's that? However the most hilariously awful mistake is the instant land-sea transformation. Your land armies which have larger numbers than the naval units so they can just walk onto the water and attack the same turn with numerical superiority. Basically meaning that whenever you face a large invasion force with your pussy navy you are dead, that is if the AI was not a complete retard and sent out 4 ships at a time to take down your artillery ships. The only time you will lose is if they outnumber you 18-1 (happened to me once navy of 200 vs 4000 land soldiers) and your artillery ships just run out of ammo. FUCK ME! I thought the naval battles in Shogun 2 FOTS were as bad as it got where it was basically a set your enemy on fire competition, where the side with armour piercing shells basically won the match, but I underestimated CA's sheer ability to suck!
No, Rome 2 is Empire's spiritual successor and for many the straw that broke the camel rider's back. It is a broken unfinished mess even after 4 patches and will require an entire revamp just to be adequate. Battles still barely last more than 5 minutes, 90% of them are siege battles where you barely lose 10 men unless you are a complete idiot and a fucking joke even on Legendary where enemy units route within seconds of engagement or yours just randomly start running when they haven't even taken a single bit of damage because you didn't press the right MOBA abilities at the right time. This is the worst game in the series and doesn't even make up for it like Empire did with interesting elements, new features or an interesting period.
We have seen Rome already and done better. The worst offence here is that Rome 2 doesn't even offer Rome 1's mod-ability so we can forget about total conversion mods for Rome 2 that are in the same ball park as the now legendary ones like Roma Surrectum, Europa Barbarorum, SPQR or even Arthurian Total War.
I liked the persistent legion idea though. That's what? 1 point out of 10 for you Rome 2?
