The Total War: Rome 2 Thread

[OneCatch]

weirdly im finding the actual battles run fine on my old pc but its the campaign map where things really slow down bad.

Yeah, battles are fairly smooth for me, but it gets a bit choppy on the campaign map. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that they're now using the same engine for battles and campaign maps (they previously used different ones), which reduces the load time significantly, but also leads to the problem you described.

Same. But between the low frame rate on my mid-range pc (variable from 5-30 frames on medium-high settings), and the fact that the other factions turns takes about a minute or two to complete, I find the campaign game very frustrating at the moment. I'll wait for the inevitable patch in the coming days before trying again.

I've found that the campaign map only lags when you've got a unit selected. A bit daft, but for now if you're having problems just leave your units unselected when you're doing surveying. I imagine it'll get patched in short order.

OT, I've enjoyed thus far. There are a few optimisation issues and framerate varies too much, but gameplay wise I'm thoroughly enjoying. Marine assaults and decent naval battles are great, and the new concealment mechanic is mixing things up a bit, even if the battle AI itself isn't much better. And I love the level of detail within units - with centurions shouting at their men, bracing themselves against missiles, better animations than in Shogun 2 even.

And the campaign AI seems a lot better now. In that they'll do things like abandon a city if it's hopeless in order to consolidate forces, utilise the new stances to be aggressive if you don't defend cities, etc.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Marine assaults and decent naval battles are great, and the new concealment mechanic is mixing things up a bit, even if the battle AI itself isn't much better. And I love the level of detail within units - with centurions shouting at their men, bracing themselves against missiles, better animations than in Shogun 2 even.

Mmm, yes. I'd forgotten to mention the concealment mechanic/fog of war in my write up. It's kind of slick, actually. I've yet to have it seriously impact a game, but it makes the idea of actual in-fight ambushes and surprises a lot more feasible than in previous editions.

Agreed about animations. I had a unit fleeing from battle getting pounded by slingers, and they had their shields up over their heads. Was a lovely little touch. Didn't help much when the javelins came in from behind, but oh well. No one ever said war was fair.

 

[wooty]

Not happy with it. All this hype on "cinematic" graphics and new textures, physics, blah......the game looks like arse, even on extreme settings, the FR drops like a horse turd and the gameplay just feels very...."sluggish" to me.

I can't say I'm happy with the overall experience so far.

Try applying Custom Settings. It seems the Game has issues with setting them automatically.

I've honestly tried, I spent more time adjusting the settings than playing the game last night :S.

But, I've just read that theres a big update coming on Friday, so I'm not going to dismiss the game as trash right away. I've been in this lifestyle long enough to understand that PC launches can have a few issues seeing as everyones rig isn't identical. Time heals all glitches.

 

[TheBelgianGuy]

Not happy with it. All this hype on "cinematic" graphics and new textures, physics, blah......the game looks like arse, even on extreme settings, the FR drops like a horse turd and the gameplay just feels very...."sluggish" to me.

I can't say I'm happy with the overall experience so far.

Try applying Custom Settings. It seems the Game has issues with setting them automatically.

I've honestly tried, I spent more time adjusting the settings than playing the game last night :S.

But, I've just read that theres a big update coming on Friday, so I'm not going to dismiss the game as trash right away. I've been in this lifestyle long enough to understand that PC launches can have a few issues seeing as everyones rig isn't identical. Time heals all glitches.

Total War's launch bugs are pretty spectacular. So many people, me included, could barely play Empire total war even 2 months in.

 

[OneCatch]

Total War's launch bugs are pretty spectacular. So many people, me included, could barely play Empire total war even 2 months in.

Empire is still unplayable if you don't get that mod which gets rid of all the forts!

Marine assaults and decent naval battles are great, and the new concealment mechanic is mixing things up a bit, even if the battle AI itself isn't much better. And I love the level of detail within units - with centurions shouting at their men, bracing themselves against missiles, better animations than in Shogun 2 even.

Mmm, yes. I'd forgotten to mention the concealment mechanic/fog of war in my write up. It's kind of slick, actually. I've yet to have it seriously impact a game, but it makes the idea of actual in-fight ambushes and surprises a lot more feasible than in previous editions.

Agreed about animations. I had a unit fleeing from battle getting pounded by slingers, and they had their shields up over their heads. Was a lovely little touch. Didn't help much when the javelins came in from behind, but oh well. No one ever said war was fair.

It is rather good - they've even implemented things like people starting to slouch and look out of breath as they get more exhausted. The flip-side is that zooming in is horribly CPU intensive at the moment, but that might improve with time!

The concealment thing only really comes into play in really broken terrain, but for me it's added a whole new element - I reckon invading Germany is going to be legitimately horrible for the same reason.
For example I was doing a beach assault against Corsica and genuinely wasn't sure where to land my general because the enemy units were screened by market stalls and bushes and stuff.
Speaking of which, the destructibility is great as well - bushes and awnings and things get trampled underfoot if formations march through them now.

 

[Krantos]

1)More than once the AI had landed ships and just stood there on the shore while I shot them.

That's a bug I hope they get fixed. What's going on is that unit can't do anything until they are ALL off the boat. So if one idiot gets stuck on board... Yeah.

The really annoying thing, imo, is you can't directly attack them in melee when they're like that, so if you're ranged units are off doing other things, you have to trick one of your units into position on top of them, then let them fight that way.

 

[BeeGeenie]

Like some others have said, overall it's a good enough game, but:

The UI is just awful. Shogun 2 was so streamlined and elegant that Rome 2's interface is fugly and obtuse by comparison.

I still have no idea what "Authority, Cunning, and Zeal" actually mean in terms of gameplay, beyond having my agents focus on just one, since they all seem to do the same thing. What they do for my generals, I have no clue.

And the lag. I wasn't expecting miracles in the battles, but the framerate chugging on the campaign map was a bit surprising.

I can also kind of excuse the Biblical waiting times between turns, since that's what happens when you have to process turns for 200+ factions, but it's still disappointing that I need to bring a good book to keep me entertained between turns. :/

Also, my ship reinforcements glitched and just sat there on their boats, watching my ground troops do all the fighting.

I'm looking forward to the patches that can turn this Beta version into a finished product.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I still have no idea what "Authority, Cunning, and Zeal" actually mean in terms of gameplay, beyond having my agents focus on just one, since they all seem to do the same thing. What they do for my generals, I have no clue.

From the Rome 2 forums...can't vouch for the accuracy but it's better than hapless speculation...

Authority, Cunning and Zeal are 3 separate attributes that can level up and affect your general in many ways.

Authority for example, make's your general a better leader the more it gets higher. To elaborate, you will notice his leadership aura in battles grows as his Auth. grows. Furthermore at certain milestones, such as 4 Auth. your general unlocks Inspire.

It's a similar thing for the other two traits Cunn. and Zeal.

Cunning = more crafty

For example the more cunning your general has, the quicker his unit's abilities recharge. Furthermore at 4 cunning he unlocks battle rhythm (make's a unit get stronger and stronger for a short time, after which they exhaust greatly)

Zeal = more brute force

Higher brute = units do more melee damage, and missile units do more upfront damage at all times

Higher brute also unlocks you more skills.

In regard to agents its even more interesting. each action done by an agent can now be specifically altered to have a bonus effect with the success chance dependent on your agents auth. cunn. or zeal.

let me give you a example. i have a german scout/spy called olaf.

by having a higher cunning than normal when i choose to disrupt an enemy army olaf is better suited to poison the food supplies.because it relies on the cunning attribute (which olaf has more of). the other alternatives to sabotaging would.have been a zeal-option to destroy the equipment of the army. theres also an authority based approach to sabotagingt the army with a bonus effect but i forgot

just remember sabotaging an army is always gonna slow/stop em if its successful but that cunning allowed me to poison em and kill some men at the same time

furthermore cunning makes my scout harder to find and catch.

zeal and authority ay out similarly but im not at my pc at the moment so i cant remember exactly.what they help with when it comes to agents.

Not even going to try and fix his spelling and capitalization.

 

[BeeGeenie]

Double post. Oops.

 

[BeeGeenie]

Spoiler: snip

I still have no idea what "Authority, Cunning, and Zeal" actually mean in terms of gameplay, beyond having my agents focus on just one, since they all seem to do the same thing. What they do for my generals, I have no clue.

From the Rome 2 forums...can't vouch for the accuracy but it's better than hapless speculation...

Authority, Cunning and Zeal are 3 separate attributes that can level up and affect your general in many ways.

Authority for example, make's your general a better leader the more it gets higher. To elaborate, you will notice his leadership aura in battles grows as his Auth. grows. Furthermore at certain milestones, such as 4 Auth. your general unlocks Inspire.

It's a similar thing for the other two traits Cunn. and Zeal.

Cunning = more crafty

For example the more cunning your general has, the quicker his unit's abilities recharge. Furthermore at 4 cunning he unlocks battle rhythm (make's a unit get stronger and stronger for a short time, after which they exhaust greatly)

Zeal = more brute force

Higher brute = units do more melee damage, and missile units do more upfront damage at all times

Higher brute also unlocks you more skills.

In regard to agents its even more interesting. each action done by an agent can now be specifically altered to have a bonus effect with the success chance dependent on your agents auth. cunn. or zeal.

let me give you a example. i have a german scout/spy called olaf.

by having a higher cunning than normal when i choose to disrupt an enemy army olaf is better suited to poison the food supplies.because it relies on the cunning attribute (which olaf has more of). the other alternatives to sabotaging would.have been a zeal-option to destroy the equipment of the army. theres also an authority based approach to sabotagingt the army with a bonus effect but i forgot

just remember sabotaging an army is always gonna slow/stop em if its successful but that cunning allowed me to poison em and kill some men at the same time

furthermore cunning makes my scout harder to find and catch.

zeal and authority ay out similarly but im not at my pc at the moment so i cant remember exactly.what they help with when it comes to agents.

Not even going to try and fix his spelling and capitalization.

Well that helps, I guess, although I still don't quite see the point of giving me three different ways to assassinate a unit depending on whichever stat is highest. Why give me three options if I'm only going to use the one with the highest chance of success?

Now, if they had the little assassination videos, and you got a different one based on which skill you were using, then I could see a point to having three different stats instead of just the one.

It's just another example of a simple, elegant, intuitive system that they had been perfecting in Shogun 2, made needlessly complicated.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Well that helps, I guess, although I still don't quite see the point of giving me three different ways to assassinate a unit depending on whichever stat is highest. Why give me three options if I'm only going to use the one with the highest chance of success?

Now, if they had the little assassination videos, and you got a different one based on which skill you were using, then I could see a point to having three different stats instead of just the one.

It's just another example of a simple, elegant, intuitive system that they had been perfecting in Shogun 2, made needlessly complicated.

Hey, I didn't design it, and I agree. Your post made me curious, so I went looking for an explanation, and that's the explanation I found. On generals at least it seems sensible, if a bit dull compared to M2's traits.

As for Shogun 2, you'll have a hard time getting me to agree with anything positive said about that game. Pong is elegant. They streamlined away EVERYTHING that made Total War special. At least Rome II has put SOME of it back in, albeit messily.

 

[BeeGeenie]

Well that helps, I guess, although I still don't quite see the point of giving me three different ways to assassinate a unit depending on whichever stat is highest. Why give me three options if I'm only going to use the one with the highest chance of success?

Now, if they had the little assassination videos, and you got a different one based on which skill you were using, then I could see a point to having three different stats instead of just the one.

It's just another example of a simple, elegant, intuitive system that they had been perfecting in Shogun 2, made needlessly complicated.

Hey, I didn't design it, and I agree. Your post made me curious, so I went looking for an explanation, and that's the explanation I found. On generals at least it seems sensible, if a bit dull compared to M2's traits.

As for Shogun 2, you'll have a hard time getting me to agree with anything positive said about that game. Pong is elegant. They streamlined away EVERYTHING that made Total War special. At least Rome II has put SOME of it back in, albeit messily.

LOL, good point. Shogun 2 didn't get my vote in the "Best Total War game" thread either, (Medieval 2 FTW) I just like how they handled agents.

 

[Floppertje]

the tutorial is a lot better than what shogun 2 had, but it still left me a little confused on a few things. other than that... i friggin LOVE the artillery! It's almost like bowling!
still need to get the hang of things, but I'm having a good time with it.

 

[InfinityX]

snip

Thank you very much! I was curious about these stats as well

 

[Carnagath]

What little playtime I managed to put in through crashes and the 20 FPS that I get on low settings, the AI seems mediocre, the UI takes up half the screen and looks horrendous, and the battles are completely broken, units break formation immediately, everything happens so fast that by the time you have organized your flank half your shit is already routing, all kinds of nonsense. I think I'm gonna pretend that this doesn't exist until after a year of patching and user modding. Extremely disappointing.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I might have asked you this before, but what did you dislike about Shogun 2?

While I also disliked some of the changes they made I thought Shogun 2 was quite solid.

- Removal of a lot of the colorful RPG/AAR aspect from the Medieval 2/Rome era. Can't say if that was a continuation of a trend through Empire or not, as I never played the post M2 games.

- A host of more or less cut and paste mirror factions.

- A setting that holds no particular historical interest to me.

- An extremely thin roster of units, exacerbated by initially confusing names (I know instinctively what to expect from a "Levy Spearman", less so an "Ashigaru") and the absurd introduction of a rock/paper/scissors dynamic between what was essentially three different unit types.

- Hyped up battle speed, making everything feel like a twitch RTS instead of a cerebral grand strategy title.

The resulting game just felt completely inert to me. I played for a few hours, found it pretty and clean, but utterly lifeless. I just couldn't bring myself to care about ANYTHING that was happening. Had I not got it for $10 in a sale it would've ranked high amongst the worst purchases I ever made.

 

[Realitycrash]

My problems are mostly minor annoyances that I hope they fix.

1: When enemy units rout, my units does not automatically chase them. Why?

2: Trying to kill routing units that aren't even defending themselves is now apparently impossible. Even with light cavalry chasing a broken unit of slingers, my cavalry only kills one routing slinger every fifteen seconds or so. Holy shit, really? In every TW game, mopping up units with fast cavalry was NOT that hard.

3: Balance the ranged units. It's nice that javelins no longer suck as hard as they used to, but Archers being worse than slingers? Uh, okey.

 

[TheCommanders]

I was really surprised by all the negativity on the Total War Forums. I had played the game for about 8 hours on easy (with rome) just to get the hang on the new system before I started a harder game with a harder faction. I went over to the forums to see what factions people liked the best and saw 90% of the threads were proclaiming the death of the franchise and the betrayal of the fanbase. Yeesh. Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've had zero performance issues (with a slightly above average pc), and no bugs at all (that I've noticed anyway). I really like the way battles feel; a large army marching feels and sounds like a large army marching, and after orders have been issued and a large melee is underway, I like to drop into cinematic view and enjoy the spectacle for a moment or two.

I've heard a lot of complaints about the new interface, and I think they are mostly unwarranted. It looks simplified, but all the information you'd expect is still there, it's just either a click or two away, or requires you to mouse over an icon. This may slow you down a few seconds, but as a result the main screen is much less cluttered, which I think is an acceptable compromise (YMMV).

There were only two things I was really annoyed by (so far anyway).

1. Why the hell are there control points in open battles? I started a battle on a map against a larger force, and deployed some troops in a forest with the intent of using my skirmishers to lure their force into an ambush. All well and good, but suddenly, after their troops had advanced a bit I lost the battle. Before any troops had engaged. What? So I checked the replay, and then noticed a random circle on the grass somewhere near the middle of the map that the enemy army walked over for about 15 seconds, and then "captured" (how you "capture" a circle of grass is beyond me). That feature needs to go away, but I'm pretty sure a mod will give the option to remove those... or at least I hope so.

2. No one (meaning any of the AI) wants to fight open battles! That example I listed above was such a surprise... because it was the only battle I engaged in (non-naval) that didn't take place in a city. Maybe it was just because I was on easy (yes, yes, I'll get to a harder difficulty soon, shut up) but the AI armies did exactly two things. Defended their settlement, or went directly to my settlements to try and capture them. I much prefer open battles (lots more options) so this is very disappointing. Again, it could just be because I was playing on easy. I'm about to start a game on hard as Parthia, so we'll see what happens.

Anyway, despite a few annoying little niggles, I really like Total War: Rome 2 so far, and was really surprised by all the hate!

 

[Dogstile]

I can see myself enjoying the game quite a bit, though the performance issues are really crippling the experience for me. The graphics seem quite muddy overall (to the point that I get a headache when I play for more than 30 minutes) and the anti-aliasing is either awful or not working. That and my FPS is just trash, which is strange since I run Shogun II almost completely maxed.

This is my exact issue. I play shogun maxed out. I should not be lagging with all my settings on low, something else is up here. I do have an ATI card, maybe that's the case (again).

Naval battles are dumb, if their ship is a tiny bit bigger than yours and they ram you, your entire ship goes down and they can love tap their way across an entire fleet like that. If your ships go over sunken ships they blow up. Transport ships can contend with war ships, etc etc.

Romans are stupidly overpowered. You can get the marian reforms in around 10-12 turns and romans don't usually die from other units. Even the counters (javalin men) firing into their flanks will run out of ammo before routing a single unit.

I have no idea why I lag more on the campaign map than i do in battle with thousands of units fighting. I also don't like crashing every other battle. I'm actually running my PC with the case off just to make sure its not an overheating issue.

People, WAIT TO BUY ON THIS ONE. At least until christmas when they'll iron out the bugs. CA games always launch buggy and unoptimized.

Edit: Oh hell, I didn't even get onto the quick battles. This is what it looks like when you put your men in front of a capture point and let the enemy "attack you". What they'll actually do is try and run past your guys into the capture point and get slaughtered. 1650ish kills in less than five minutes.

http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/616154295831875472/1D42E4D9C292578538AFF07AC598F7EC236C2D7B/

 

[Elfgore]

So I didn't mind the game until now but after I failed a mission because my troops didn't listen to me, I'm putting the game on hold till they patch it. I fucking ordered my general ten times, ten FUCKING times to stop fighting the swordsman that ambushed him and run like hell. Do they do it? Of course not because that makes sense to run away, instead they decide to run back and save the one guy who was still being attacked. I then get attacked by spearmen and my general dies. I've noticed this before too. If my soldiers are fighting they will not run away unless I click it ten times. Makes hit and run cavalry attacks downright impossible because you lose your entire fucking cav force because they refuse to run when they get charged by five units of elite spearmen.