The Total War: Rome 2 Thread

[LostCrusader]

A major issue for me that I have noticed is that the computers seem to focus on making the majority of their armies out of skirmishers. I have tried 2 groups so far, Rome and Parthia, and both of them have had very little difficulty in battles because all of the computers I run into are using armies with 50-75% of their troops being skirmishers.

With the Romans, I can easily out match most neighbors infantry with the more heavily armored infantry, and I can easily shatter skirmishers with support units (such as defeating 5 full units of skirmishers by sending 1 unit of war dogs at them, losing no more than 5 dogs).

With the Parthians, I was expecting both them and their neighbors to be heavily focused on horse archers like they were in the first Rome. But after trying them out, I discovered that the way that most units use their shields more effectively now make horse archers fairly worthless so I shifted to melee cavalry. This lead the computer's skirmisher focused armies to being worthless against much smaller forces, even with supporting spear men. I recently had a battle where the auto resolve bar was giving me about a 10% chance because I had about 1000 cavalry vs a 4400 man army and I ended up killing over 3K of them and lost 41.

 

[BLAHwhatever]

Angry Joe's review speaks directly from my heart and a lot of others as well.

 

[ERaptor]

This is relevant. And before you ask no haven't checked if someone else posted it yet, if they have, so be it,



This video also made sure i did not get the game, since i actually was thinking about it.

I was waiting for the first guy to post this. In the official forums, a whole army of whiners does pretty much nothing but post Joe's Video and repost the same stuff over and over. Im aware the game has problems, but for some people its actually running nicely, and with radious mod i had a blast with the campaign. Not to mention that the first patches fixed a lot of the performance issues.

You were probably right to not get the game tough. If not as many people would have preordered it, the community wouldnt be a giant playground with kids crying everywhere. I hope the whole thing calms down a bit and the game gets some re-reviews after the major stuff has been fixed. Joe seemed like he wanted to like the game, and maybe he can after some fixing has been done.

 

[LetalisK]

Angry Joe's review speaks directly from my heart and a lot of others as well.

I'm surprised he gave it as high of a score as he did, both from my perspective and his. I wouldn't even rate this game average and up until the score it didn't sound like he thought it was even average either.

 

[Longstreet]

Snip

I was waiting for the first guy to post this. In the official forums, a whole army of whiners does pretty much nothing but post Joe's Video and repost the same stuff over and over. Im aware the game has problems, but for some people its actually running nicely, and with radious mod i had a blast with the campaign. Not to mention that the first patches fixed a lot of the performance issues.

You were probably right to not get the game tough. If not as many people would have preordered it, the community wouldnt be a giant playground with kids crying everywhere. I hope the whole thing calms down a bit and the game gets some re-reviews after the major stuff has been fixed. Joe seemed like he wanted to like the game, and maybe he can after some fixing has been done.

So let's take this step by step;

First off, i am just gonna ignore the "whole army of whiners post nothing but joe video's" thing and assume you didn't just call me a joe humping whiner.

Now that, that is clear, let's move on.

If you create a game, and that game needs CONSUMER MADE mods you fucked something up and the game should not have been released.

I do love the whole "i do not have a problem, ergo there is no problem" attitude. But how would you feel if a dealer sold 5 cars, 4 work perfectly but yours is missing an engine? (Note; this is by no means an indication of the Rome II working to not-working ratio, just an example) Shouldn't you be allowed to go to the dealer and say fuck this shit give a car with an engine in it? Or should you keep quiet because the other 4 cars works perfectly and you can always get an engine from the scrapyard? Of course you go back to the dealer and demand a working car, you paid for it didnt you?

While i do not know how the people on the official forums express themselves. They damn sure have a legitimate reason to complain. But if they repost the same stuff over and over maybe it is because they have THOSE problems?

If this was Bethesda(they are known for their bugs in their games, although i never really had a problem), it would have been ripped a new one already. But for some reason CA gets away with it.

Should it get a new review, this should be based on official patches released by CA and not on consumer made mods.

 

[Dogstile]

Snip

I was waiting for the first guy to post this. In the official forums, a whole army of whiners does pretty much nothing but post Joe's Video and repost the same stuff over and over. Im aware the game has problems, but for some people its actually running nicely, and with radious mod i had a blast with the campaign. Not to mention that the first patches fixed a lot of the performance issues.

You were probably right to not get the game tough. If not as many people would have preordered it, the community wouldnt be a giant playground with kids crying everywhere. I hope the whole thing calms down a bit and the game gets some re-reviews after the major stuff has been fixed. Joe seemed like he wanted to like the game, and maybe he can after some fixing has been done.

So let's take this step by step;

First off, i am just gonna ignore the "whole army of whiners post nothing but joe video's" thing and assume you didn't just call me a joe humping whiner.

Now that, that is clear, let's move on.

If you create a game, and that game needs CONSUMER MADE mods you fucked something up and the game should not have been released.

I do love the whole "i do not have a problem, ergo there is no problem" attitude. But how would you feel if a dealer sold 5 cars, 4 work perfectly but yours is missing an engine? (Note; this is by no means an indication of the Rome II working to not-working ratio, just an example) Shouldn't you be allowed to go to the dealer and say fuck this shit give a car with an engine in it? Or should you keep quiet because the other 4 cars works perfectly and you can always get an engine from the scrapyard? Of course you go back to the dealer and demand a working car, you paid for it didnt you?

While i do not know how the people on the official forums express themselves. They damn sure have a legitimate reason to complain. But if they repost the same stuff over and over maybe it is because they have THOSE problems?

If this was Bethesda(they are known for their bugs in their games, although i never really had a problem), it would have been ripped a new one already. But for some reason CA gets away with it.

Should it get a new review, this should be based on official patches released by CA and not on consumer made mods.

By that logic:

Elder Scrolls is a series of complete shit from beginning to end.

ARMA is shit.

The Sims is shit.

Shogun II is shit.

A lot off series have mods required. Hell oblivion requires a fan patch to take care off the litany of bugs and issues with it. In fact, every Bethesda game from Oblivion on requires a fan made patch.

None of those games required fan made mods to actually play them. Oblivion was more than playable, in fact it was just buggy enough to create amusing situations.

ARMA again, has minimal bugs that let you play the game against a half decent AI.

I'll skip the sims, thinking you need a patch to play the first sims is funny as hell.

Shogun 2 again, requires no fan made patch because the AI actually attacks your troops rather than running through them because "gotta get dem flags".

 

[ERaptor]

Snip

I was waiting for the first guy to post this. In the official forums, a whole army of whiners does pretty much nothing but post Joe's Video and repost the same stuff over and over. Im aware the game has problems, but for some people its actually running nicely, and with radious mod i had a blast with the campaign. Not to mention that the first patches fixed a lot of the performance issues.

You were probably right to not get the game tough. If not as many people would have preordered it, the community wouldnt be a giant playground with kids crying everywhere. I hope the whole thing calms down a bit and the game gets some re-reviews after the major stuff has been fixed. Joe seemed like he wanted to like the game, and maybe he can after some fixing has been done.

So let's take this step by step;

First off, i am just gonna ignore the "whole army of whiners post nothing but joe video's" thing and assume you didn't just call me a joe humping whiner.

Now that, that is clear, let's move on.

If you create a game, and that game needs CONSUMER MADE mods you fucked something up and the game should not have been released.

I do love the whole "i do not have a problem, ergo there is no problem" attitude. But how would you feel if a dealer sold 5 cars, 4 work perfectly but yours is missing an engine? (Note; this is by no means an indication of the Rome II working to not-working ratio, just an example) Shouldn't you be allowed to go to the dealer and say fuck this shit give a car with an engine in it? Or should you keep quiet because the other 4 cars works perfectly and you can always get an engine from the scrapyard? Of course you go back to the dealer and demand a working car, you paid for it didnt you?

While i do not know how the people on the official forums express themselves. They damn sure have a legitimate reason to complain. But if they repost the same stuff over and over maybe it is because they have THOSE problems?

If this was Bethesda(they are known for their bugs in their games, although i never really had a problem), it would have been ripped a new one already. But for some reason CA gets away with it.

Should it get a new review, this should be based on official patches released by CA and not on consumer made mods.

I did, in fact, not call you that. The very reason i reffered to the CA Forums and the people over there. If you havent, go take a look. CA doesnt get away with it. There are plenty of people proclaiming the death of the franchise, calling CA and each other names. Heck, look at Metacritic. It's literally a battle between Fanboys rating 10/10 and "whiners" 0/10 to balance each other out. Last i checked, the game was at 4.0. And its allways the same people, rementioning the same stuff. I absolutely agree, that a customer whos product doesnt work should get up and do something about it. In this case, however, you are not doing anyone any favors by posting three liners in EVERY Thread, pretty much consisting of:

- CA sucks
- Everyone liking the game sucks
- Modders have to save the franchise
- Filthy casuals should all die

And it's allways the same attitude too. With games like Skyrim, who would have died in weeks without the modding Community, people arent going up in arms in the Forums calling the Developers retards for needing Mods. They refer to modding as a great addition to a great game. Rome 2 is the exact opposite. Yes, the release was a failure bugwise, but they are working on it. And it took them only a week to fix a huge amount of performance issues a lot of people had. But that gets a lot less mentioning than the stuff i pointed out above.

To use a stupid example. If your car didnt work, would you then go to your retailer, and while hes fixing it answer all hes saying with:

"MY ENGINE DOESNT WORK AND SOME DUDE MADE A VIDEO ABOUT IT."
"MY ENGINE DOESNT WORK AND SOME DUDE MADE A VIDEO ABOUT IT."

Thats the reason im calling these people whiners. Because the above is pretty much the policy in the official Forums now. And to clarify, it wasnt aimed at you at all. You were just providing the context i used to bring it up. I do apologize that it came over the wrong way, i wrote the post at work and didnt notice that it was worded a bit provocative.

 

[Eduku]

Second statement from CA:

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.

Mike Simpson
Creative Director
Creative Assembly

If you look past the PR speak, it seems they're targeting the main performance issues first, before moving on to the rest.

The last paragraph is also interesting, where he notes that future games could be introduced as open betas before releasing. In my opinion, they should have started doing this a long time ago, as it's becoming more and more clear that they don't have the capacity to test their games sufficiently before release.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

None of those games required fan made mods to actually play them. Oblivion was more than playable, in fact it was just buggy enough to create amusing situations.

ARMA again, has minimal bugs that let you play the game against a half decent AI.

I'll skip the sims, thinking you need a patch to play the first sims is funny as hell.

Shogun 2 again, requires no fan made patch because the AI actually attacks your troops rather than running through them because "gotta get dem flags".

Rome II does not require mods to be "playable". If you're having issues launching/playing the game, mods will not fix those issues. Mods significantly improve the game, but the game was "playable" without them.

All Total War games, including Shogun 2, launched with AI bugs ranging from serious to catastrophic. Rome 2 is actually middle of the pack in this regard. Medieval 2 was much worse at launch. Notably, I have not experienced the "lemming rush to the flag" through 30 hours played, the first 10 of which were unmodded. Clearly it can happen, but it doesn't always happen. Let's not pretend it does.

Obviously the game was released, as is usual for the franchise, in a dubious 'beta at best' condition. No, this is not excusable because mods can help it, but by now Total War fans should know what kind of dish they can expect to be served at launch. Fool me 6 times, shame on me. Overstating the problems it's having serves nothing. I don't like blind, frothing, hyperbolic criticism, even of badly screwed up games.

 

[Dogstile]

Snip

I was waiting for the first guy to post this. In the official forums, a whole army of whiners does pretty much nothing but post Joe's Video and repost the same stuff over and over. Im aware the game has problems, but for some people its actually running nicely, and with radious mod i had a blast with the campaign. Not to mention that the first patches fixed a lot of the performance issues.

You were probably right to not get the game tough. If not as many people would have preordered it, the community wouldnt be a giant playground with kids crying everywhere. I hope the whole thing calms down a bit and the game gets some re-reviews after the major stuff has been fixed. Joe seemed like he wanted to like the game, and maybe he can after some fixing has been done.

So let's take this step by step;

First off, i am just gonna ignore the "whole army of whiners post nothing but joe video's" thing and assume you didn't just call me a joe humping whiner.

Now that, that is clear, let's move on.

If you create a game, and that game needs CONSUMER MADE mods you fucked something up and the game should not have been released.

I do love the whole "i do not have a problem, ergo there is no problem" attitude. But how would you feel if a dealer sold 5 cars, 4 work perfectly but yours is missing an engine? (Note; this is by no means an indication of the Rome II working to not-working ratio, just an example) Shouldn't you be allowed to go to the dealer and say fuck this shit give a car with an engine in it? Or should you keep quiet because the other 4 cars works perfectly and you can always get an engine from the scrapyard? Of course you go back to the dealer and demand a working car, you paid for it didnt you?

While i do not know how the people on the official forums express themselves. They damn sure have a legitimate reason to complain. But if they repost the same stuff over and over maybe it is because they have THOSE problems?

If this was Bethesda(they are known for their bugs in their games, although i never really had a problem), it would have been ripped a new one already. But for some reason CA gets away with it.

Should it get a new review, this should be based on official patches released by CA and not on consumer made mods.

By that logic:

Elder Scrolls is a series of complete shit from beginning to end.

ARMA is shit.

The Sims is shit.

Shogun II is shit.

A lot off series have mods required. Hell oblivion requires a fan patch to take care off the litany of bugs and issues with it. In fact, every Bethesda game from Oblivion on requires a fan made patch.

None of those games required fan made mods to actually play them. Oblivion was more than playable, in fact it was just buggy enough to create amusing situations.

ARMA again, has minimal bugs that let you play the game against a half decent AI.

I'll skip the sims, thinking you need a patch to play the first sims is funny as hell.

Shogun 2 again, requires no fan made patch because the AI actually attacks your troops rather than running through them because "gotta get dem flags".

1. Past mods, no one really had any reason to play it. Day Z put it on the map. Mods are the reason anyone plays it, because past that there is really nothing to do in ARMA. Its less a game and more a sandbox for mods, just like the sims and even total war.

2. Shogun II's AI is notoriously awful for anyone who played it. I had troops run away from me right as they are about to charge my line. You can game the system easily without an overhaul. The AI was easily exploitable and predictable. Especially with any sort of ranged or gun unit.

I won against multiple full stacks with more experience than me with little issue because of ranged weapons. On hard. Easy AI is the hallmark of total war.

In fact, the main criticism was that you need to play on Legendary to get any real challenge. Saying you play on anything less on Total War forums gets you laughed at.

3. Oblivion and any Elder Scrolls past that had fan patches with fixes in the hundreds. A lot of bugs to ignore, especially when people got them.

You used the very argument he criticized: "I don't have bugs so neither do you."

4. Sims, same thing. Mods are its main focus even in development. Its meant to be modded. Without it, it has little value. Its the reason Sims: Medieval died on arrival.

Lots of games are meant to be played with mods. Total war is among them.

I actually didn't say "I don't have bugs so neither do you". I said they don't need mods to be playable. I, as well as many other people played arma before mods. I played every total war, without mods. The sims, I played without mods. There is a massive difference between "I need to mod a game to be interested" and "I need to mod a game to be able to play it".

Saying the games don't have bugs is silly, I didn't say they didn't have bugs. In oblivions case I explicitly mentioned it. I even mentioned it in arma, as minimal. Because they are minimal. I had one case of a really bad glitch, where every enemy was stuck in passive that required a reset. For general play, the game functioned. I followed it, the horrible tales of non-working AI in that game were nearly non-existant, which i'm willing to brush over as exceptions to the rule.

That's what i'm saying, most of these games are functional. Shogun, for all its AI problems, actually ran. Tales of people not being able to run it on high end hardware was almost nonexistant.

Rome? No matter what forum I visit, people are mentioning that their £1000 pc they bought half a year ago lags on the campaign map, that you spend more time waiting than playing, that even on low the game eats up the CPU like crazy and makes it take forever marching towards the enemy because with the amount of CPU usage it has, you can't speed it up.

Playable and "what i/you find fun" are two different things.

 

[Eduku]

The beta version of patch 2 was released a few days ago and reports are coming in that it seems to bring some nice improvements/fixes to the game. The most notable is more aggressive campaign AI, as well as improved FPS on the campaign map for many people (though not all). Battle improvements include slower run speed for infantry and faster run and charge speed for cavalry, as well as increased morale penalties for being attacked from flanks.

It's a start. Maybe in a month or so Rome 2 will be approaching the game it was supposed to be.

 

[kingthrall]

The beta version of patch 2 was released a few days ago and reports are coming in that it seems to bring some nice improvements/fixes to the game. The most notable is more aggressive campaign AI, as well as improved FPS on the campaign map for many people (though not all). Battle improvements include slower run speed for infantry and faster run and charge speed for cavalry, as well as increased morale penalties for being attacked from flanks.

It's a start. Maybe in a month or so Rome 2 will be approaching the game it was supposed to be.

glad someone actually posts somthing relivant to rome total war 2's progress rather than using the opinions and repeating obivous news such as "Angry Joe the Loser review". I have a lot of qualms about RTW 2 but at the same time Im just posting every sort of issue in their forums and giving them hell for it (with screenshots/proofect), THE RIGHT WAY to go about it.

Also as for AI Sparta in my Campaign has conquered the Entire of Egypt, Libya and encroaches on Persia. While I am playign as Athens and crapping myself cause our nations distrust each other and are at quite intensity but not actually at war. Yet at the same time, bugs like units not moving during seiges or the game ending when you slain every enemy make me want to bash my head agaist my desk in frustration.