Rome Total War II

The only thing I've really liked of what has been shown so far are the unit cards. Holy fuck they're gorgeous.

Also fuck magic spells on generals.

 

This was probably CA's attempt to please all the bitching about the AI being braindead. Hard or not, the guy's playing style and strategy sucked big time. Or he intended to lose - I don't know.
Not to say that the AI's force was what? Double?

Also, we have yet to see how the AI manages diplomacy. I have a feeling that they didn't improve it very much. Inb4 war-peace treaties spam

 

I'd say this is pretty much a given. It's obvious they don't give a fuck or they would have made an effort at some point in the last decade.

 

Oh god, another reskinned Total War game with a braindead AI, broken diplomacy, a few somewhat cool gimmicks and a generous portion of dumbed down content that I will still be unable to ignore. For some reason I am even able to eke out some enjoyment out of Empire. I don't know what it is with me and TW games, it's a really unhealthy relationship...

 

It's part nostalgia/part remember good times/part the battles and presentation still look awesome as fuck. TW games have so much wasted potential. There's something about building and progressing an empire, and then watching your toys and characters go to battle. When you spend a couple years building a massive 120 gun Ship of the Line, after decades of research and infrastructure, which involved various land and sea battles to maintain.......and then lose it in a climactic battle shortly thereafter(or win, even)....that is compelling gameplay. Too bad they get so much wrong.

 

He's playing into the AI's strenghts while making all sorts of mistakes himself that he won't mention. Like pulling his general out of the area where he can support/buff his troops, managing his cavelery extremely poorly and extending his forces too much. That said, it looks like on par with Shogun 2's battle AI. And that one was rather decent.

 

Sweet lard, I cannot stomach watching this shit. Guy has cavalry advantage and he hides half of it in the woods to be torn apart by spear infantry instead of using the juicy open field right in front of him... and calls himself a distinctly average player, wow I dread to see the really bad ones.
Anyways, looks quite a bit like Shogun 2 AI indeed, which is good enough. Wonder how blatantly it'll cheat on the campaign map.
I frown at the growing number of additional activated skills. I know the WoW generation loves this shit, but added micro is not what suits total war imo.

I'm pretty dumbfounded at the fact that there's no seasons on the main map. I very much liked the 4 turns per year from Shogun, so I hope they don't come back to the 2/1 year per turn scheme. It's baffling since no reason for the engine not to handle it.

Well, to be frank, it's a rare thing, an AAA strategy game that manages to keep pretty consistent quality. Also, it's either TW or back to the good ole paradox map painting. Both get tedious after some time, but let's just come clean, everyone likes them some "visceral experience" every now and then.

 

Loads. Every AI does in any strategy title. I don't really mind, as long as it won't summon units out of thin air or upgrade low class stuff into elite top tier ones when I don't look. Also the comment in the RPS preview where the Rome 2 previewer got outmanouvred on the campaign map gave me some hope. Especially as it was in the prologue and he once again mentioned it in the following interview in which the CA dev responded by them discussing on wether or not to tone down the preview campaign AI.

Perhaps we'll see a half decent campaign AI yet. What did piss me off in the interview was the tone of the dev. Every time the interviewer mentioned that he lost something to the AI the dev responded by saying he was sorry and that the previewer wasn't supposed to lose or have a hard time. Pretty clear they're deadly afraid to lose out on 'casuals' if word gets out the game might be challenging in any sort of way. That never bodes well for the actual release.

And fuck these added activated skills. Feature micro creep detected. Shit on that.

 

I just wished that they improved the AI army composition, on Rome 1, most barbarians only produced cheap infantry and skirmishers that with the fact that units couldn't be pushed back (they added all this Hollywood shit but the mere fact of adding the possibility of units being pushed back and having their formation broken would be massive incline, as you would have to worry with line cohesion) , that made possible to massacre the the AI every time when defending a chokepoint like a bridge , the only thing you needed was some 500 men in each bridge and you could slaughter a 4000 army.

It was very easy to lure the AI into dividing it's forces with a smaller cavalry army and kill every isolated AI unit one by one, the harder modes were absolutely retarded to the point of your units melting even while fighting AI peasants, the unit pathfinding during sieges was atrocious, the AI was very dumbfuck on assaulting cities and siege battles were very clunky and by far the most common battle, that made me gave up on vanilla Rome and only really tried the mods that are way better, to me Rome 1 was broken to the point of almost being unplayable at release. I doubt that Rome 2 will be worse, the only thing that annoys me is the lack of a proper mod support.

 

Hence my question: how blatantly I remember shogun 2 being much more stomachable with the mod that allowed the AI to conjure up armies of peasants, but no more level 8 upgraded samurai.
I'm cautiously optimistic for the campaign AI in this iteration, it seems that they've went the shogun 2 route again, notice that there number of routes leading in and out of each province was limited, so I expect similar algorithms to be at work.

@DeepOcean
Yeah, higher difficulty levels in TW series is about stat and morale bonuses. It's not really rewarding.

 

I forget which "barbarian" tribe it was, but I remember in RTW there was one with these devastating horse archers. Just make an entire army of them and put on skirmish mode. Using the firing circle against infantry and just run against cav. They could outrun any light cav while still shooting and surround any infantry/heavy cav. Win battles with 3k kills and like 14 losses. Silly. Hope they make it in RTW2 so that someone can easily show how shitty the AI is.

 

Yeah, rome AI was really off at times. And M2 AI sometimes wouldn't even react to being shot at. I think Shogun 2 AI was a bit better at that. I haven't tried to field large amounts of horse archers yet, but iirc they died a lot to regular archers, so the scythian scenario isn't that likely.

IMO, choke points (rivers and sieges in particular) and coordinating attacks from two sides (which means both proper flanking without telegraphing and defending from two sides) is the biggest weakness of the current TW AI. Will see what they have to offer in this regard. The Shogun 2's ninja climbers were pretty retarded and exploitable... but it was some improvement at least.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Carrhae

 

Nah... If horse archers worked so well, why the romans were never really treaten by anyone tha use them on mass? Heavy infantry on a square formation and the Parthians could fire a forest worth of arrows and do little damage, the problem was that Crassus was a terrible dumbfuck in that battle, there were alot more battles where the parthians were fucked really hard by the romans .

 

I think that in reality, you can't retreat your horse archers forever.

 

Yep.I think that come a point where the horses get tired too.

 

And their moviment is affected by type of terrain, rivers, etc. Hard to properly model this in the game, though.

 

I guess I'm the only one who got run over by the Mongols in MTW?

 

More answers for R2


Will soldiers ever lose their swords, spears or shields when fighting?
Soldiers will drop them when they die, but not during combat as this would require individual soldiers swapping to a different animation set to the rest of the unit for the rest of the battle.

In a battle, can I disembark troops from ships anywhere or only at certain points?
You can disembark on beaches or in harbours.

Can buildings and grass be set on fire?
Buildings yes, grass no.

Can chariots and elephants cause casualties to friendly units if they run through them?
Yes they can. Best to move them around other units rather than through them.

I've not seen the movement compass UI in any screenshot, has that been removed?
It is not part of the user interface anymore, but the controls for it still work and we also have added an additional way to move units around. If you hold left click over a selected unit, or a unit that is part of a selected group, the cursor will change to a four directional symbol and you can drag the units around the map and they will keep their current formation and facing as you do so. You can hold the ctrl key to then rotate their facing as well.

Are province capitals captured in a single battle, or are there multiple if they are a port city?
The capture of a settlement is resolved in a single fight. The ports are part of the city, not separate parts of them.

How do garrisons work with limited armies?
The auto-garrisons that have been in since Empire make a return, but with better units and large numbers. Multiple different building chains can add units to the auto-garrison for a settlement. If you want more troops to defend a settlement you will need to station an army in it. As a player you will need to keep a balance of how many armies you are attacking with and how many are protecting your territory.

How do transported armies work? Can they be merged with navies?
Armies can embark and become transport navies. These can move around on their own, or can be attached to a navy and they can move around together and will fight together on the battlemap.

Are battlemaps generated from the campaign map like in Rome I, or are they preset tile maps like in Shogun 2? How many of them will there be?
So in Rome I battlemaps were generated via information from the campaign map. Culture, height details, terrain types, things like that. There was then code that took all of that to generate battlefields. Siege maps were big pre-made chunks dropped into middle of one of these maps.

With Shogun 2 battle maps were a mixture of tile template maps and premade maps. We use tiles as it allows for complete control over what kind of battle maps people will encounter compared to the old code solution. The tile template maps were tied to areas on the campaign, generally a few covering each region, and the game would pick the nearest one to where your army stood and fight a battle based on that. All of the templates were based on the geography and layout of the campaign map. siege maps were premade maps, including the outfield, and there were a few variations repeated across the campaign map.

Rome II takes a different approach. It is still tile based, but the entire campaign map is basically one giant tile map. There is a huge variety of battlefields and all based on where you are standing on the campaign map. Siege maps are also done as tile maps, not only is there the greatest variety of siege maps for settlements ever in a Total War game, the outfield will also reflect where that settlement is on the campaign map.

How big are the tech trees? Can you trade tech with other factions?
Big. Macedon has 56 techs it can research for example. No this is not possible in Rome II.

Do all families within a faction have the same tech tree?
Yes tech trees are done by faction.

Does the army cap affect all factions and cultures?
It applies to everyone.

Can minor settlements be upgraded in the campaign to have walls on the battlefield?
No only province capitals have walls and only they will have walled siege maps on the battlefield.

Will the city/castle split from Medieval II return?
This is up to players this time around. With the limited number of building slots in each settlement, and the number depending on if you've expanded the slots in a settlement, choices have to be made about what you specialise a settlement in. You might decide to turn a minor settlement with iron into a town for industrial wealth, or a big province capital into the heart of your military machine with every military building you can fit in it.

Will there be religious buildings like in Rome I?
Temples make a return, and there is a greater variety of them all with their own effects. The chain starts out as a basic building which then branches into all the different types.

With the new recruitment system, where units are recruited directly to the army, will there be any small scale battles?
Yes, it will take time to build up to 20 units in an army, so you'll see both large and small scale battles, though each with more importance than in previous titles.

What are the sizes of different units and what are they on the different unit size settings?
These numbers are by type, and then huge/large/medium/small unit size. Melee infantry 160/120/80/40, missile infantry 120/90/60/30, cavalry 80/60/40/20, artillery 40/30/20/10 and 4/3/2/1 engines.

 

SHAMEFUL DISPLAY




CA must have reused this phrase to troll Shogun 2 players

 

Oh, so short answer it's exactly the same as in Shogun 2 but you can't say that because that'd lose sales.

Sounds to me like they still haven't made it even remotely possible to choose the location of your battle in an informed way (while the campaign/battle map correlation was at least OK in M2/Rome). Amazing. One of the most important tasks for a general was choosing where to fight.

 

We're almost at release and its been pretty underwhelming so far. Im still looking forward to playing Rome 2 but its not the feverish hype I was hoping to be in by now. They were promising something big and its fallen way short imo. Not even jaw-dropping graphics to make up for it. A large campaign map and lots of melee oriented units are the only selling points for me.

The last stunning sequel was Empire, it was horribly buggy sure, but there was a wow factor with all the new features.
Shogun 2 had me disdained with redundancy. Didnt even buy it till it was 75% off.


Most exciting news ive heard is their twitter comment on Warhammer. A brand new setting will force em to break the mold somewhat.

 

What is the point in "features" that dont work, and are horribly bugged and unbalanced.
Id rather have a couple of good well implemented and balanced features then 100+ of broken mess.
Empire was unplayable, literally there was no game in it. It was just something to look at.

 

I managed to snag one of the somewhat playable versions (not through steam). I think they had a bunch of patches that fucked up one thing or the other and I had the one that seemed least broken.

I simply want something new, for them to expand and build upon the franchise instead of taking stuff in and out. Thinking back all the way to Shogun 1. I cant recall much that has drastically evolved; playable navies, better grafix and movement points for armies is about it.
Looking at the previews we've got of Rome 2. I dont see the perfectly implemented and balanced features that would justify the lack of innovation.

 

Dynamic city growth

Too bad this won't affect sieges...