Rome Total War II

And that's TW games for you in a nutshell. So many times it starts off with you thinking, "Fuck yeah bitch, that is some cool ass shit and what I've always dreamed of in a grand strategy game. I can build my awesome empire and fight the battles??!! THANK JESUS". And then you realize your imagination has run wild with their beautiful, horrible tease, and you slink away....dejected and torn between the dream and the reality.

Every game they seem almost there, and you hope that maybe this time it will be right. It's enough to make a grown man cry.

 

Really? There are actually people that don't expect TW games to be dumbed down shit on release? That seems more like your fault than anyone elses.

 

Well there are two competing thoughts with any release. MTW2 does not feel like "dumbed down shit" as compared to their later releases. Sure, it's not a Pdox game, but it more comfortably scratches that strategy itch than ETW/NTW/STW2. Of course TW games are not meant to be brilliant strategy games, but they can still be competent ones, that aren't completely broken, with cool battles, like they used to be. If you played on hard, MTW:Viking Invasion was not a dumbed down strategy game. It did what it was trying to do quite well. Try playing as the Saxon's neighbor, against their armoured Huscarls, and good luck.

 

Meh, up untill Rome they were all incline. Sure, not to everyone's liking but the series moved forward. Not to mention that expansions like Viking Invasion and Barbarian Invasions were actually pretty damn great. Medieval II was the first botched release but that one got saved by a decent expansion and great moddability. Then they switched engine and came up with the botched abortion that was Empire and we landed squarely into decline territory.

The engine from medieval total war 2 already lost some of the stuff they introduced in rome total war and its expansions. Methinks they either decided to cut corners or lost some of their most talented programmers and designers. The story of Empire's AI would suggest they repeatedly are having problems holding on to their people.

Mind you, I enjoyed Shogun 2 and this looks enjoyable as well but with the switch of engine they really lost a lot of the interactivity that made the series so great to begin. All the stuff like random city maps, a few pre-made historical cities and random battle maps (they claim, it however seems they simply made a handfull per province. They did the same thing in Shogun 2 and lied about these being randomly made maps at first as well.) and city growth that simply does not make a difference to a siege battle are all part of the shit the new engine came with.

 

Completely agree. I think some part of the switch to a new engine either lost them some of their old talent, or their old talent just couldn't work with it as well as they did by the end of RTW's expansions, and MTW2's expansion. The new engine is complete shit. It has taken them three games to *hopefully* get sieges right with RTW2. That's just one part of what makes a TW game. There was a time when a cavalry charge of fully armored knights would obliterate a 100 peasants in about five seconds, as it would probably do. Now you just get a dozen guys flying through the air, half of them getting up, and then single combat bullshit which takes a minute or more.

 

I actually found Medieval 2's cavalry charges to be way too overpowered. Well, in most mods that is.

 

What is wrong with cavalry being powerful enough to save a mostly poorly equipped Hitman army from total defeat by hordes of Russians, skyways, well-equipped Teutonic knights, treacherous Poles and damned Danes invading Lithuania simultaneously?

 

Nice. From the little I've read, and I'm no scholar, just a fan of history....heavy cav were the tanks of medieval warfare, with no direct "infantry" counter for quite some time(like entrenched modern infantry can usually beat modern armor). Very few troops were trained or equipped to deal with them. Even the best archers(longbowmen with bodkin) couldn't easily harm heavy knights(see: Agincourt, where mud and terrain was the French downfall). It wasn't even until the square formation during the Napoleonic era, and much later with the prevalence of armored warfare in WW2, that cavalry were finally outclassed. That says much about their strength and staying power. If any unit deserves to be OP in a medieval warfare game, it should be cavalry. That said, I'm sure not everything is designed perfectly. I wish ancient/medieval warfare put a stronger emphasis on mercenaries/levies, for example. The former being well-trained and expensive troops bought for a specific purpose/battle, and the latter being the worthless masses you dredge up just to get by, and they leave you when planting season comes around. It would be interesting to model that dynamic.

 

I don't remember if it was Real Recruitment for Stainless Steel or something else, but there are mods for M2TW Kingdoms that tried to model historical recruitment and army composition better. I felt it went overboard a bit because IIRC you only had three generals that could recruit professional units and they had to camp in the settlement for up to 14 or so turns to recruit one unit of knights for example, but yeah, I think a better solution to the OP cavalry problem would be to give them much higher upkeep and limit their recruitment pool like real recruitment did.

 

I have been thinking of going back to Stainless Steel, I remember having a lot of fun with it. One thing that bothered me about it was the extreme balance between units. Basically, every country had a very, very similar roster of troops, which made everything somewhat boring.

 

That would be RR for SS, which I think you can disable in the setup you run for it now. I believe with the latest iteration recruitment fluctuates in an empire. Sometimes only the King and a couple other high lords can recruit professional troops, and sometimes the entire empire can. Also, mercenaries tend to be more abundant, cheaper, and restock faster, so that's something to keep in mind for your regular armies.

As far as unit diversity, it's pretty samey early on, but expands later. There are slight differences between regional powers however. For instance, England starts with the ability to recruit javelin light cav, a form of billmen, and decent archers, whereas France starts off very "medieval", with access to some men-at-arms, and countries like Genoa/Italy get a bunch of urban militia types(slightly better trained and equipped than the standard European levies).

The best way to get that new car smell is always either an Islamic nation or Byzantium though.

 

Those all look pretty great, we'll see how they play. Especially like the harbor in Carthage. It's really too bad that most "cities" won't be sieged proper, so that they could make time to create these admittedly cool looking major city maps. Just hire one extra dude to design a couple dozen generic cities.

 

Well, IMAO they didn't had to create custom cities AT ALL. Just extend the campaign expandable feature on the battle map. That plus a little RNG and terrain data, and you would have plenty of unique cities without too much fuss.
Oh well...

 

Limitation of the new engine. The old one had cities that showed during the battles what buildings and fortifications and even size it had on the campaign map. These cities will be static, although CA said they will show persistent damage. We'll see.

 

Hopefully they've fixed the way units move between and near buildings. I think it's been a problem for the AI from the very beginning, or at least from Medieval 2, and especially in Empire. Dudes would just go bonkers and start slippin and slidin all over the place, repositioning, trying to hold some imaginary formation... That makes me wish the units had some kind of a cohesion rating, which when broken would lead to individuals becoming separated from the group, instead of forcing the entire unit to wait for that one dude to regain his place in the formation. It would probably make the game AI explode, though.

 

http://www.4players.de/4players.php.../Vorschau/31807/79887/0/Total_War_Rome_2.html

So what I got out of this was that the tutorial sucked shit and most of the things that I keep seeing in M2 that I've started playing again are again present here, such as only about 9 guys fighting while everyone else stands around. The author's gripe though about cav going through your infantry while fighting instead of around is because it sounds like he just selected attack and that has always happened so idk what the fuck he was expecting.

He gave is a satisfactory grade though and I saw on the side that Empire is the highest rated TW game on their site so I take this review with a pound of salt.

 

Seriously i could care less about animations, i never even zoom into the battle so i dont see them for like 99 percent of the game.

 

Naval combat demo. Unfortunately its being played by that same tard who sucked ass in the land battle demo so no hope of intelligence being displayed.

 

Doesn't show jack shit. Next.

 

Looks neat. I hope they've put some effort into AI pathfinding, especially in cities and forts. Otherwise this is going to be a clusterfuck.

 

Naval warfare looks fun, but seeing TW AI fight in tight spaces is frequently infuriating and glitchy, and I expect the boarding mechanic will have all sorts of fun bugs to deal with (can't board from that side, please try again etc.), though I may just be bitter...

 

The naval warfare looks glitchy as fuck. I expected the usual shennanigans with the boarding but the ramming looks completely detached as well. Hit ship, nothing happens. Hit ship and breach damage treshhold and watch it fall apart. Where is the middle ground CA? You know, bits falling off and people falling overboard when another ship rams them. Not every ramming action needs to end with ships being blasted to splinters but I would like to see some damage happening.

 

Ship speed is a huge incline. I can't forget horror of shogun2 and empire with 2 hour turns and pursuits.

 

That game made up for that by including turbo charged land battles though.