Rome Total War II

[Bradylama]

They built up a lot of good will with Shogun 2 to be fair.

 

[oscar]

My computer absolutely hates Shogun 2 like no other game I have seen. Countless problems even with the most recent patch.

Funnily enough I had better performance from a pirated version back in 2011 then I did when I fired it up from Steam a few days ago.

 

[Cyberarmy]

Other then that and flags what design decisions do you mean? Units speed?

The warscape engine does not do formations in melee combat well. Meaning the Roman legions devolve into blobs the moment a battle starts. Them trying to remedy this with countless gimmicky 'special' abilities is just insulting. Peasants burning down the gates of Carthage by throwing a few torches. Faction rosters are utterly inadequate with a few nonsensical factions being overpowered and other historically mayor factions left weak. No seasons really limits the gameplay on the campaign map. CA promised 'random' cities for the unwalled battles, there are however only two or three models per culture group. The UI is weak. BAI and CAI are the same as usual. Meaning they are rubbish. Lack of formations, including unit formations.

It's not just a beta, it's a beta of a game that's put together shoddily.

EDIT: They also just patched shogun 2 with a patch of roughly the same size as that new Rome 2 one which should optimize things. Since then my campaign map randomly becomes filled with waves. Thanks, CA.

Carthage and Egypt cannot get past turn 15 alive at most.
That blobs and how qucikly formations got screwed were real deal breakers. Spartan Phlanax loose thier formation in 1-2 sec most of time. At least AI is bad enoguh to use low tier soldiers usually.
I mean, really... After 55 turns and conqueering most of north as Iceni I decided to attack Rome. Their main army didn't even have Pretorain class soldiers...
Also some units are completely garbage, especially chariots... Charge stregth 14! With all charge upgrades and good weapons, they can only kill 1 or 2 mob tier enemy at best and then die honorribly. Haven't seen any Egyptian chariots so can't commend on them. (thought I think there is none...)

Another think is both strange Uİ and fast combat "upgrade" smells like consol portability. Well, back to Shogun 2 I guess.

 

[Ivar the Boner]

Why the fuck should they care. They are still getting 8/10 on "major gamur journalizm sites", TW fans turned into Bethestards long ago with their "house rules" to remedy "weak" AI which is nothing short of "how to roleplay in Oblivion".

Their goal is to make money, not good games and apparently they are sucessful at it. CA should go out of business right after Empire Total War (or even after Rome Total War reskin Medieval 2, but that would require people to stop giving those bastards money, which is not going to happen soon.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

They removed formation movements from the UI.

ctrl+g to lock shit down and click on the enemy army, they'll move and attack in formation, they're surprisingly not totally inept at choosing targets as well.

I do miss my "move forward/backward" buttons though.

 

[fastjack]

They removed formation movements from the UI.

ctrl+g to lock shit down and click on the enemy army, they'll move and attack in formation, they're surprisingly not totally inept at choosing targets as well.

I do miss my "move forward/backward" buttons though.

You should try out the arrow keys with your soldiers selected then bro.

 

[Raghar]

Oh, look who's talking

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

This statement was so dumb I started to work.

Luckily I recovered about two hours later after one chapter of a book and after discovering that one number isn't equal to another thus I'd need to look through 60 MB of data to find where.

 

[Brayko]

Whoa. CA fucked up. I guess Rome 2 will sit on my shelf for about a year until patches and mods fix things.

 

[Bradylama]

Throw another one onto the pile. The town of Migdol produces the resource Purple Dye, but it's not in the resources list and it's not tradable. Anybody who doesn't think this is a Beta that Sega rushed out is too stupid to live.

 

[Trash]

Throw another one onto the pile. The town of Migdol produces the resource Purple Dye, but it's not in the resources list and it's not tradable. Anybody who doesn't think this is a Beta that Sega rushed out is too stupid to live.

Even if nothing else then having CA themselves mention a 100 fixes for the first patch and already a 100 ones for the second are enough of an indication.

 

[Raghar]

Have you played any of theirs last 4 games? This is perfectly normal for them. They are patching it for at least year before they re-release it as a gold version. Which might be playable.

 

[Bradylama]

The other releases weren't early betas. It's difficult for me to convey just how much worse this is than Shogun 2's release.

 

[Morgoth]

http://wiki.totalwar.com/w/Total_War_ROME_II:_Patch_2

 

[Kaldurenik]

So i heard this game is abit broken... Should i wait for the ultimate edition with all the dlc and expansions and so on?

 

[Raghar]

The other releases weren't early betas. It's difficult for me to convey just how much worse this is than Shogun 2's release.

Shogun 2: Freeze when processing a turn.
Rome 2: Icen can freeze your turn if you are not playing as them.

Shogun 2 was relatively stable after release, why don't you compare it with Empire?

 

[Bradylama]

So i heard this game is abit broken... Should i wait for the ultimate edition with all the dlc and expansions and so on?

yes.

 

[Kaldurenik]

So i heard this game is abit broken... Should i wait for the ultimate edition with all the dlc and expansions and so on?

yes.

Okey well its abit sad i like total war but oh well.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

http://wiki.totalwar.com/w/Total_War_ROME_II:_Patch_2

Blimey, that's not the kind of patch that gets thrown together in a week.

 

[Rahdulan]

http://wiki.totalwar.com/w/Total_War_ROME_II:_Patch_2

Blimey, that's not the kind of patch that gets thrown together in a week.

Of course it isn't. You'd have to make an insane leap of faith to think CA wasn't perfectly aware of what they were launching, whether it was due to pressure from SEGA or not.

 

[Bradylama]

I keep having this feeling that Shogun 2 was only relatively stable on release because it's set in Japan.

 

[EmoBunny]

This makes me want to play the first Rome Total War.

 

[Vibalist]

I'm glad they've managed to fix the "AI only recruits low level units" thing (at least according to the patch release note). It's a good start, I think.

 

[Cursed Platypus]

 

[Santander02]

Any good mods for FotS? Figure I should give it a go again to relieve me of the need to care about RTW2. Thinking about a VH Tsu playthrough going for muh freedoms.

A bit late, but I just discovered that TROM3 supports Fall of the Samurai now, definitely worth a look!

Spoiler

Land Battles

- Massive change to ranged combat: Range of weapons is more realistic and units fire with multiple rows which gives battles a much more chaotic feel. Ballistics were changed to make the kill rate scale with range, so close up volleys are more deadly.
- Redid all unit stats for a less extreme rock-paper-scissor system.
- More realistic fatigue: Units tire quicker when in combat.
- Reworked moral for more realistic behaviour of troops.
- Reduced damage and accuracy of artillery.
- Reduced damage of naval bombardments on the battlefield.
- Units are spread out sligthly more to reflect the more open formations of that age.
- Traditional samurai units have more men. This makes assaults of melee units on shooters more intense.
- Improved battle formations for armies with a lot of line infantry.
- Halved casualities from falls when scaling walls.
- Adjusted unit abilities.
- Revolver cavarly is less overpowered.
- United States Marines use repeating carbines instead of a rifle.
- Increased unit size of cavalry to 90 men.
- Reduced unit size of garrisons to 160 men.
- Samurai heroes can use whistling arrows.
- Reduced the cooldown of shrapnel shots to 90 sec and made shrapnel shots bounce when hitting the ground.
- Fixed a vanilla bug with supression fire making enemy units run quicker instead slower! If suppressed a unit will run with 25% less speed for 45 seconds and has 4 less moral. Your own unit has -20 accuracy but +20 reload rate.
- Limbered artillery has less hitpoints (13 to be exact representing the total number of crewmen for each gun).
- Jozai troops move 5% quicker in battles instead of hardly noticable 2%.
- Increased unit size of cavalry to 90 men.
- Reduced unit size of garrisons to 160 men.
- Samurai heroes can use whistling arrows.
- Added bayonets for some rifle and line infantry (Thanks to IGdood & KUNGFUSERGE!)

Naval Battles

- Reduced the effectiveness of advanced ammunition somewhat.
- Ships are less likely to catch fire.
- Increased moral of ships.

Campaign Related Gameplay Changes

- Changed victory conditions to allow for longer campaigns (short & long campaign: +2 years; domination campaign: +4 years)
- Improved autocalculations for battles (more losses for the winner)
- Removed a number of cheats for the AI (especially the unit upgrade cheat).
- Lowered tax income in the late game.
- Increased the chance of events.
- Units gain experience slower.
- Minimum unit size is now 15% (instead of 5%). A unit below this size gets disbanded.
- Lowered some stat bonuses from buildings.
- Military hospitals have a smaller local effect on replenishment but got an additional global bonus (2%).
- Added costal defences to ports.
- Habours can establish trade now.
- Increased recruitment time of all units by one turn to make battles more decisive (since reinforcements take longer to get for both player and AI)
- Increased movement range for land (33%) and naval units (50%). Gunbots and Torpedoboats have a higher range then other ships.
- Ishin Shishi/Shinsengumi actions are 20% more expensive.
- Agents (with the exception of generals) level slower.
- Changed realm divide. You now have a chance to keep some allies when choosing to become a republic.
- Dynamic recruitment caps: Advanced artillery, veteran land units and heavy ships all have dynamic recruitment caps now. The number of units you can get increases with additional buildings that can recruit that type of unit or improving existing buildings.
- Changed range of all costal defences to 12. Ports are still different in terms of firepower and resilence.
- Lowering taxes has a stronger effect on town growth.
- Copper plated ships are now worth to get: They have a greater campaign movement range, move quicker on the battlefield and are better armoured then their wooden variant.
- Increased the number of recruitment slots of castles by 1.
- Changed autocalc so taking castles is more difficult.
- The AI gets more money on higher diffculty levels.
- Train stations and railway companies incease the local replenisment rate and the global ammunition count (for the latter you need several buildings to see a difference). This represents the easier distribution of supplies.
- Agents (with the exception of generals) level slower.
- Changed realm divide. You now have a chance to keep some allies when choosing to become a republic.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?455308-REL-TROM3-ROAD-TO-KYOTO-v1-91-*AUGUST-2013*

 

[Dead Guy]

youtube

That guy brings up a lot of the things that annoyed me about Empire in particular. I clocked several hundred hours with the game too, but was furious with the constant moron-shuffle of line infantry, and that idiotic firing arc and consequent reforming the entire regiment to line up for a salvo. Units bugging out on walls has always been a problem, but in Empire they could become crippled in field battles because one guy decided to straddle a low stone wall or fence and play with his dick. Most of the time the best strategy was to form a defensive position and move as little as possible.

 

[praetor]

 

[Whisky]

That is pretty much my issue with Total War. Ever since Empire, they've been having the same problems and it doesn't help they're using the same horrible Empire engine. Shogun 2 is the best they've made since, most likely because of less missile based combat, but it's still got huge problems.