Rome Total War II

[Darklife]

It obviously looks like crap, but I think you're blowing this out of proportion. Who even owns an ultrabook? This just looks like an Intel sponsored piece.

 

[Tytus]

All the developers of Rome II should be subjected to this every day, until they decide to redo the game as probono labour.

 

[muds_animal_friend]

All the management at CA/Sega who decided that gaming Metacritic scores was an appropriate development methodology should be subjected to this:

and the Europa Barbarorum team hired to redo the game.

 

[Brinko]

Patch 12: 2 more DLC's to shit out

Technical and performance improvements:
Battle

• Fix for UI-related crash in battle
• Fixed replay de-sync for siege battles initiated from the frontend (e.g. custom or multiplayer, not campaign battles).

Campaign

• Reduced lag during AI turns in Multiplayer Campaign mode.

Battle AI improvements:

• Fixed several battle AI issues in naval settlement assaults which caused disembarked units to go idle and not join the battle.
• Fix for a Battle AI bug where units could not find a path to a wall-breach, if a gate was captured before entering city.
• Various battle-map improvements to help the Battle AI use siege equipment more effectively.
• Fixed bug which caused the battle AI not to recognise breaches in some wall corner pieces.
• Improved Battle AI phalanx unit behaviour (ensuring pike units use their phalanx abilities when bracing).
• Battle AI no longer issues orders to units when they should be skirmishing.
• Improved the battle AI’s spatial reasoning in naval settlement assaults. This applies to reinforcing or disembarked naval forces, when selecting positions from which to assault the settlement.

Campaign AI improvements

• Campaign AI is now less likely to maintain long blockades without assaulting.
• Campaign AI is now less likely to move armies into proximity with superior enemy forces.

General battle improvements

• Improvements to certain units in unit groups who would fail to pathfind effectively when ordered to attack units in different areas (in very specific/rare cases on the battlefield).
• Improvements to siege vehicles to ensure men on the tower getting knocked into the air does not cause wall-docking to fail.
• Unit parts (armour, tunics etc) updated to offer greater unit variety.
• Various improvements to men climbing siege towers and ladders. Soldiers now climb towers more effectively without milling at the bottom.
• Siege engines will no longer get stuck on trees on the battlefield.
• Player-controlled ambushing armies can now use deployables in ambush battles.
• Naval units no longer attempt to reinforce ambush battles.
• Fixed a bug which prevented armies of only one unit from being able to hide on the battlefield.
• Fixed an area in the large Persian port where ships were not disembarking correctly.
• Increased the number of unobstructed walls in the medium and large Rome siege battle-maps.
• Fixed several cases where multiplayer battles could take place on very steep hills or mountains.
• Several battle map improvements to beach landings, improved terrain heights and collision with some battlefield props.
• Added new helmet variations and new Germanic tunics to Campaign Generals.
• Added new Eastern Horse and Hellenic Heavy Horse variants.
• Trees and units no longer clip through the ground near the Statue of Zeus at Olympia wonder on the battlefield.
• Altered ship-sorting priority when disembarking, in order to reduce shuffling around.
• An alternative bear pelt has been applied to Germanic Berserkers who don't wear helmets under their pelts, so the top of the hairline is no longer visible.

General Campaign improvements

• A number of battle maps no longer feature snow during Spring, Summer and Autumn.
• Fixed an issue where an ambushing army would move at the start of the turn. Please note: Sometimes an ambushing army will move when it is discovered or you discover an agent or army that is standing on top of it. This is expected behaviour.
• When a general’s unit is the only unit in a reinforcing army, and the general dies but the unit does not, The general will now die on the campaign map.
• Raiding will no longer cause negative happiness.
• Technology requirements for military ports have been altered. Tier II military ports either have no tech requirements, or the same requirements as other tier II ports.
• Corrected local traditions for Iberian regions in Grand Campaign to be Iberian instead of Celtic.
• Reduced the Siege Holdout Time Effect conferred by siege tower technologies.
• Political promotion positions for Syracuse, Arevaci and Lusitani factions have been corrected.
• Forming a confederation no longer causes rebel armies in regions owned by the confederating factions to be absorbed into the confederation.
• Fixed some terrain issues on the Hannibal at the Gates map.
• New Germanic trousers and tunics added.

Usability Improvements
Battle

• Fixed a rare bug where fire sound-effects would play after a battle had finished, and could be heard over the victory menu.

Campaign

• Reduce Slaves effect now displays the correct icon.
• Retreat button is no longer enabled on the pre-battle siege screen when forces are unable to retreat.
• Some typographical fixes in Incidents and Dilemmas.
• Tweaks to Egyptian and Carthaginian siege technology to more closely match the unlock order of normal Greek technologies.
• Fixed a situation where all new Carthaginian general or agent recruits had the surname "Gisco".
• Fix for some instances where a skull would appear on a unit card despite that unit not being dead on the post battle screen.
• Various improvements to battle-unit banner icons.
• Arevaci, Lusitani and Syracuse civil-war factions minimap and unit card colours have been corrected.
• Roman siege buildings are now unlocked by technologies in the correct order in Grand Campaign.

General

• Added a warning when loading replays from an older game version, to inform the player that results may be inconsistent when viewed in the version they are now playing.
• If the Twitch End User Licence Agreement (EULA) has previously been declined, it will no longer be displayed every time the game is launched. If the Twitch button is pressed when the EULA has previously been declined, the EULA will then be shown. If the Twitch button is pressed and the player is not signed in to their Twitch account, they will be taken to the options menu to sign in.
• Twitch streams will now be paused when the Steam overlay is active.
• The Twitch button will no longer display during Historical Battle frontend intros.

Balancing Changes
Campaign

• Reduced all technology-conferred ammo bonuses from 50% to 25%.
• Reduced General’s logistics-conferred ammo bonuses from 25% and 50% to 10% and 25%.
• Hidden income bonus for African and Arabian factions removed.
• Reduced the amount of money that the Etruscan league start the campaign with.
• Added two extra Hastati units to Rome at the start of their campaign.
• The Ibossim region now belongs to Carthage at the start of the campaign.
• Unit-balancing changes. Axe Warriors and Naked Warriors have also been added to the Boii unit roster.

Assembly Kit

• Fixed an Assembly Kit bug which removed Campaign victory conditions from Campaign mods.

 

[Invictus]

Wow 12 patches...
I will be aquiring this little piece of new age gaming development after countless galant gametesters have given me a pretty polished final version, thank you for your efforts and actualy putting your time and money foward so after all this time we can have a working version
Oh and by aquiring I mean pirating this pos

 

[Cyberarmy]

Wow 12 patches...
I will be aquiring this little piece of new age gaming development after countless galant gametesters have given me a pretty polished final version, thank you for your efforts and actualy putting your time and money foward so after all this time we can have a working version
Oh and by aquiring I mean pirating this pos

Not worth your time and bandwith. Just play Rome 1 with EB mod.

 

[Shannow]

Wow 12 patches...
I will be aquiring this little piece of new age gaming development after countless galant gametesters have given me a pretty polished final version, thank you for your efforts and actualy putting your time and money foward so after all this time we can have a working version
Oh and by aquiring I mean pirating this pos

You think this is now a bug-free, good gaming-experience, worth its money? Have you been following the thread?

Anyway, since EB1 is mentioned: How far along is EB2?

 

[KoolNoodles]

Nobody really knows about EB2, but last I skimmed through the thread they were in the final "release" stretch(most of the big stuff done), though that doesn't mean the mod will be perfect. Thought they were trying for an August/September release, but who knows with them.

They also said "within 2014".

 

[Brinko]

http://steamdb.info/app/214950/#section_dlc

Well looks like 2 more DLC slots opened up in the last 5 days. Guess they have to make up the difference on how shit that Amnesia knock off they are making so Sega can retain the Aliens license.

 

[Shannow]

I've finally aquired Rome 2 and tried it for more than 5 minutes. (It's probably 20-30 hours now, with lots of restarts and trying different factions. So I'm not actually all that far in.)
First: The current game is good. I like it. If it weren't STEAM-required I'd buy it.

Now what interests the codex most: Graphics. The first time I tried it a few months back, it was stuttering unplayable even on low settings. Now it runs smoothly on a mixture of "very high" and "ultra" settings (with shadows tuned down and shitty stuff like DoF and Bloom turned off). "Extreme" is the highest setting. While it runs smooth, it looks quite bad, but not as bad as Shogun2. ME2:TW still looks prettier. I don't like the look of the UI and it often feels quite clunky. Feels like some app UI with unneccessary clicks and stuff.

Battle gameplay is back to good (after Shogun's atrocious zipping units). AI is so/so. So far, I've only had one battle where the enemy behaved absolutely moronically. (He stood in range of my siege engines and waited for me to attack. My engines racked up almost 600 kills in that battle...)
They could have streamlined a bit with the agents so that they automatically do they'r thing in your provinces. Now that the empire is becoming larger, I often forget to move/assign (new) agents. An overview with all units, their movement points and their current occupation would be nice.

Bugs are bearable. Some examples:
I'm playing Iceni and they "should" only get 50% of the possible slaves after a battle. But I don't get any option how to deal with prisoners. I assume they're automatically killed.
UI is sometimes unresponsive.
At one stage all my saves disappeared. Though they were back after a restart.
Horse archers with skirmish mode simply stood still without firing when the AI could not find a good escape route.

So what I like:
The battle gameplay.
Reasearch and province management. Though they went over the top to some degree. I like the additional element of planning.
Character and army development.
(Playing the Iceni and going from "Meh, what a shitty barbarian faction" to unlocking the "good" units and developing the upgrades to "OMG. I'm ROFLstomping everything! Great Ballistae, rain death! Chariots, trample their bones to dust! Heads for Morrigan! Let the ravens feast!"

What's so/so:
Agents. I like the new agents, but many abillities and success chances need balancing. At the moment they're too powerful.
The new diplomacy is really nice, but some features that I liked seem to be missing. (E.g. province/region trading, forcing vassalage)
Conquering regions. While I like that minor regions not having walls takes away the tedium of constant sieges, the sieges that do happen are ridiculous. Usually the enemy will 1-2 armies near their cities. This means I have to take more than one army on conquests. Since the number of armies is restricted, they cost money and I prefer the smaller scale battles, this sucks. Since you also suffer from attrion as besieger waiting them out is not a good option. Also armies are raised much faster than before, so you'll probably be driven off before the city falls. (Not all of this is bad.) I've resorted to attacking the armies standing outside of towns with my monster army of death and that's quite successful (and probably more realistical), but I haven't really fought a siege battle in ages...
The speeches are not so great so far.

What's meh:
Lots of information is hidden or unclear.
So far I've not found anything good about the political system.
You don't really have the nice summary of faction strengths and weaknesses.
Many factions' starting positions are weird. You're a "major" faction with one minor province and right next to you is a "minor" faction with one major province and two minor ones...?
You can't find enemy units on the radar once they are routed. Routed units so far have never rallied and returned to battle.
Lack of modding possibility. This alone will prevent it from ever competing with ME2:TW.


If TW:Warhammer turns out this good I might even break down and buy it. STEAM or no STEAM. (Though I'd still use a non-STEAM version.)

 

[anus_pounder]

Its probably a no-brainer, but have they said the Warhammer game is gonna be TW-Like?

 

[Cyberarmy]

Its probably a no-brainer, but have they said the Warhammer game is gonna be TW-Like?

No words about Warhammer game yet, just wild guesses after they got the IP

 

[Zewp]

This game has one thing going for it over Shogun 2, and that's that when I clicked on the icon on my desktop I was sitting at the main menu 30 seconds later. That's a massive improvement compared to Shogun 2, where I had to go do some errands around the house while waiting for the game to actually start.

I haven't actually played it yet, though, so I'll have to check it out a bit later.

 

[Brinko]

http://forums.totalwar.com/showthre...ming-in-Rally-Point-20!?p=1127009#post1127009

So more FreeLC getting hyped up because I'm sure a steam sale is about to happen. Gotta get the morons to see that new content is always coming out and trick them into buying it.

 

[Brinko]

It really does bring me great joy to know that the devs cannot even play their own game properly when they should probably have the inner working knowledge most people don't have and still can't fucking win what is probably the AI on normal.

Makes me wonder about that Jack Lusted LP that was done during the run up to release and how that must've really played out.

 

[KoolNoodles]

The issue probably isn't that they can't beat the AI, it's that oftentimes they won't to make it look better than it is. Saw that in many of the battle videos prior to release. The guy playing them seemed like he was completely ignoring basic stuff, like whole sections of his army, for a minute at a time, in an RTS.

The Lusted LP was probably heavily scripted in its play. Assume he was working with multiple saves, especially since at points there would be a couple screens of what was supposed to be the same turn(the player's turn), and some of the AI unit placement was different.

 

[Brinko]

So new DLC, Pirates and Raiders, which is the Thracian factions and a Free faction which are the Dacians from what I can tell from their unit roster. Fucking worthless.

 

[Raghar]

It really does bring me great joy to know that the devs cannot even play their own game properly when they should probably have the inner working knowledge most people don't have and still can't fucking win what is probably the AI on normal.

He's playing at legendary difficulty. The problem is he tries real tactic, when he plays Creative Assembly game.

 

[Brinko]

http://wiki.totalwar.com/w/Wwise_-_Audio_Modding

Audio modding is now possible. So now the of mandatory mods has moved up by one to include the mod that takes Rome 1's music and puts it in Rome 2.

EDIT: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=263097925

It actually exists. But I think I am a bit surprised that CA didn't take a page out of Paradox's book and make this a DLC and then release audio modding.

 

[kris]

It really does bring me great joy to know that the devs cannot even play their own game properly when they should probably have the inner working knowledge most people don't have and still can't fucking win what is probably the AI on normal.

He's playing at legendary difficulty. The problem is he tries real tactic, when he plays Creative Assembly game.

Except for his use of elephants. Who uses elephants in a charge together with a cavalry unit?

 

[Raghar]

Except for his use of elephants. Who uses elephants in a charge together with a cavalry unit?

A person who believes that horses are not scared of elephants.

 

[Jagged Appliance]

It it true this doesn't have guard mode or fire at will? Not that that's that bad considering all of it's other problems.

That.

 

[Steve]

It it true this doesn't have guard mode or fire at will? Not that that's that bad considering all of it's other problems.

That.

Guard mode has always been in the game, it's on by default and you can't turn it off. Fire at will is the same as in the previous games.

 

[Shannow]

Not really on both counts.
"Guard mode" meant that fleeing enemies would not be chased (unless given the order to attack already fleeing units). Now it seems the AI more or less randomly decides if it gives chase or not. Units defending walls will not give chase. In the open field, if your unit attacked they'll give chase. Otherwise they won't. (Might be different for different factions with pike/phalanx formations, etc.) Also no charge without orders and stuff.

While fire at will can be switched on/off, ranged units will only shot at stuff in front of them in their firing zone. They won't automatically turn to shoot at units outside of their firing zone (Legacy of Empire's musket combat). Melee units which throw spears before a charge will also only do this when charging. They do not have a "fire at will"-button.

Not major points IMO, but regression none the less.

 

[titus]

Fuck that. Setting up your armies while the enemy was charging, holding that open fire command until the last moment then ordering your soldiers to throw their pila in the other team's face was the best part of R1. Now they have this clumsy system that you double click and basically break formation for them to open fire. Fuck that.