Rome: Total War Remastered

[Athos]

there was/is an asian dude who uploaded multiplayer matches of Rome 1 on youtube.

what is his name?

Prince of Macedon?

 

[karoliner]

Which was the best TW game, Medieval 2? Shogun 2?

Fall of the Samurai.

 

[Theodora]

Except your Egyptian Pharaoh was Greek and didn't ride around in a chariot. RS2 has the Galatians as an actual faction.

I'm well aware the Ptolemies are an incestuous pile of Macedonians, but they still stylized themselves after Kemetic religious traditions — king worship and all that — and understood themselves as the monarchs of Egypt. What's your point? If anything it just affirms the idea that people get around.

(No one said anything about fucking chariots.)

 

[catfood]

Which was the best TW game, Medieval 2? Shogun 2?

Shogun and Medieval

 

[JarlFrank]

Except your Egyptian Pharaoh was Greek and didn't ride around in a chariot. RS2 has the Galatians as an actual faction.

I'm well aware the Ptolemies are an incestuous pile of Macedonians, but they still stylized themselves after Kemetic religious traditions — king worship and all that — and understood themselves as the monarchs of Egypt. What's your point? If anything it just affirms the idea that people get around.

(No one said anything about fucking chariots.)

People definitely did get around, but it's always a question about who these people were and where they went.
Apart from some Nubians fucking around in Egypt, you never had blacks interacting with whites in any major way until the 19th century's scramble for Africa, with some minor exceptions (black slaves in medieval and early modern muslim Arab countries, but they were a small minority; religious conversion efforts by Christian ans Muslim missionaries in African kingdoms in the middle ages), so that's why the whole negro soldiers in the Roman Republic is such an annoying thing.

With pretty much every major population movement, we have at least a rough idea where they came from (even the Huns who are largely a mystery!), where they went, and why they went there. We're also roughly aware of the numbers involved: Alexander brought Hellenism all the way to the border of India, giving birth to cool cultural phenomena like Indo-Greek stuff, but that doesn't mean there were millions of Greeks suddenly colonizing eastern provinces: he had an army, and some of those men settled in the areas he conquered. Not enough to replace the local population, but enough to have a cultural impact and to marry and mix with the local women, while still staying a minority-in-power.

Egypt is a great case study because it was first conquered by the Persians, and then by Alexander, and once the Ptolemaic dynasty took over there was barely any trace left of the Persian rule, since the Persians didn't do much other than assign a Persian Satrap to the province. There wasn't a Persian population to speak of, other than some traders settling there for the purpose of trade. Meanwhile there has always been a small Greek minority along the coast thanks to Classical Greek colonialism, which consisted of a bunch of Greek settlers fucking off from their home Polis and founding a new one somewhere on the coast.

Also, it has to be kept in mind that most of these people were Caucasian sub-races. Celts and Germans? They're paler and blonder than the Mediterraneans but other than that, they don't look too different from your average Roiman. North Africans? They look like more tanned Romans. Carthaginians are west semitic (Phoenician colony), and look pretty much like people in the Levant... and Syrians even today don't look too different from Europeans.

Really, when it comes to unit models you shouldn't be able to tell much of a difference when it comes to skin tone. Soldiers recruited in Africa should be more tan, yeah, but then when you send a German to Africa and let him serve there for 20 years he's gonna get tanned too.

You might get some noticeable skintone differences when you enter India, but the India that the ancients interacted with is northern India, which has always been the center of the Aryan Indian civilizations, while the dravidian south - where the brown people are - wasn't really in anyone's picture.

Even in the huge multicultural Persian Empire, subject populations were characterized through their hairstyles, clothing, and mannerisms rather than their skin tone or facial structure or anything.

In Roman ethnographic texts, whenever they encounter a people that is not Caucasian, they find their features to be so strange they have to mention them as something strange and foreign, like the descriptions of the Huns (which most Roman authors considered to be barely human).

 

[Fedora Master]

Im sure there were actual Africans in Rome.
As fucking slaves.

 

[JarlFrank]

Im sure there were actual Africans in Rome.
As fucking slaves.

Yes.
North Africans.
Carthaginians (who are ethnically Phoenician so they look like your average Syrian), Numidians, Berbers...

Here are a few pictures of what North Africans look like today:

Yeah, they're darker than your average Roman.
But they're not black.

North Africa =/= Sub-Saharan Africa

 

[Fedora Master]

North Africans today are just Arabs and they look the part.
I was talking actual Nubian slaves. Fairly certain the slave trade from the East Coast of Africa up to Arabia and Egypt was a thing even back then.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Im sure there were actual Africans in Rome.
As fucking slaves.

Yes.
North Africans.
Carthaginians (who are ethnically Phoenician so they look like your average Syrian), Numidians, Berbers...

Here are a few pictures of what North Africans look like today:

Yeah, they're darker than your average Roman.
But they're not black.

North Africa =/= Sub-Saharan Africa

But all of Africa is black tho.
Twitter told me so. You mean to tell me that Twitter is full of shit?

Spoiler

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Which was the best TW game, Medieval 2? Shogun 2?

Fall of the Samurai.

I still maintain that CA should just make Victoria : Total War. Fall of the Samurai was late modern warfare done right, unlike Empire which was jank as fuck.

 

[Theodora]

People definitely did get around, but it's always a question about who these people were and where they went.
Apart from some Nubians fucking around in Egypt, you never had blacks interacting with whites in any major way until the 19th century's scramble for Africa, with some minor exceptions (black slaves in medieval and early modern muslim Arab countries, but they were a small minority; religious conversion efforts by Christian ans Muslim missionaries in African kingdoms in the middle ages), so that's why the whole negro soldiers in the Roman Republic is such an annoying thing.

With pretty much every major population movement, we have at least a rough idea where they came from (even the Huns who are largely a mystery!), where they went, and why they went there. We're also roughly aware of the numbers involved: Alexander brought Hellenism all the way to the border of India, giving birth to cool cultural phenomena like Indo-Greek stuff, but that doesn't mean there were millions of Greeks suddenly colonizing eastern provinces: he had an army, and some of those men settled in the areas he conquered. Not enough to replace the local population, but enough to have a cultural impact and to marry and mix with the local women, while still staying a minority-in-power.

There were always admixtures of Nubian and the like, but if you didn't see my other post, I think that the darker-skinned models are meant to be people from the North African coast and the Levant. (They use the same facial features as Caucasians, after all.) It's just a bit overdone, because the graphical style retains some of the original game's cartoon-y oversaturation. After all, there's nothing to represent those people if we read them as Africans. And re: whether Rome had any major interactions with Sub-Saharan Africa, I guess it comes down to how you define it. I think the expeditions that started in the first century BCE to the Sub-Saharan are noteworthy enough.

Anyway, I understand I come across to some as a total sjw or whatever, but I really just don't like when people run away with small details from an unfinished, unreleased product. It's crude and not helpful.

Im sure there were actual Africans in Rome.
As fucking slaves.

You do realise that because of how the Roman slave system worked, this would guarantee eventual ethnically "African" citizenry in Rome through the children of freedmen, right?

 

[Jugashvili]

I still maintain that CA should just make Victoria : Total War. Fall of the Samurai was late modern warfare done right, unlike Empire which was jank as fuck.

Fall of the Samurai was fun, but any ressemblance with late 19th century warfare was coincidental. The Total War model is incapable of handling early and late modern warfare in its current state. For a real-time tactics system that actually succeeds at this, see the Ultimate General series.

 

[JarlFrank]

North Africans today are just Arabs and they look the part.
I was talking actual Nubian slaves. Fairly certain the slave trade from the East Coast of Africa up to Arabia and Egypt was a thing even back then.

Why bother buying a slave from all the way over there when you got Celts, Germans, Carthaginians, Spaniards, and even a bunch of goddamn high value Greeks much closer to home?

 

[janior]

UG: Civil War is the best total war game in years.

 

[A horse of course]

North Africans today are just Arabs and they look the part.
I was talking actual Nubian slaves. Fairly certain the slave trade from the East Coast of Africa up to Arabia and Egypt was a thing even back then.

Why bother buying a slave from all the way over there when you got Celts, Germans, Carthaginians, Spaniards, and even a bunch of goddamn high value Greeks much closer to home?

To flaunt your power and wealth. Having the blackest n'wah you could find as a courtier was very trendy in Elizabethan courts, for example. Obviously this has nothing to do with the overall issue of hypothetical possibility (e.g. random black citizens in Italy in 200BC) versus plausibility, however.

 

[Melcar]

Eramos Romanos y mierda ese!

 

[LizardWizard]

ITT people acting like Rome TW wasn't decline compared to Shogun/Med 1. Fucking zoomers

Fucking flaming pigs and shitty campaign mechanics. Acting like sieges were 'good' are also laughable, when you can you could just range the retarded AI with slingers into submission. At least sieges in Warhammer end the pain faster. Stop acting Rome era CA was somehow incline, when it was basically pop-a-mole without Europa Barbarorum installed.

 

[Sarissofoi]

Rome was still fun(and still is).
I replayed 3 short campaign recently and had a blast(yes i played pure vanilla for 2 and 1 with some fan bug fixes).
Had problem starting is(need to uninstall some Windows update). After that it go smoothly and I have fun running around and slaughtering barbarians.
And I come straight from playing Shogun 1 and Medieval 1.
All three are very good and enjoyable games.
The best TW games.

 

[oldmanpaco]

ITT people acting like Rome TW wasn't decline compared to Shogun/Med 1. Fucking zoomers

Rome was the first TW game that was extensively modded. I don't even remember the vanilla game. I actually forgot about the 3 Roman faction nonsense in the game until I was reading this thread.

 

[Jugashvili]

Rome was the first TW game that was extensively modded. I don't even remember the vanilla game. I actually forgot about the 3 Roman faction nonsense in the game until I was reading this thread.

The three factions were lulzy, especially "Scipii" which isn't even proper Latin. It should be Scipiones, or Cornelii Scipiones since they were a branch family of the gens Cornelia.

 

[A horse of course]

 

[JarlFrank]

ITT people acting like Rome TW wasn't decline compared to Shogun/Med 1. Fucking zoomers

Rome was the first TW game that was extensively modded. I don't even remember the vanilla game. I actually forgot about the 3 Roman faction nonsense in the game until I was reading this thread.

That's why Rome is such a good game (and Medieval 2, too).

I haven't played vanilla Rome or Med2 since... oh I dunno, 2006 or 2007? But I've been playing a lot of mods since then. And I mean a LOT.

RTW and MTW2 both have over a dozen total conversion mods of varying quality (with the average being bettter than vanilla) and with various different settings. Bronze Age, Classical Age, Dark Age, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Early Modern Age... there's a lot to pick from. Tons of interesting historical scenarios. And of course the fantasy mods: LotR, Warhammer, Warcraft, Elder Scrolls, Gothic, Game of Thrones, even fucking Zelda.

The mods add so much content, it's insane. And due to the lack of campaign map modding in the newer games (from Empire onwards), none of them have even one tenth of the mod variety that Rome and Med2 have.

Yes, the old games are wonky. They have glitches, pathfinding issues during sieges, bad AI (even with the AI improvement mods that most major mod projects use), and other problems. But the amount of content they offer is unmatched.

My mod collection folder has 57 mods for Rome Total War and 42 mods for Medieval 2.

 

[A horse of course]

My mod collection folder has 57 mods for Rome Total War and 42 mods for Medieval 2.

And none of them restore the first- and second-degree consanguineous marriages from Medieval 1

 

[Tacgnol]

I didn't realise that Feral apparently updated the Mac version of Medieval 2 to be 64 bit a couple of years ago.

It supposedly runs big mods with way better performance and stability.

I wish they'd done that for the Windows version as well.

 

[Brancaleone]

The three factions were lulzy, especially "Scipii" which isn't even proper Latin. It should be Scipiones, or Cornelii Scipiones since they were a branch family of the gens Cornelia.

Same goes with the "Brutii" (plural would be Bruti, and here as well the famous Bruti from history were all from gens Junia). Maybe it is intentional, in order to create a-historical factions that sound like Latin but have no root in actual history.

Or at least I hope so.