Interesting post on Rome 2 Total Wars release/bugs/glitches/development/buying.

[st_dux 26]

Great ! How is it performance-wise ?

Vastly improved from release. On my fairly modest machine (3.4Ghz i5, single GTX 770, 4GB RAM), I get solid performance with very high detail settings (not quite maxed out, but close) and huge unit sizes. In extremely large battles (e.g., full-stack vs. full-stack siege battle), tick rate will occasionally slow down noticeably, but the way they designed it this won't actually affect your framerate (simulation updates more slowly instead), so control is never hindered. The long turn times that made the campaign a drag at release are gone now, too; the AI processes its turns very efficiently.

[Tonci87 163]

The fact that they now again charge more than full price for the game (54,99€ on Steam without the DLCs, and there will be more DLCs to come) is kind of arrogant... (especially since I have seen this game in sales for less than 20€)

The game is still getting mixed reviews on several TW Forums. Some say the new Edition is great and that the game should have been released like this in the first place, while other say that it (especially the AI) still isn´t good enough. And you can still Torch metal gates....

I would wait until there is a definitive edition with all the DLCs in it. The game is just not worth 54,99€.

[st_dux 26]

Well it's a Rome II Free Weekend on Steam (plus the entire Total War series is 75% off), so if you are kind of interested but not sure, now might be a good time to check it out.

[Tonci87 163]

Well it's a Rome II Free Weekend on Steam (plus the entire Total War series is 75% off), so if you are kind of interested but not sure, now might be a good time to check it out.

Thx for the heads up, I will definately do some testing

Rome 2 however is not discounted, still 54,99€. Seems like they are trying to cash in on that to compensate for earlier losses if you ask me

Edited September 26, 2014 by Tonci87

[giallustio 770]

I'm selling a key if anyone wants it, I've one of Shogun 2 too

[papanowel 120]

A stand-alone is coming next year:

War of Attila

[Tonci87 163]

Judging by that Trailer more money is going into Marketing than into development again.

The TW Community is pretty pissed right now because CA has confirmed that none of the features announced for Attila will be patched into Rome 2. Many of those things (stuff that was in earlier TWs) should have been in Rome 2 from the beginning and buyers complained a lot because they were cut out. CA is also already promising a lot of new stuff that will propably be silently droped during development. The new mechanic that walls crumble more and more the longer a siege is until you have a breach in the wall (total BS by the way) seems to be a way to deal with the broken siege AI. Instead of burning the gates they will now simply wait a few turns before they attack through a breach in your wall.

Only the "New Content" (DLC) Team will continue to work on Rome2, the rest is already busy with Attila, wich means that Rome 2 will stay as it is now, unfinished.

Attila seems to be more like a total conversion mod or small addon but will cost at least 40€ at launch.

So yep, it´s pretty sad/angry on TW Forums right now.

I´ll conclude this with a little rant from a user on the TWC

Well, another game - another rant. Another way of CA saying 'F you' to her loyal fan-base.

Everyone knows of the disaster that was Rome II on release. Sure it has been improved since then; but it is not the game we dreamed of or wanted. Many features still remain broken despite assurance from CA that they are being worked upon (i.e. Sparta's inability to trade from the off and Admirals still not contributing to province effects). Sieges are still a mess and we are still yet to see the 'most modifiable game' to date.

As you all know, the 'Emperor Edition' of Rome has just been released. Essentially, what we got was simply a modification of the Grand Campaign which set the date a bit later and added some lighting improvements to the Battle-Map. Simply put, something modders could have done (given the right tools in some cases).

What we have with Attila, is what Rome 2 should have been. The bollocks CA have fed us for the past year about family trees 'not being in their vision' and the UI being more 'streamlined' has clearly just been thrown back in our faces. They have realised that this is not what the fans want. Do they go back on their word with Rome II? No, of course not - that would mean admitting they were wrong. However, just to kick us between the legs - they add these wanted features with Atilla; a beautiful UI, with family tree and political support!

Knowing how CA work - this game has been in development for a while. It would have been easy for them to add these features to the Emperor edition, knowing that this is what we want. But they don't - why? Because they know many people won't then buy Attila. I frankly don't care about this time period in history. I doubt I will be buying it from the off and experience has taught me not to pre-order the game. Instead, I will secretly be hoping that our brilliant modders will simply be able to do what was done with Empire: Total War - in which many of the features added in Napoleon: Total War were ported over (i.e. Graphics, Replenishment System). If CA have any decency or care about their fan-base at all - they will make it possible...

Either that or it will be easy to simply make a modification of Attila which brings the time period back to that of Rome. This may be the easiest choice if I'm honest - but it will mean the hundreds upon hundreds of hours of work spent by the teams of DEI, Medieval Kingdoms and sole modders such as Radious will be thrown back at them. Let's face it, most people are going to want to play a modified Attila campaign with the timescale of Rome II - than a Rome II campaign that lacks the features of Attila.

You may think I'm being ungrateful, CA don't owe me anything after all. They don't owe any of us anything. However, after seeing brilliant games like Shogun II, to see Rome II and now to see Attila - it pains me to know I've spent hard earned money on Rome II, a game that is not up to the standard of it's predecessor or successor.

[st_dux 26]

[...] Rome 2 will stay as it is now, unfinished.

I really don't think it's fair to say this anymore. Rome 2 is a complete game right now. It's not perfect, but no Total War game ever has been.

[Tonci87 163]

They fucked up before, so they can do it again?

That is really no excuse. The common interpretation is that the Emperor Edition is Rome 2 how it should have been at release (everything before was Beta testing), and now it still needs more features and patches wich simply aren´t going to come. Parts of the game are fundamentally broken. Sieges and Ship battles in particular. And that is pretty sad. CA used to be a good customer friendly company, that has really changed a lot under the rule of Sega.

[onlyrazor 11]

They fucked up before, so they can do it again?

That is really no excuse. The common interpretation is that the Emperor Edition is Rome 2 how it should have been at release (everything before was Beta testing), and now it still needs more features and patches wich simply aren´t going to come. Parts of the game are fundamentally broken. Sieges and Ship battles in particular. And that is pretty sad. CA used to be a good customer friendly company, that has really changed a lot under the rule of Sega.

Eh, I bought Empire and gave up on ever trying to understand strategy games. I keep losing a flank because I'm focusing on the other one and my reserves are slow to deploy (I'm not paying you people to march over there god damn it).

[Tonci87 163]

OK, I have definately played enough of this.

My Review:

It sucks.

That was the short version, now for the long one:

The Campaign Map:

It looks nice at first but then you notice some stupid things.

Settlements are obscenely large. Rome (the city) alone has the size of Luxemburg. Why they thought they had to do this, no idea...

Some cities are in the wrong place. Salona (today Solin, near Split Croatia) on the Imperator Augustus map for example, the placed it where Zadar is, but hey they failed only by 100km....

The new system with the provinces is plain bad. I really don´t like it.

The movement on the map is very restricted, your armies can essentially only move through corridors.

The Interface is the worst the TW series has ever seen. It is extremely ugly and unintuitive.

Unit cards are really ugly too.

In Rome 2 units can´t exist without a general, wich means that you can only recruit units through a general. Individual units won´t appear on the Map any more. You general orders them and they get added to his army. The size of your nation decides how many generals and therefore armys you can have. My guess is that they did this to reduce the number of units on the map and to solve the issue with the AI deploying lots of really small armies. So instead of fixing the AI they went the easy way and introduced limitations.

This new system makes everything a lot less flexible. In old TWs I could send an army into war and recruit reiforcement units while that army was fighting. This isn´t possible any more because your general can´t move as long as he is waiting for his new units.

Armys can transform into fleets and cross any water obstacle. that is also a feature to avoid fixing the AI. Naval invasions are now possible, but only because they went the really easy way and allowed land units to cross water without a transport fleet. It is now much harder to protect your cost from seaborne invasions because those appear out of nowhere even if you have crushed the enemy main fleet.

The new Diplomatic options are nice, if they would work that is. Most of the time (possibly due to the new stupid interface) you have absolutely no idea why a nation rejects a diplomatic offer.

You can´t zoom out far enough.

Battles:

Naval battles suck. They are nothing more than a large clusterfuck of ships ramming into each other. The AI doesn´t use any apparent tactics other than "pick the next ship and ram into it". Empire and Napoleon still have the best sea battles.

Siege battles are better than I thought but the AI suffers from pathfinding issues and stupid features.

I was besieged by the AI and managed to destroy their siege equipment with a daring cavalry strike right at the start. My cavalry died, but it would have saved my city.....then the AI started to torch my gates FPDR.

Again a very lazy way to avoid fixing the AI. In pre Empire TWs the AI would have retreated after loosing the siege equipment and built new stuff before attacking again.

Land battles are fun but they are over too fast. The line of sight system is awesome. General speeches are ok. A cool new feature. Zoom in all the way and you can hear some soldiers talk.

-random soldier while the enemy army was advancing towards me: "Who is up for a drink? There is still time"

-Centurio: "Not in my Unit!"

The old problem of the series is still present though. You learn to play the AI very fast. Bring more ranged units than the AI, or siege equipment and they will attack you even if they have no chance. The AI in earlier TWs retreated from the battlefield if their chances were too slim.

The game is still plagued by the issues of the Warscape engine they introduced with Empire. That Engine was build with shiny graphics and flashy animations in mind, not with AI and functionality. CA doesn´t seem to have an interest in fixing core issues, they rather invent workarounds. This leads me to believe that they plan a new engine for the next TW and therefore don´t invest too much ressources into fixing the current one.

It is still a problem that one unit can only fight against one unit due to the animations. If your unit with lets say 200 men attacks a small unit with only 30 survivors then most of your units will be standing around with their thumbs up their arse because each soldier can only be fought by one enemy. It gets really ridiculous if you fight some veteran unit and the lone survivor fights against one other dude while all his comrades stand around watching.

The units also can´t get close to each other with makes proper shield formations impossible.

This is a Testudo formation in Rome 2

http://images.gamestar.de/images/idgwpgsgp/bdb/2413687/944x531.jpg (268 kB)

and this is it in Rome 1!

The soldiers in Rome 1 were much closer together and had protection to front left and right.

The same problem applies to all shield formations in the game. Soldiers can´t get shoulder to shoulder and form a proper shield wall and they break formation anyway as soon as they get into a fight. I remember that spear soldiers in Rome 1 could form real shieldwalls and they would stay in formation and keep advancing into the enemy like that.

Is Rome 2 worth the money? Certainly not! You are better off waiting for Attilaand even better a comlete version of that (there will be a lot of DLCs of course).

The game suffers from too many really bad design decisions and the inherent problems of the engine. CA seems unwilling to fix those and resorts to spending ridiculous ammounts of money on marketing to sell their games. The ammount of false information prior to the launch of the game reminded me of Empire.

Empire, the game where the boss of CA later admitted that he was too ashamed of the game to gift it to friends when it released, well he certainly wasn´t too ashamed to screw the whole community and make them pay for the most broken and unfinished TW release ever.

Some factions and many units (mostly reskins) are loked behind DLCs.

Modding is still very restricted so sadly modders can´t fix the game by themselves....

This will be the first TW I will completely skip, not only because it is not a good TW, but also to not support CAs customer unfriendly behaviour any longer.

Tonci87 Owner of Medieval 1+exp, Rome+exp, Medieval 2+exp, Empire, Shogun 2. Long time Community member. Former Moderator at Totalwar-zone.de previously Germanys biggest TW community, and second largest in the world.

Edited September 27, 2014 by Tonci87

[krycek 349]

A shiver ran down my spine that Medieval might be next to herpa-derpa treatment.

Nice write-up,Tonci.

It is still a problem that one unit can only fight against one unit due to the animations. If your unit with lets say 200 men attacks a small unit with only 30 survivors then most of your units will be standing around with their thumbs up their arse because each soldier can only be fought by one enemy. It gets really ridiculous if you fight some veteran unit and the lone survivor fights against one other dude while all his comrades stand around watching.

This part from your post reminds me of this

[Tonci87 163]

A shiver ran down my spine that Medieval might be next to herpa-derpa treatment.

Nice write-up,Tonci.

This part from your post reminds me of this

Yeah it is exactly like that. Unit sizes don´t really matter A 100 men unit fighting a 300 men unit won´t be at an disadvantage because of the numbers. In the pre Empire TWs small units would get cut to pieces by large units in no time because there would be more attacking opponents per soldier.

I think they are working on a Warhammer strategy game next. Medieval 3 will most likely be the next TW and I really hope that they 1: Make an engine that is really up to the task. 2: Focus on AI since that is essentially what makes or breaks a strategy game. 3: Invest more money into making the game than into marketing. 4: Make it modable.

Sadly I fear it will be:

1. Another engine build with pretty graphics and animations in mind

2. A great AI is too hard to make, working is already enough.

3. Sega

4. Ah who am I kidding, the games are not modable any more because they couldn´t sell DLCs if they were....

[st_dux 26]

I appreciate the detailed review. I think some of the changes that you point out as negatives are just a matter of personal preference. For example:

- I think the province system is a great improvement.

- I like the recruiting-through-generals organization. It seems more immersive and realistic to me to have only cohesive forces led by generals on the map instead of random units all over the place. I also believe that the Imperium-based limit on armies and fleets reflects the political clout that would have been required at the time to raise so many troops.

- I don't have an issue with armies "transforming" into transport ships. It basically takes an entire turn to do this, and transport ships are incredibly slow and easy to intercept. Since Patch 15, unescorted transports are also extremely easy to wreck even with small military fleets.

Also, I don't agree that a 100-man unit isn't at a disadvantage against a 300-man unit. It's true that attacks only occur from one individual to another, but a 300-man unit is still going to be attacking more often because it will naturally envelop the smaller unit, and this also causes steep morale penalties.

As for CA's marketing budget, I agree that it seems kind of obscene. Unfortunately, it also seems to work really well, because Rome II outsold all previous Total War games at release despite the fact that game was basically broken back then. That said, I do believe that CA have made good with the fans with all the support and free content the game has seen since that time.

Edited October 2, 2014 by ST_Dux

[danil-ch 165]

Total War: Attila Gameplay With Developer Commentary

[myshaak 0]

Hey Tonci, I thank you for the review as well! I bought Medieval 2 a few weeks ago from Humble store in a flash sale for less then a Euro, just out of curiosity... and since then I clocked in more hours than I'd like to admit, instant Total War fan!

I bought the Kingdoms Expansion and the original Rome (because I usually like to start the series from the older titles, no matter how dated they look and feel) and I'm sad to hear Rome 2 took so many wrong turns. As JC Denton would say, what a shame! :) Graphically it looks stunning, though.

Oh well, I'll still have Empire and Shogun to play...

[Tonci87 163]

Mods to play

For Medieval 2: Stainless Steel 6.4 to make medieval better or Third Age if you are into Lord of the Rings.

Rome 1: Roma Surrectum 2 (doesn´t work with the new patch on Steam, CA broke everything :mad:).

Empire: Darthmod Ultimate Commander 8.0.1 Platinum Edition, make sure to play battles with 40 units per side. Battles are absolutely Epic. The maker of this is now making his own game wich seems to be pretty good "Ultimate General: Gettysburg"

Shogun 2: Radious Total War Mod

ABout the Video Danil posted: All I hear is marketing talk. They are doing the same thing they have done for al the past games. Showcasing scripted historical battles that are nothing like the stuff you will see in the campaign. And still the AI manages to fuck up.

A catapult crew abandoned their engines and went into the brawl.....

Why is the city without proper walls? Why is there a gate if the enemys can just run up the slope left and right of it?

All those new mechanics like barricades, spreading fires, razing citys etc. sounds really nice but the real question is if the AI can handle it.

[danil-ch 165]

if the AI can handle it.

Unlikely. But maybe after 15 patches :D

What also funny is that CA mentioned MSAA as new super feature.

Edited October 3, 2014 by Danil-ch

[danil-ch 165]

:bounce3:

[froggyluv 2136]

:butbut:

Damn ^that^ looks awesome. Finally some decent siege advancements. Loved everything but the arrow tracers.

[Tonci87 163]

But will the AI be improved enough to use that stuff. That is the real question.My fear is that for example the siege escalation is only there so that the AI can besiege you until your walls are gone (for some unexplained reason) and then it can attack you without the wall pathfinding problems....

[giallustio 770]

Will the siege escalation be the only "feature" they will add? I'm done with CA for sure

[Tonci87 163]

Will the siege escalation be the only "feature" they will add? I'm done with CA for sure

They also plan to bring back the family tree (CA really likes to take out features and when they bring them back in a future game they celebrate it as a big advancement. It is actually sad to see that Medieval 1 Viking invasion had many awesome features that were never seen again in later games....Actually some of the stuff they announce with Attila reminds me of Viking Invasion features) and some other features like spreading fire and those barricades in the streets. I´ll be curious to see if the AI will recognize that they are marching into a flamming forest...

And don´t forget, the ammount of fire, and especially smoke you see in trailers may not be what you see in the final product. Actually I bet that you won´t see smoke this dense in the finished game.

[danil-ch 165]

Don't raise your hopes too much. Deja vu.

Just like before: Final game will look way... way better than this. :rolleyes:

[Tonci87 163]

Don't raise your hopes too much. Deja vu.

Just like before: Final game will look way... way better than this. :rolleyes:

Exactly what I´m talking about.

They are pulling this false marketing bullshit (because that is what it is at the end of the day) since Empire and still people fall for it every single time. I bought a physical copy of Empire and back on the box you can see screenshots from the game (labeled as ingame screenshots) that actually can´t be in the game. Like for example a Seabattle along a coastline (Empire has only open water battles). If a company goes as far as to lie on the freaking games box you can expect some really shitty behaviour from them.

I just checked, even the Steam Storepage still has those made up screenshots of the game. The do that all the time. Pre Release Screenshots and Trailers go through some heavy editing and look nothing like the final game.