The latest trailer for Total War: Rome II shows the Romans getting their asses kicked for a change, with the Battle of Teutoburg Forest. Not sure if this is actual gameplay footage or pre-rendered cinematics. Maybe a mixture of both.
I hope it’s good.
I was a huge Total War fan, all the way back to Shogun 1, but Shogun 2 really soured me on the franchise. This had better be a return to form.
It looks like a rip off from the Eagle. The Battle scene at least.
Awesome!
Also re-watched the live action trailer…
HBO, Give me back my Rome season 3!!!
Me too - yet I couldn’t quite figure out why. Shogun just really bored me. I didn’t like Empire very much either. Both may be due to the omnipresence of seiges, and that the way the maps and AI work there’s a distinct lack of interesting battles. It’s very difficult to actually make any interesting suprises, and the AI is rather dim but extremely straightforward.
Is it wrong that I’m already hoping for a Total Realism mod?
I rather liked Shogun 2. The one that fell flat for me was Medieval II. Also Napoleon for some reason, though I played a lot of Empire. Rome is still fun so I hope the sequel will live up to the name. This time around I’d like to see my legions upgrade properly from hastati to principes to triarii.
I liked Rome Total War but I hated the “sea battles” which I have no control over whatsoever except that I have to click like 27 times to get past them.
Full fledged sea battles were introduced with Empire total War, and improved a bit with Shogun 2.
They’re still not my favorite thing and I usually just auto resolve them, specially ones with lots of ships.
Controlling the ships has never felt intuitive to me. I hope they fix that in Rome II.
Apparently we are going to be able to support troops from the sea as they advance on land, and amphibious assaults are also a possibility, making sea combat perhaps a little more interesting.
Yeah, sea battles were a good idea, but mostly just tedious. It was fun in Shogun 2, though, when you got the nanban ship and could just blow the hell out of everyone else.
I especially liked Napoleon and enjoy Shogun 2. Empire was ok… I liked the Native American campaigns the most. I bet Rome II will at least be worth the price. Yay, new war games 
I didn’t like Shogun 2 either, and I loved the rest of the series. I can’t even figure out why I didn’t like it, I just couldn’t get into it.
Sadly, the Black Ship and the Nanbans were nerfed in a patch. I had an unpatched version of the game in which every sea battle ended with me floating around victorious in a vast sea of broken lumber. Now four salvos won’t even wreck a bow kaboya.
Somebody at Sega or CA seems to have a sense of humor about it though. They made the most powerful ship in the game into the least powerful and made the least powerful ships into the most powerful. I once captured the Black Ship on an autoresolve with a fleet of nothing more than ten trade ships.
I was unable to even destroy a single bow kobaya with multiple Nanban ships focus-firing. You can still win by complete morale victory - the Nanban ships are so tough they can take on several enemies firing flaming arrows and still win with minimal casualties. However, they do feel obnoxiously underpowered, as you can fire all day without wrecking an overgrown raft. It also makes your sea battles take forever.
New awesome super high def panorama here:
A new video of Teutoburg Forest, showing actual gameplay:
Never mind the fancy graphics. The high-level tactical view with blocks and lines looks especially sweet.
I’m gonna play the crap out of this game, but what I really can’t wait for is a new Medieval. Those were my favorites, hands down.
Me too, Johnny. If just for hoping for muskets that actually work more than 1/5 of the time, a bug which I don’t think was fixed in any of the mods (I wouldn’t know , not having played any of the mods.) When the muskets did fire they were absolutely devastating.
That, and some more subtlety in both difficulty settings and AI. The AI should not be so stupid as to not sue for peace when you are about to destroy them, no matter what the difficulty level. Plus they should break out the AI aggressiveness setting from the economic development setting. Sometimes you want to play being surrounded immediately by enemies, other times you just want to be challenged to develop as much as possible.
There was a show on BBC called Time Commanders that used a modified Rome: Total War engine to re-enact various historical battles. A team of four non-gamers, with no previous experience, would control the forces on one side. One episode featured the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, with a team of bloodthirsty vicars in command of Roman forces.
I can only imagine what kind of computer it would take to run this.