I haven’t noticed great speeches, but if you haven’t heard any then something is wrong. Usually they give a speech of some kind before every tactical battle. The annoying helper guys also give speeches sometimes, and you get cut scenes of discussions before the senate if you do the campaign.
Mine’s a ca. 2009 fairly hoss machine, but it still chugs pretty bad in the Forest benchmark at times.
Is there a widget/wizard that will analyze your machine and automatically set the recommended best settings? I didn’t see anything like that in 5 or 10 minutes of fiddling with the settings.
Hasn’t happened even once, definitely no cutscenes with the senate, either!
Argh!!!
Another weird thing is that sometimes I have a general die (they die too soon!), but instead of telling me what happened, first, it just jumps straight into the “Replace the general of this army” screen, so I have no clue who I’m replacing and why. Not only that, but sometime later, in the middle of my turn, the death cutscene begins playing, seemingly at random!
They don’t get a special “speech cutscene” any more - the speeches are done… I think it’s during troop placement? Maybe it’s once you’ve started the fight. Anyway, the audio is sourced on your general, and if your camera isn’t on top of him, you can’t hear him speaking.
Ahhhh, so it’s like the general banter of the soldier…
Gotta pay attention. The banter, by the way can be pretty funny! I was in the cinematic camera mode once on my velites, which I, of course, sent ahead of my main army as scouts/harassers.
The moment they crest over a hill and could no longer see their friends coming behind them:
Random solider: "Uh, where’s the general? I can’t see our General!
Commander: "Generals? Don’t you worry about no Generals, they don’t worry about YOU!.
Lol.
Loving this game so far. I keep yelling at my cat to give me back my legions lol.
Oh, dear.
I’ve been enjoying the game so far, despite a graphics glitch that made the ground look all flickery. I tried updating my video driver and broke my computer; I get a blue screen within a minute of booting up unless I do it in safe mode. Uninstalling my video driver doesn’t solve the problem, and re-installing isn’t working now, either. The blue screen says there’s a registry error. I’m tired now, but maybe tomorrow I’ll try to find a registry cleaner that isn’t malware; if anyone knows of one, a recommendation would really help me out.
On the bright side, I expect to have a brand new computer within the week anyway.
Is it just me or is the game confusing?
FTR I have most Total War games (skipped Medieval one) and have loved them (all the way back to the first one).
First, just to get this out of the way, I really miss the mini-videos when your assassin or whatever would attempt a mission. I hate they got rid of that. I can understand why but I still miss it.
For Rome II I am finding myself fairly confused.
For instance, when trying to look up stuff in the encyclopedia I found things were not there. Cunning? Nope. Workshop? Nope. Some others that I forget. What do they do? Not completely clear.
Tech tree? No frigging clue. Yeah I have seen stuff in the online help but it is not much help. Hard to see what leads to what.
Food? I was producing gobs of it…no idea why (maybe I am used to Shogun 2 where I would struggle sometimes to produce enough food).
Town size? Can’t figure how you get to grow them. I mean I know the button to expand…just not sure what to do to make it appear.
Tech? I NEVER knew I was done with something till I tried to end the turn and the game told me I forgot to start new research and/or add to a general’s skills. Finding the general or city on the big map? Not easy.
Don’t even get me started on wives and diplomacy and all that. No fucking clue.
Rebels? Where are they coming from? I had a town without a general that would get attacked by rebels nearly every turn. My town garrison that is just there was easily able to fend them off every time. But I wanted to stop it so bought a general and some troops. Thing is troops come a turn after the general so rebels would attack the lone general and kill him. This happened repeatedly.
Eventually I brought a proper army down but never found a rebel camp or anything or any reason they kept appearing (town seemed content).
The game is beautiful and the battles are fun and sieging cities is the best it has ever been.
I also have no doubt there are answers to all the above. Either I am missing the obvious or just need to learn by trial and error. Still kind of maddening.
Provinces (not towns) get excess population every few turns based on “growth rate” (boosted by buildings). There’s a hard to see bar on the UI when you have a town selected that shows it. When that bar fills you get another excess person, once you have enough excess people you can expand a town.
As far as I know, rebels only appear if you’re unhappy. Are you sure your province is content?
Anyway, this game’s balance of power bar is completely borked. It values numbers too heavily, one tier 2 unit can take on approximately infinite garrison troops (especially mobs). Almost every town attack I’ve ever done has been like “they outnumber me 5 to 1, how am I going to do this?” Followed by a heroic victory where I lost like 100 guys and they lose 3500 or some insane number.
And this is with the Iceni, I can’t imagine the slaughter if I was playing a faction like Rome that actually had units with real stats.
When it comes to city management I’m still pretty clueless.
Yeah! When they released the first live action trailer that made me want to re-watch the ROME HBO series, I was convinced they would have live action clips for the assassination/events in the game. Very disappointed they are missing.
Yep. I tried searching for “food” nothing either. I still don’t know why my food stores aren’t representative of what the detail for my cities say.
Specially difficult when planning out upgrades for your generals. In Shogun 2 the skill tree for everything was right there in the UI. Super easy to see what everything does and plan ahead.
The entire minimalist ui does nothing but obscure information that is vital to making important decisions.
Yep.
The surplus population must be equal to or higher than the number on the new slot. But how do you make sure you are growing surplus population? What are the effects of the surplus population on other factors? What is the rate of growth? Who knows.
I think Rebels come from within your own cities, if unrest is high. You can lower unrest using agents. Don’t ask me what type or how though.
[QUOTE=Whack-a-Mole]
Tech tree? No frigging clue. Yeah I have seen stuff in the online help but it is not much help. Hard to see what leads to what.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, it’s a bit confusing. A nice mouse over with key info would be good. But you can basically open up a description window on any tech item to see what it actually does. You’d have to do it for all of them in a tech area, but it gives you an idea of what you need to research to do whatever you are trying to do. The tech tree in Shogun II was better IMHO and wish they had stayed with that one.
Well, food has certainly been an issue with me. I’ve been at negative food several times and gotten messages about starving citizens and rebellion. I actually had to station a full army in Southern Italy for about 20 years because the rebellions were happening so often. Eventually I got the food situation under control through tech advances (there are several that increase your crop yield) and city expansions.
As others have said, your population goes up slowly over time. When it reaches a certain size you can expand. There are also tech items that help you expand by letting you make stuff that makes your population happy or healthy, which speeds up expansion.
Yeah, in the same boat. I’m a turtle player so I generally turtle up until someone attacks me or until I’m powerful enough to take the offensive, so my only diplomacy is if someone else initiates it with me. I have a diplomat but he’s basically used to explore the map. No idea about the wives thing.
I’m planning several long campaigns. I generally learn something new in each one. My current one playing one of the Rome factions I’m around 175 BC and I’ve only consolidated the Italian peninsula, the off shore islands, and conquered Carthage (which had rebelled so I nipped in an swiped it and Sicily from the rebels for no cost).
ANother thing: Where are the short campaigns? Usually you have the option fo playign a grand campaign, where dominating large portions fo the map is a necessity, AND a shorter campaign.
No such option this time 
Not the best layout I’ve ever seen, but here is a website that has the tech tree if anyone is interested. They should have put this in the actual game IMHO.
-XT
If you look in the upper right corner of the window that shows all the structures in a province, there’s a little meter that tracks how many free population you have in the province, and how long until you get another one. When that number’s larger than the number of buildings you have in any one city in the province, you’ll be given the chance to expand that city.
Population grows faster by having excess food, low squalor, low taxes, and a few other factors.
Have you played a campaign yet? For some reason, the notifications are messed up in the prologue. In the campaign, you get a message first thing in a turn when you complete research.
To easily upgrade your generals, click on the second button above your mini-map. It’s a list of all the generals you control. Ones that can level up have a little yellow chevron next to their name.
I’m several decades into a campaign, and I don’t think I’ve seen a wife yet. Family dynastics really seem to be underplayed in this game.
Each province has a happiness rating. You can see it if you hover your mouse over a city on the main map. The rating goes from -100 to 100. When the rating reaches -100, it spawns a number of rebels in one of the regions in the province, and temporarily lowers unrest.
Also, after recruiting a general, move him into the city before recruiting any troops. This will, at least, give him the garrison as protection.
There is a mouse-over on the tech tree. It’s just to the right of the research window. 
Maybe it’s my graphic then, since when I mouse over I don’t get enough info to really understand what it’s for. If I click on it there is a pop up that goes into more detail. What I REALLY want is for the tech tree to be more like in Shogun II…to me that was totally intuitive and well done.
ETA: However, I’m loving the game, and the issues so far have been minor for me. Just wanted to point that out. I’ve been pumped for months that this was coming out, and the only thing that would make my life complete at this point is if they would hurry up with the first expansion, which is supposed to have the Selucids in it…they were always my favorite faction.
Selucids free DLC is supposed to be out soon, like within the first month.
Really my only MAJOR issue with the game is the AI, which is as dumb as ever. And I wish the political machinations were more interesting, varied, and provided to you ina mroe transparent manner.
This game is a contender for best TW game, but they need to hire a few talented AI people to solve the problems they have right now. And maybe tweak the balance a bit. Units rout way too quickly.
I was wondering why the heck you couldn’t play the Seleucid Empire.
What do you guys reckon to the artillery? As the Iceni my Briton ballista are owning all. Playing as the Romans I decided to go to for the Heavy Onagers - in Rome I they splatted countless Gallic generals. To my disappointment in Rome II they aren’t really suited to be battlefield artillery; poison causes too few casualties, likewise the standard rounds don’t do much damage.
I’m of one mind with Frederick the Great; artillery adds dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl. Glad that there’s so much variety now, Shogun II arty was shite (apart from FotS, with its Gatling guns) Dunno whether to try an array of polyboros or some giant ballista…
Carthage just took two of my Provinces in Italia with like 4 stacks of war elephants.
Carthago Delenda Est!