Yeah, if there is a fleet blockade you can’t currently attack the city. Gods know why but it’s something to be aware of. What I do in that case is set my guys to living off the land and then just camp out, hoping that the rebels will throw off the blockade and give you the chance to attack. In this game both the besieged and besieger (or blockade) take attritional losses every turn.
Oh, crap. I guess that conquest is not going to be as swift as I had thought.
I had an idea regarding food management, which I’m (slowly) testing out. When you exempt a province from tax, it apparently does not contribute its food surplus or deficit to your empire-wide total. It appears possible to devote a province to unit recruitment (lots of barracks, training fields, and workshops, no farms or ranches) and then give it a permanent tax holiday. I think that this will allow you to have a province for recruiting powerful units that isn’t a drain on your food supply.
This food and squalor nonsense is getting on my tits. However, I just saw one of my praetorians kick a celt in the groin then stab him in the throat. All is forgiven, Rome II.
Beta patch 2 is up, and it’s HUGE.
Started a new campaign with it and the AI seems a bit smarter, at least on the campaign. More balanced armies, more willing to engage you.
I’m installing the patch 2 beta now. The chatter on reddit suggests that the AI is a lot smarter, and the food/squalor dynamic has been rebalanced.
I didn’t have much of a chance to see how much smarter the AI is yet, but food and squalor are a fair bit more manageable: What was -12 food or happiness is now -10, and I feel like I have more freedom to upgrade my settlements.
It was also kind of funny seeing the first turn after the patch process. You could practically hear the AI saying, “Wait, what the hell were we doing here?” as it moved its fleets and armies into more logical positions.
Getting better FPS in battles now, so that’s a plus.
AI is still pretty unaggressive though, nobody has declared war on me yet. Could be called Total Peace: Rome II.
The food/squalor thing is a bit better but I still don’t like the mechanic, especially in comparison to the other TW games as the balancing act between squalor/food/public order is about as fun as watching close-up eye surgery. One other thing they need to fix is the one turn per year. Generals die too damn fast, especially if you’re used to Shogun II.
OTOH, Shogun spanned 50 or so years, a couple generations at the most. Rome tries to squeeze a couple centuries in. Concessions and compromises have to be made, lest a motivated player conquers the whole of Mare Nostrum over a decade ;).
There are already mods out there to go to 2 or even 4 turns per annum though… if you want to play the same campaign for about a thousand and a half turns.