I have been a fan of the Total War series since it started. While some entries were better than others I liked them all till Rome II.
Rome II, I felt, was a massive let down from Shogun 2. Deeply disappointed barely covers it for me. I played six hours of Rome II and gave up (compared to 160 hours in Shogun 2). That game single handedly put me off pre-purchasing games (and no matter how Rome II finally turns out I will absolutely never pre-purchase a CA game again).
So, all that said, has numerous patches redeemed Rome II? Is it worth revisiting or are its initial flaws too deep to be corrected?
I personally held off from buying it at all for two reasons :
it chugged like hell on my machine. I mean slideshow quality, even at lowest settings
and
I know CA, and I know Total War. Which means I know a TW title will be utter, broken, barely stable piece of shit (with a stupid to downright broken AI) on release and will only become good circa one year later, which coincides with the arrival of the first major mods and the first expansions.
From what I’ve been hearing, point the first has been more or less dealt with : they’ve tightened the code a lot and so forth so that it should actually run on what they say it should. I’m not sure they’ve updated/patched the demo though - and I kinda doubt it since it was a leak to begin with. So I can’t know for sure, but the scuttlebutt of the grapevine through Chinese whispers seems positive on that front.
Point the second, like the OP I’d be interested to hear about however, as I haven’t really kept up with it - the wars of the Antiquity were never quite my bag… but then again that’s 50% of what I’m going to be studying this year so I might as well study them with a mouse in hand :]
I feel your pain. I almost never buy new single player games, since they’re both cheaper if I wait and less likely to be lemons. But I broke my rule for Rome II, since I had some time off and was on kind of an ancient history kick. Plus I liked the earlier TW games, and since I figured that since CA is basically just making slight variations of the same game over and over again, Rome II ought to be at least playable out of the box.
I had the same experience as the OP, gave up after two or three hours.
Haven’t tried again, but I’ve heard a few people say its much better now. Sadly I don’t have time for computer games right now, so I’ll have to wait a while before I can test whether they’re right or not.
I’ve been playing the game off and on since release.
The state the game was in at launch was deplorable. Not only were there serious issues in terms of performance and stability, but many of the game’s mechanics seemed poorly thought out, or poorly implemented. The AI, however, was what had me not playing for most of the intervening time. The campaign AI was bad, the battle AI was not very good at all, and the siege AI was utterly broken, as in non-functioning, with units sometimes running in circles or standing still for the entire battle.
It’s been getting better, but it didn’t really turn the corner until the last patch, patch 14, which fixed siege AI.
Now, with patch 15, a lot of those half-baked systems are getting reworked, the AI is getting yet another improvement pass, and combat is getting a bit of an overhaul in terms of how long melee combat lasts and how well the units are balanced.
I’ve only tried the patch 15 beta so far, and am looking forward to the full patch when I get home, but I’m very happy with the game in it’s current state. I’m actually looking forward to finishing my first goddamned campaign since this thing shipped!
I agree with you guys though, I won’t be pre-ordering Total War games anymore ;( But I’m still looking forward to Medieval 3. They just better not fuck it up.
So if you held back because you heard all bad reviews, or you own it and haven’t played it much due to it’s broken state at launch, DEFINITELY give it another go with the Emperor edition. It’s a different game, IMHO.
Hah! I had a rinky-dink little unit of Roman militia or city watch or whatever they’re called in a town attacked by Gauls at one point. Due to spastic clicking on my part, I accidentally chose to fight the battle instead of letting the computer do it.
So I lined my guys up in a square and waited for the Gauls to crush them. Instead, they advanced right up to my guys, but never actually attacked.
So I just zipped it up to the highest time compression and waited… they never did attack, and I ended up winning.
Yea, the AI problems were bizzarre. I mean, I don’t really expect the AI in these games to be great, trying to come up with a program that can do strategy in a system with a bunch of different rules is tough. But past TW games have shone steady improvement, and really the only difference form game to game is the balance of missile to artillery to calvary to infantry, so I kind of expect it to get, if not better on each iteration, at least not worse.
I mean, if they didn’t have time to get it working at all, they could’ve just dropped in the AI form an earlier game and it would’ve worked, if not well, then at least not completely broken.
FWIW, the TW AI has been rubbish in offensive sieges since… well, since Shogun. The first one. Back then at least it wasn’t technically suicidal because it couldn’t (due to a combination of castles being anything but, and Jedi generals) but from *Medieval *onwards the AI has always been plenty happy to sit quietly under missile fire, patiently waiting for its turn to rush into a lone (well-defended) opening and routing immediately.
Rince repeat for 3+ stacks of crusaders/jihadis trickling in one by one and regrouping/rechargerouting alone.
I never had a problem with their AI’s (plural) in earlier games, and didn’t end up getting Rome due to some suspicions over the hype.
The campaign AI generally was awful, and only in the fight due to the usual free AI resources. Still, it could at least pretend to fight. The only problem there was that it often had an issue fighting out in the open - tended to drop too wait for sieges. Still, not terrible as far as strategic AI goes.
The battle AI is hit-or-miss. It’s only real problem is that it doesn’t have a very good sense so actual tactics beyond charge-n’-flank. It’s a good tactic, but it tends to annoy the player and it makes the AI much more effective with certain factions than others. Many players complain about the AI having a stupid moment and sitting there while being killed with arrows, but I’ve seen a lot of issues with getting real use out of archer units, simply because the AI doesn’t can’t handle its own and seems incapable of intelligently skirmishing. Got better with Shogun 2, though.
So the Emperor Edition also comes with a new free campaign: Imperator Augustus.
It’s set on the heels of Gaius Julius Caesar’s death, and the start of the 2nd triumvirate. I started it up and I’m playing as Octavian, which has me controlling the three provinces of the Italian peninsula and several territories in Gaul. It looks like my immediate concerns will be pacifying my barbarian holdings - some of which are about to rebell, keeping the Germanic tribes to the north east at bay and dealing with Pompey’s son who controls Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily.
Within a few turns I was at war with Lepidus, Pompey Jr. and a few of the Germanic tribes. I’m barely holding on to Mark Antony as a begrudging ally, and I want to keep it that way for as long as possible. Right now I’ve got some buffer between me and Lepidus, but Both Pompey jr and Antony are just a short boat ride away.
What I like so far:
Performance is WAY better, and I mean that from the perspective of someone who played the patch 15 beta. The game runs significant;y better at max settings on my 780 ti at 2560x1440 (large unit size). If I can see the difference between beta 15 and this, the performance gulf between now and what it was like at release should be pretty damn significant.
The new ui colors and design are a nice change, IMHO.
The new faction UI is WAY better than before, and of course, it’s tuned for the new civil war mechanics. It shows you your characters and those of the other internal factions, how their gravitas and ambition affect the power of your faction in the senate, it also shows the balance of power on a nice, straightforward infographic that looks like a senate floor diagram, and it displays the current chance for a civil war. I like it a lot. The way civil wars work now is also way better. Before you usually just ended up with a couple of stacks of doom somewhere in your lands representing the opposing factions. It was inevitable, a one time event, and had no connection to what was happening politically. Now civil wars can occur more than once, or not all (though they become more and more difficult to hold back as your faction grows). Your generals from other factions will leave you once a civil war starts as will the lands they occupy and the agents they work with. So now you really do have to be on top of the political situation within your faction, and there are interesting choices to be made. Do you really want to give a general belonging to another faction that huge army? Replacing him with one of your own might be a good idea, but that might unbalance things later on making a civil war more likely.
It’s not as in depth as I would liked this system to be (with family trees and all sorts of nefarious options), but at least it’s a big improvement from what was, and it looks to be a fun new mechanic.
4 turns per year in this campaign at least, and the overall increase in the lifespan of agents and generals, means more time to get attached to them and to grow their power and skill.
Haven’t actually gotten into a battle yet, so we’ll see how that goes, hopefully tonight!
After looking, I will NOT be getting this. First off, for a game a year old, and not terribly good at release, the Emperor edition contains nothing but patches. It’s still undiscounted and includes no DLC. Note: the DLC for this is mostly a bunch of stuff which was included in Rome 1. So yeah, the game is actually 120 bucks if you want the other stuff, which includes many interesting nations. CA has become another greedy hype machine.
The Augustus campaign is free anyhow, so you’re not actually getting anything there, either.
I’m a huge Total War fan…and, sadly, I didn’t like RTWII. It just wasn’t very fun to play, to be honest. It dragged and became more of a chore to slog through the mid-game to the end game than it was worth. No matter what you did (well, no matter what I did), provinces would revolt and, as noted, the AI wasn’t anything to write home about. I didn’t have a lot of issues with how it ran from a technical standpoint…no frame rate issues, no locking and few crashes, but the game just wasn’t fun for me. I haven’t played it in 6 months though, so grain of salt wrt patches and such, though it’s hard for me to believe they could patch the game to fix the underlying core aspects of playing the thing.
It’s sad, since some of my all time favorite games have been TW games. I enjoyed Empire (though I know it wasn’t well liked here), and Shogun II, and even Medieval II. This one…it really needs a Rome Total Realism upgrade to make it fun, IMHO, and afaik it hasn’t gotten one yet.
I don’t think its worth my money, and it’s probably not worth the time investment. I found King Arthur The Roleplaying Wargame to basically be all the same stuff, but a lot more fun, so I’m just not interested in a mediocre offering.
I’ve played that game… it’s not as good. But I’ve already said how I feel about this game. IMHO, you would likely enjoy it, I’d say give it a shot, even if that means not picking it up until it’s $10 or so on a holiday sale or something.
Yeah, I wasn’t a big fan of the King Arthur RPG either, though I did buy both the 1st and 2nd one. RTWII is certainly worth picking up in a $10 holiday sale from Steam, assuming it ever drops to that. Hell, I’ll probably buy the DLCs for the game when/if they drop to that level, and most likely I’ll fire the game up again at some point to see if it’s gotten better. It was just a disappointment, considering the anticipation I had for the game when counting the days down to initial release.
Yeah I don’t know what happened there. The hype train was so big for this game, they mentioned they were working with the biggest budget they’ve ever had, Rome I was probably one of the most beloved entry in the series so far (or maybe tied with Medieval 2), they said all the right things leading up to release…
It’s going to hurt the series, and they definitely can’t let this happen again. Apparently they are announcing a new title soon too. No one knows whether it’s that battle arena MOBA game, or some type of warhammer thing, or an expansion fo rRome 2, or an entirely new Total war title.
Highly disappointing, even a year later. I bought it on release and couldn’t run it at all. Now, many patches later, the game will run, but it just doesn’t have the same satisfying “one more turn” compulsion that defines really great strategy games.
Like others, I won’t be purchasing another CW game at launch.
It’s kind of obvious when you understand CA’s culture and philosophy. They basically work on two parallel lines : engine and game. One team works on making a game as a demonstration/proof of concept of a tech engine, the other works on making an actually good game with this engine, to be released later.
*Shogun *was a proof of their original engine (and is often considered to be the absolute best when it comes to multiplayer), *Medieval *was the refinement - more complex, more rich. Historical wins ! I’m so sad they dropped that concept entirely.
Then came Rome (which was unpolished and flawed), refined into Medieval II which while thoroughly fucked on release is now damn near perfect, especially when you add mods to the equation.
*Empire *was a whole new, aimless Thing with a ton of issues, *Napoleon *was a limited-scope Great Leap Forward, and Shogun 2 is the culmination (with a few caveats left, because Realm Divide is both good game design and retarded).
Rome II is the latest iteration of the design model. It was shit on launch, and my expectation is that it will always be a bit shit when it comes right down to it, but one year from now they’ll probably release an other game based on that strat+tac engine, and it will still be kinda crap on release but one year later it will be the bee’s tits.
But I’m willing to be surprised. Plus I sorta need my TW fix
Sometimes I am ok with “meh” on release if the game evolves into something better. Civ5 was like this to me. I have been a lifetime Civ fan so Civ5 was ok enough on release to not make me pissed off. I was not thrilled but at least it still felt like the effort was there to move forward.
Move forward two(?) years and three major updates and, with the last release, I think the game is damn near flawless. It is an excellent experience to play and far better than at release.
I kind of expect the same from the Total War series. On release I kind of expect it to not be quite as refined or as good as it can be. That will come with later patches.
What killed me about TWRII is it was a distinct step backwards. It seemed there was a misguided attempt to dumb the game down to make it more broadly appealing. Even if the game ran smoothly without bugs it was still shit on release.
They are not the first company to do such a thing. Perhaps it even makes sense for some games and pays off. I cannot see how the TW series benefits from such dumbing down.
I can only hope they learned a lesson here (although I doubt it). I will be interested to see how pre-orders go for their next game.
