No idea if anyone in 'doperland still even has this game on their computers these days. I recently re-loaded Rome Total War on my computer (got bored) and patched to the latest version then downloaded the platinum version of RTR. The game really looks exactly the same as the gold version of RTR looked to be honest…which is damn good. Was enjoying getting back into the game but I’m having some issues…if anyone has any suggestions I would appreciate it.
What’s happening is that seemingly at random when I finish a tactical battle (or more annoyingly when I have finished several of them in a single game turn) the game simply drops me to desktop when I hit the key to exit the battle. It’s not a major problem and it seems to happen more or less randomly…but it really sucks when you have several attacks on your during the computers turn and you’ve fought a few battles…and then have the game drop to desktop so that you need to reload and fight them all over again.
(I just wish they would put out Empire Total War already, or that those guys at the Total Realism site would get on with making Medieval II TR…sheesh)
Does TR make the AI more intelligent? M2:TW is still tied for the best game ever made but would win the title if the AI ever did anything halfway aggressive intelligently. (Although I do give it props for consistently using mixed forces so even a mismatched battle will usually result in my taking some casualties.)
I think they did some tweaks to the AI, but I don’t think they made it all that much better than the original game. The computer AI is still pretty good on the tactical side…and still plays fairly good early on as well (at least it’s pretty aggressive on the strategic side). At some point the AI just sort of gives up though and almost completely goes on the defensive which makes the end game a bit less exciting.
The biggest problem with Rome: Total Realism was the insane aggressiveness of the AI, at least early on. The civs liked me or not regardless of what I did, and whenever I had a city on their border, they declared war and attacked me. This meant that I wound up involved in wars against everybody all the time, as even my own allies turned on me whenever I actually successfully took a city.
Eventually, I got irked at this and had to cheese it by always leaving a border city. But this was very irritating, and though I was winning sucked the fun right out of it.
Well, you could try installing everything again from scratch. It’s possible some file or other got corrupted during the installation. You might also check that all your drivers are up to date. If that doesn’t fix the crashes, I’m all out of ideas.
As far as M2TW mods go, none of the offer as extensive an overhaul as RTR, but there are some good ones. I especially like the latest version of Stainless Steel, which improves the realism quite a bit versus the vanilla version, especially if you install some of the optional submods.
I haven’t tried a re-install. As for my drivers, afaik they are all up to date, though I have rebuilt my system since the last time I played RTR so I can look into that as well. The game used to be pretty stable, but I was playing the 6.0 Gold version at the time and this is their latest and greatest (though supposedly they are still developing the RTR system and plan another major update sometime).
Do you have any links? I actually haven’t tried any mods to M2TW…just the expansion game.