Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 djones520 wrote:
I'm unfortunately not really going to get to play it until Friday. I'm working mids right now, so simply going to get the game tomorrow is going to be rough.

Due to the idiotic (and wholly pointless given that the game has probably been cracked already) online activation requirement I won't be playing it until November at the earliest. I also can't play Europa Universalis IV for the same reason.

Gah, updates already. Let me play my game dammit!

Tried a custom game to see how the fights felt. LoS-based sight is an interesting concept, and means terrain might actually play more of a part in fights, and flanking manoeuvres will actually be flanks rather than trying to sneak cavalry units past without the AI simply turning to face.

That said, the AI hasn't impressed me at all. I marched some 8-10 units of fully experienced Spartans up to pretty much spitting distance of a force of Levy Spears more than 4:1 larger without them even moving. For the entire game, not one of their units so much as sneezed.

Is this how it's going to play out in every fight? Going back to the times of M2 where the player has to make all the effort and the AI only has to wait and respond, even if they outnumber and/or outmatch the player several times over?

I'm tempted to try another custom fight to see if switching around the roles works, or see if making the enemy army OP works, but then I don't want to waste my time.

One of my issues with the game is that it just looks too cartoony. The projectiles look cartoony, the way the units move aod turn so quick looks cartoony.

It looks like it belongs in Dota or something.

Waiting for my physical copy to arrive from amazon. It was stupidly cheaper than the steam version.

Way to difficult to get my game installed today. Gamestop, despite my asking when I picked my copy up, did not give me my Greek States DLC, so I didn't get the game fully installed until the evening. I got to play 5 turns as Sparta. Captured Larissa, and researched a couple of techs.

Sparta is definitely not started in an enviable position. He shares a province with Athens, and given the trade agreement between the two I decided to just go after Epirus since we were already at war. But even then, if I want to capture a full province, I'm going to have to break my alliance with Macedon and take them down.

I'm so far going to let the Spartan natural combat bonuses stand, and work on economic techs to build up my cash flow so I can support the armies I need to tackle 3 powers in early game (Epirus, Macedon, Athens).

Gamestop didn't give me my culture pack either. did you pay for it via steam? I would, but I'm going to go to gamestop tomorrow to ask first.

 lord marcus wrote:
Gamestop didn't give me my culture pack either. did you pay for it via steam? I would, but I'm going to go to gamestop tomorrow to ask first.

No, I contacted Sega and Gamestop and asked WTF.com because Total War's webpage specifically says Gamestop was supposed to provide it to me. Both companies got back to me and said they where supposed to give it to us. So I went back into the store, showed them the email, and they spent ten minutes trying to figure out how to get me the code.

I'd suggest leaving a nasty review on the matter. If this is a wide spread issue, they certainly dropped the ball on it.

Just contacted gamestop. Going to go back to the store tommorrow.

I've been playing it on and off since it released last night... and I don't think I'm going to be playing it for very much longer. The game is, quite simply, terrible, and in ways that can't be fixed by mods or by patches. There are bugs, to be sure, but the problems that are killing it for me have nothing to do with bugs and everything to do with the design choices made by CA.

The battles, the heart of the game, are horrible. There is no flow to them, no pacing. There is very little maneuver, very little reason to want to maneuver, because as far as I can tell there's little to no effect from fatigue. On top of that, the run speed of units is incredibly fast, with heavily-armored spearmen running like linebackers and turning on a dime. Where in Medieval II and Empire, units took time to approach and you could feel the various stages of a battle playing out, and a battle between two large armies would take a satisfying 30 minutes or more to play out, I'm having battles lasting no longer than 10 minutes, with most ending up at 5 minutes or less. Units break too quickly, but if you try to play the Roman game of accepting a charge and then wearing down the enemy, you'll lose half of your troops because defense just doesn't work due to a total lack of unit coherency. Romans, the most disciplined force ever seen up until the time of the game, won't hold their lines. The game has essentially been made into a standard low-level RTS: you just throw units at the enemy, you mash a few special ability buttons (with freaking cooldowns), some fight animations happen, and they run away. It's even worse in naval battles, where the ships accelerate and stop like they're tanks rather than rowed ships, where there's no feeling of inertia or weight like there was in Empire's ship combat. It takes away the potential drama of a ship lining up for a potential ramming attack and wondering if the enemy ship is going to get out of the way in time. Instead, you just click once on the enemy ship, hit the "row faster" and "use the whip" buttons, and in five seconds your ship has blown through the side of the target.

Another entirely disheartening thing is that you can research the ability to deploy Legionaries in something like 10 turns. I loved playing with the old maniples (the Hastati-Principe-Triari trio) for decades in the original Rome, and the Marian Reformation was a major event that you spent time working through and getting used to. Now, Legionaries are the 3rd tech up the first military tree... and that's it. You can deploy them before you even have the ability to field Principes and Triarii. An epoch-defining change in military history is reduced to an early-game mouse click.

The game is, as expected for a project of this size, buggy. I don't hold that against anyone in this day and age, and anyone buying a game on day one sort of expects that. It's just the poor design choices that feel like they're intended to make the game easier to grasp... but just end up making the game bad and not fun to play at all. There are a number of other changes to the game (a lack of a family tree, a confusing and very random-feeling political structure, the reduction of tactics in favor or giving units and generals what amount to magic abilities) and old Total War bugs (the usual lack of the campaign AI to accept a peace treaty) that just make the game a chore rather than something that will possess you to keep playing one more turn.

 Magc8Ball wrote:

The game is, as expected for a project of this size, buggy. I don't hold that against anyone in this day and age

I do, small bugs are fine and completely expected but grapics bugs and the like should really have at least been noticed in playtesting. Day 1 patches are not a good thing either. I will never accept a buggy game form a AAA developer, better to spend the time getting your game to a ready state than release it early in a flawed condition.

I really hope that this game is widley modable, but I have my doubts. Shogun 2 isn't very mod friendly and while CA has been proactive on the modding front during Rome 2's development I don't expect the see the diversity of mods that appeared for medieval 2. This is a shame as Medival 2s mods are what really kept the game alive and interesting.

The more I read about this game the less I want to play it.

I actually quite enjoyed playing the game for a few hours. I played as the Iceni and in a few turns conquered Wales. I really like the naval and land system, it was pretty fun. Also the ability to name and personalise armies was pretty cool, I hope my Iceni Invictus ends up conquering Rome!

The game also runs well on my very low end computer.

I do have a few niggles with the game though:
* Battles, as someone before me said, aren't as good as they used to be, but you get loads of space on the battlefields
* I hate the way that cities and surroundings are grouped into provinces, even as the Iceni I manage my empire as "Britannia"
* The prologue is really bad.

The nerdrage out there is amazing. I'm already seeing calls for lawsuits. It helps brighten my morning.

I have no major beefs with the game yet. Anyone following knew that this was going to be DRASTICALLY different from Rome 1. So far nothing I've encountered in game play is different from what they showed us in video's. There have been no broken promises, or anything like that.

So I'm enjoying it for what it is. A new game, that combines the strategic and tactical levels of strategy, in a time period that I love.

Really? I haven't even bothered to read any opinions about it before I played!

It is quite a different game, but it's a nice change, not a weird change

Actually I have one more niggle: you can't zoom out far enough

 ExNoctemNacimur wrote:
Really? I haven't even bothered to read any opinions about it before I played!

It is quite a different game, but it's a nice change, not a weird change

Actually I have one more niggle: you can't zoom out far enough

Yeah, that's probably my first real complaint.

But yeah, there is a ton of angry folks out there. If you check the Total War Center forums, and the Total War website forums, it's pretty ugly. I'm not sure why they are so militant. I'm seeing a lot of people complaining about the game being unplayable, saying their PC set up is much much better then mine, and it can't handle the game. Mine is a touch laggy, yeah, but it's perfectly fine IMO, so I don't know what their issue is.

Ive really enjoyed the game so far, its not realistic but its just a game. I'll be eagerly awaiting an announcement on the rome total realism mod as that made me love the first game. I do wish the game did a better job explaining city management though

Hey, at least it's a bit more realistic than the last one!

My only major problem so far is that it barely runs on my laptop. Lag is pretty severe and really detracts from the game experience not to mention that I have no fluid control over my units.

Another niggle that I am sure is an easy fix for modders is that all the tabs on the battle map take up FAR too much space. Granted they can be minimized but the tab that shows the units takes up a good chunk of the screen.

I think I might just carry on playing my newly bought Civ5 and wait for some fixes to come out before going back to play Rome 2...

So I got a little more play time in today. I've captured a couple settlements, at war with a few factions, and so far done the general Spartan thing with walking around and kicking people in the face.

Things I've noticed? Mercenaries are EXPENSIVE! I was running in the negative after buying 3 units of them, so I disbanded 2 after taking Appalonia and it ended up freeing up nearly 1000 denarri a turn.

Noticing more about the physical demands on my machine. I've got a 3ghz dual core processor, 1gb vid card, and 4gb's of RAM. I had to make sure all of my Chrome windows are closed to keep the game from getting laggy. Otherwise though, the game is still working decently for me.

Got my copy today, still no code for the extra factions. Amazon already has a "note" saying all the missing codes will be delivered by September 8th. I shall wait and see.

First impressions after the prologue: Oh dear, I really don't like this at all. I really hope I get used to it.

I like most if not all of the Strategy changes. I reaaallly like the Confederation ability of the Barbarian factions - fits really well, historically. I do not like how comically fast everything moves in the tactical battles, but I tend to autocalc anything that isn't close anyways, and given my playstyle the only time I fight close battles is if I have made a mistake.

I've only fought one battle on the map so far, and it was differant.

It was against Epirus, and they split their army in three, and it was pretty easy for me to destroy it piece by piece. I thought it was odd, but I haven't played any others so I can't really share any thoughts on it yet.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Got a bit more in this evening. Destroyed Epirus, and have thrown down with Athens. My control of Greece is almost secure. I'm content with the game. I don't get all the que que'ing that everyone is doing over it.

Fixed the graphics issue on mine. and got my greeks. Fun to be had.

 lord marcus wrote:
Fixed the graphics issue on mine. and got my greeks. Fun to be had.

I set all of my graphics to medium, and I'm running smooth as can be, and the game still looks just fine to me. Can't wait till Friday night. I'll be home, family will be asleep, and I'll have a full night of uninterrupted gameplay.

suppose to have a patch on Friday aswell, but other than some gameplay problems, my game has run very well
, that said I still cannot wait to see what the modd community will be able to do with this game, I expect it to be on my comp for a very long time.

 djones520 wrote:
I'm not sure why they are so militant

Probably because Rome:TW was the game that really made the series. Shogun and Medieval were good but the expanded map, complexity and actual 3D models of Rome really kickstarted the TW series and made it properly mainstream. This, combined with the usual hyperactive hype machine meant that too many people were expecting Rome 2 to have the same effect on the series as Rome 1 did and this just isn't the case. People shouldn't believe hype, I know that and you know that, but they do and when they do they are inevitably disappointed so they vent though the worlds favourite method of complaining; the internet.

Apparently at least some of the graphics problems are to do with video memory on high performance machines so its quite possible that people with better specs than your PC were getting worse performance.

got this game day1 from steam and i must say i am enjoying it doing what i see a lot of people are on here and going with SPARTA!!!

There are a lot of confusing aspects to the game that i think will become more apparent with time and i seemed to have broken the tutorial prologue by going to gung ho (see Sparta suits) and had capped all the provinces but to no avail and it kept saying the target is in sight (I know I just bloody capped it!!!!!) not that im complaining im pretty sure its mark strong who voices it haha oh well it gives you hints when you start anyway!

I like how it’s not as easy to get allies you can’t just go up to some1 and say OI U!!! TRADE!!!, you have to take them on romantic walks flowers and such. Combats good I like the hidden aspects of the game allowing for a bit more strategy!

I like the way cavalry have seemed to get a slight boost i see myself using more and more as compared to shogun 2. I also half like that if your unit weapon damage isn’t enough you can’t harm a unit, for instance defending a settlement from a sizeable force wiped out all the units except the "very heavy cavalry" unit body guard so 1 had 2 slingers pelting them with stones they just stood there (for the whole 60 mins mind you) wondering what I was trying to achieve! (FYI reason i didn’t charge out is i had about 30 spear men left and 20 slingers total VS 80 very heavy cav and didn’t want to lose the settlement).

Over all i think it’s good and will be playing for the foreseeable future and it is the weekend so i expect to be glued to the PC!!

I just finished taking half of Spain in my hard Gaul playthrough. I got pretty far as Macedon on my normal 'get to know the game' game, but it was getting a bit too easy - had most of Greece over to Armenia, and Egypt, with the Seleucids as a client state controlling the coastal cities of the middle east, and Sparta as a client stat controlling Sparta, Sicily, and southern Italy.

anything useful in todays patch?

 Magc8Ball wrote:
I've been playing it on and off since it released last night... and I don't think I'm going to be playing it for very much longer. The game is, quite simply, terrible, and in ways that can't be fixed by mods or by patches.

I think you seriously underestimate the level of dedication of the Total War modding community. Which is, arguably, the best community of modders there is in the entire gaming industry. The Darth Mod for Empire simply left vanilla in the dust. By now, there must have been more hours put into Europa Barbarorum 2 then in the original. Most of the complaints you voice over Rome 2 features were also implemented in Shogun 2, and there's a lot of mods to fix them (unit movement, shooting, fatigue).

Vanilla Total War games are generally passable, but its the mods that make them shine.