Rome Total War II

[Forest Dweller]

So I recently acquired this game, and I was wondering...Rome and Carthage are the only two factions where you can pick individual houses within, presumably with specific gameplay mechanics that go along with that. Am I missing much by playing as one of the other factions? I was considering starting as an eastern faction, possibly the Seleucids. But if not as much attention was given to the other factions as Rome and Carthage (something I'm suspecting), I may not. Is this true?

 

[Commissar Draco]

OH, YOU SICK FUCK.

Was tempted to acquire Attila but it seems that the only good RTW is still the RTW I and mods done by unpaid amateurs for MTW 2... after 16 patches; glorious fall of Rome swallowed by Popamolard Invasion.

 

[Cyberarmy]

So I recently acquired this game, and I was wondering...Rome and Carthage are the only two factions where you can pick individual houses within, presumably with specific gameplay mechanics that go along with that. Am I missing much by playing as one of the other factions? I was considering starting as an eastern faction, possibly the Seleucids. But if not as much attention was given to the other factions as Rome and Carthage (something I'm suspecting), I may not. Is this true?

Not much difference except obvious units and buildings. But I had more fun while playing as the Seleucids, they have a challenging starting position, good unit diverstiy and stomping poor soldiers with Cataphract charge never ceases to amaze.

 

[Corporate_Jew_Master]

MEH, Atilla and Huns are on their way.

PREORDER TO PLAY AS VIKINGS

 

[Jick Magger]

Apparently the Vikings are mostly consisting of various tribes that may've existed around the time the Western Empire fell, though to refer to any of them as 'vikings' is a reeeeal stretch.

 

[Forest Dweller]

So I recently acquired this game, and I was wondering...Rome and Carthage are the only two factions where you can pick individual houses within, presumably with specific gameplay mechanics that go along with that. Am I missing much by playing as one of the other factions? I was considering starting as an eastern faction, possibly the Seleucids. But if not as much attention was given to the other factions as Rome and Carthage (something I'm suspecting), I may not. Is this true?

Not much difference except obvious units and buildings. But I had more fun while playing as the Seleucids, they have a challenging starting position, good unit diverstiy and stomping poor soldiers with Cataphract charge never ceases to amaze.

So what does picking an individual "house" even mean? Is it just a faction (like Rome 1)?

 

[BlackAdderBG]

Just different bonuses.Nothing like in original where you get different missions.

 

[Forest Dweller]

So I started a game as the Seleucids, and...wow, lots to take in. I see about a third of the map already, have tons of diplomatic options and interactions with other factions. This definitely isn't a "beginner" faction. They've also added a bunch of new features to this entry (off the top of my head: regions versus provinces, edicts, political system, more diplomatic options, stances for generals, etc). I'm reconsidering my choice lol. The issue is I like to micromanage a lot in the early stages of these games. Also I seem to be starting in a position of strength relative to my neighbors, something I'm not used to.

 

[not an artichoke]

Seems lovely until all your satrapies revolt and your northern and southern neighbors declare war at the same time. If you act quickly and keep Persia happy on your eastern border to fight off your former satraps you can do ok though.

 

[Great Deceiver]

So I bought the master pack on Steam because I didn't realize there was a grandmaster pack with all the dlc for an extra 5 bucks, i blame my shitty phone. How good is the dlc? I'm pretty butthurt right now.

 

[flabbyjack]

I don't own the DLC. Seems pretty worthless 'horse armor' for the most part. THe exception are the campaigns DLCs like Caesar in Gaul, which add the standard campaign mode instead of Sandbox. I assume those campaign DLCs are like the Napoleon: Total War campaigns (Map is same 'size' per se, but represents a smaller geographical area)

Btw I recommend the 'build in 1 turn' and 'research in 1 turn' mods. THey affect the AI factions too, but it's really awesome to beeline straight for top-tier Rome units (which are the best in the game), and give them weapon/armor upgrades, then roflstomp enemy armies.

 

[Forest Dweller]

So I'm playing as Rome, and...

I can't transfer units from one army to another without without bringing the whole armies together because all armies have to have a general at all times?

And public order applies to the whole region instead of to individual settlements, meaning if you conquer a settlement, that penalty affects the whole region?

WHAT THE FUCK.

And I'm confused about this army recruitment thing. Does it matter at all what province you're in the units that you can recruit? Is it global?

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

I've finished a campaign as Cimmeria (sp?). First time I've spent more than 2-3 hours with a Total War game since Medieval 2 (and I didn't even play Rome 1 at all). It's still the popamole of grand strategies it always was, the "free movement" 3d strategic map just makes it more tedious. Some of the mechanics are completely fucking dumb and seemingly designed with the intention of pissing the player off as much as possible. I still had some decent fun with it though, nice graphics and murdering barbarian hordes with ballistae and hoplites is satisfying.

The province development is the biggest culprit here. I don't even mean the fact that it looks and feels like something taken out of a flash game, but the "build stuff that gives food and decreases happiness, build stuff that gives happiness but uses food" mechanic it's based on, jesus. When you have more than a few provinces and you research something new you can't even build it, you have to count how much food it will use up and usually it will use up enough to put you on a negative. Since the game doesn't give any warning of "you gonna starve bro" I lost a war first time it happened since negative food decimated my best army from full strength to like 10 men per unit in a few turns. Even worse, those penalties that buildings carry with them don't even make any sense most of the time. OK, military buildings use up some food and working in an ancient mine probably sucks so I get happiness penalty, I can buy that. But why the hell does building farms make my population unhappy, with butthurt progressing as I modernise and upgrade them? Resistance to frankenwheat? I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure ancient Greeks didn't rebel because someone was trying to feed them. And an example from the other side: constructing sanitary buildings apparently puts a huge dent in my food production. Seriously? If there's one thing worse than dumb and irritating game mechanic it's a dumb and irritating game mechanic that's also completely arbitrary. Oh, and people rebelling because I just conquered an enemy town in the same province. Hard to fathom someone dumb enough to think that the global happiness thingy from CiV was actually a good idea.

The interface takes the second spot. You thought that Witcher 2 or post-Morrowind Bethesda games had an abortion of a UI? Well, those games were console popamole action dross, this here is a PC-exclusive grand strategy game and yes, it's worse. The research tree takes 6 screens instead of one for no reason whatsoever. You think maybe with these huge-ass technology icons you can at least see all the details on what things do on a given screen? Nope, six screens and you still have to hover over each one individually to know what it is and how long it takes. But brace your undies for the general and agent skill trees. They exist, but you can't see them! Yep, before you learn them by heart (sic!), you have to consult the unwieldy encyclopedia/manual every time. Want to upgrade your 20-unit army with new armour? Hovering each unit once for selection and clicking once for actual upgrade sounds fun, right? I will admit though, I'm not sure why people were making so much fuss over the unit cards or the battle interface. These seem pretty clear to me.

The third goes to the hard limit of armies and the requirement for each of them to be led by a magically spawned general. This makes logistics and army management tedious, especially reinforcing/modernising your line stacks. And generals respawning each turn from thin air is just pants on head retarded. Killing/assassinating an enemy leader often works against you because next turn you'll have to face a full strength unit of elite troops.

Battles are OK. Typically for this series they are incredibly easy and you have to be facing really overwhelming numerical/technological (and the second almost never happens) superiority to not win with like 3-5:1 kill ratio. AI is predictable and suffers from occasional brainfarts, like running their cavalry in pointless circles or suddenly stopping its troops under heavy fire, but it often tries to flank and uses skirmish/missile troops pretty well. Its cavalry charges also took me by surprise a few times in bigger battles when there's lots of stuff to pay attention to. Unit collision is pretty bad, yeah, looks really weird sometimes, but I like the general feel of combat, raining fire on approaching barbarian hordes feels good man. Naval battles... I'm not sure I understand them. Sometimes I order all my ships to ram and they sink enemy fleet instantly, but sometimes the ramming doesn't seem to work and my ships get boarded on contact and boarding is magical and can't be disengaged, AI loves to use fleets composed of actual land troops and they are much better at boarding than regular navy, go figure.

Later on of course you autoresolve most stuff, even though the autoresolve is hilariously skewed (another revered TW tradition), predicting total army loss in battles that you can win blindfolded and massacring your siege weapons and cavalry no matter the odds.

The strategic AI is both bad and good. Bad, cause it nags you with "gib money" all the time and morons refuse mutually lucrative trading agreements even if you offer 200k gold in a bundle (literally, I tried that). Good, because it doesn't go berserk on you for no reason or when it has 0 chance of winning and it actually does recognize when it's beaten, even offering tribute or becoming a client state. So obvious, yet so few strategy games have that. I think it still cheats, though, one-town factions produce and support full stacks of units which should not be possible and I think they still spawn armies out of thin air where the player can't see it.

Finishing a campaign also takes way too much time for the kind of entertainment this game provides. Initial struggle is exciting, grinding for the victory objectives is not. Military requires you to take regions across the whole map and maintain 240 units afair, which is a crazy amount (you don't even need half of that to take on anyone on the map and win comfortably). Economic needs trading agreements with 15 factions and an income of 90k net per turn. That's the one I won, but those requirements are rather mutually exclusive, by the time you expand enough to earn that kind of money there are barely 15 nations on the map and most of them hate you for expansionism. Cultural - don't have any thoughts about that one, but conquering provinces and switching them to your culture is probably similarly grindy.

Performance wise it seems fixed, at least I see no problems. I can run it on very high just fine on my laptop, better than Shogun 2 actually, at least the loading times are much faster.

Edit: Oh, and I ignored the political stuff completely. Seems pretty tacked on to be honest.

 

[A horse of course]

The strategic AI is both bad and good. Bad, cause it nags you with "gib money" all the time and morons refuse mutually lucrative trading agreements even if you offer 200k gold in a bundle (literally, I tried that)..

I think the highest I got was 500,000 gold to a shitty 1-province backwater faction for a non-aggression treaty...which they still refused. On the upside, this kinda behaviour is a tell that they're planning to fuck you over, even if there's no indication of such from the faction relations.

 

[Jick Magger]

I played the game for something like 100 hours, and I never figured out just how the fuck the naval combat works. I eventually just began ignoring it and avoided enemy navies whenever I could, and autoresolved rights when I could not.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Another funny thing connected to naval warfare is that autoresolving it often results in a lot of ships surviving, but with decimated crews. Which is something that almost never happens when you play it out manually. Something like 9 out of 10 attacked ships die to ramming or boarding (that's right, in Rome 2 boarding is for sinking ships, not overtaking them) and only some lucky ones escape when they panic, since panicking is the only way of breaking the spell that holds the fighting ships together.

 

[Irenaeus]

Play R:TW

 

[Beowulf]

I played the game for something like 100 hours, and I never figured out just how the fuck the naval combat works. I eventually just began ignoring it and avoided enemy navies whenever I could, and autoresolved rights when I could not.

Same here, with ~150 hours. I was hoping for Salamis but resorted to avoidance and autoresolve eventually. Sometimes I could ram the enemy fleet and sink them completely, but upon coming back to that battle and replaying it some ships would just stop short of their targets and block themselves on oars.

Some mods do enhance the experience enough to make it worth playing (in my eyes), but some mechanics cannot be changed, like Zboj Lamignat mentioned - the infamous wonder generals being the best example.
With proper battle mods (mainly slowing the battles down) the BattleAI seems to fare better, and you will face battles that you simple cannot win.

 

[Jick Magger]

I played a couple of battles, and whether or not your ship actually managed to sink an enemy with a ram was a total crapshoot, and it became outright dangerous when you dealt with infantry transports since they could easily just turn around and immediately begin boarding your ship and overwhelm your crew. The no-cost infantry transports wound up actually being better in a battle than the dedicated naval vessels since they could just board enemy vessels and swamp them with qualitatively equal but more numerous troops.

 

[KoolNoodles]

Maybe it's playing with Divide Et Impera, but the basic greek galleys that can ram with the iron prow will absolutely wreck troop transports. They are faster and more maneuverable and with "row hard" you can line up a ram to amidships, glance to one side or the other and get away if the ship isn't crippled(which a lot of times it is).

It took me a bit to get the hang of them though. Also having a few archer ships with fire arrows to distract and slow them down as you maneuver the fast ramming galleys is good too. Sometimes one will get caught, which sucks, but most of the time they are good.

 

[Beowulf]

Yeah, I'm using Divide et Impera too, can't imagine going back to vanilla. Still, I don't know if I can allocate more time to test naval component more thoroughly.

 

[Trash]

Atilla has a shitload of Rome II's flaws but still seems like a decent game in its own right. What irks me is how the 'mods will fix it' thing is quickly going the way of the dodo. No, for once I'm not bitching about CA but about their fan base. I'm frankly stunned by how much the mod scene has declined for the TW titles in recent years. When you look past the few decent examples like DEI you come across row after row of crap 'rebalances' and other sub-par shit. The Radious mods are some of the worst. Hailed as the saviour for TW games they practically throw everything and the kitchen sink at the vanilla game. Resulting in bizarro units, bizarro AI behaviour and wierd art style meshes everywhere. It's all too amateur but is considered the best around. WTF happened?

 

[KoolNoodles]

Well they released a handful of shit games, broken promises, and hardcoded a ton of stuff. All while promising "mod tools", ever since Empire. Then they said modders had already made tools better than what they would have given. A lot of the "bigger" names in the mod scene were expecting studio made map editors, campaign editors, unit editors, etc.

Just look at how many people are still modding and playing MTW2, and there's also part of your answer. They alienated the base built up since the modding scene got big with MTW original, and now you have the aforementioned dumb cobbled trash that is Radious or whatever some kid thinks is funny and throws on the Steam Workshop.

 

[Raghar]

Atilla has a shitload of Rome II's flaws but still seems like a decent game in its own right. What irks me is how the 'mods will fix it' thing is quickly going the way of the dodo. No, for once I'm not bitching about CA but about their fan base. I'm frankly stunned by how much the mod scene has declined for the TW titles in recent years. When you look past the few decent examples like DEI you come across row after row of crap 'rebalances' and other sub-par shit. The Radious mods are some of the worst. Hailed as the saviour for TW games they practically throw everything and the kitchen sink at the vanilla game. Resulting in bizarro units, bizarro AI behaviour and wierd art style meshes everywhere. It's all too amateur but is considered the best around. WTF happened?

Well, that's the problem. Do you remember what old modders said about copyright, DRM, or similar stuff? I don't give a shit about copyright. They spend effort, did some serious shit, and proved they really want to release things. I remember how firewall said about one mod, instead of allow/deny, it said allow/kill. Yes it was that serious shit. And it was an attempt to reduce number of crashes because nobody gave them source code.
I also remember how they made Oblivion extender, aka binary hack that allowed MUCH greater freedom with mods.
When I remember how crappy are editors used by real game developers, and why they are so crappy (because game developer don't wanna waste time by improving it when it's usable already and he wants to create stuff with it), I wonder how any modder can actually expect he would get something better than what game developer used. Editing unit stats is just about changing few binary values, who would want editor for that?
Basically they lost skills, and they expected too much.

But I seen the real problem when I seen the discussion about DLC, and mods. "These are locked out from moding, but if they were not we wouldn't have this discussion (implied for legal reasons)." Well, old modders when they would be able to create mod that basically replicated the DLC, and do that by using fact that all models are exposed for multiplayer, wouldn't give a shit about taking away profit from companies. They would say, look we replicated the DLC (and corrected some flaws in the process), are you happy?

I guess the piracy ostracization culture works against personal freedom and artistic expression that happens free of charge. No technical skills - no modders. No willingness to break laws - no modders. No artistic expression - no modders.

 

[Irenaeus]

Who would want to mod a shit game when you can just play the better, older version of it?