StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I have to say that this new patch (even in its beta state) is impressive in terms of campaign AI. I attacked the Greek states before I had a foothold in Illyrium, which was a bad idea since that naval gap between Italia and the Greek Isles makes it a huge pain to reinforce my frontline. I don't know if this is happening in the background or not but it feels like my allied enemies are actually forming cohesive strategies together. And I can no longer leave cities that are in their reach undefended; they will now assuredly attack if there is an opportunity. They're also not doing that retarded thing where their forces abandon their cities as soon as my armies approach them. Instead, they'll coalesce their armies together and even bring allies to protect a vulnerable point.

That sounds awesome. Not just from ai cooperation, but because they've even formed an alliance in the first place.

What difficulty are you on? Do we know if harder difficulties just give the ai more bonuses or does it actually have more strategies available?

Steel wrote:That sounds awesome. Not just from ai cooperation, but because they've even formed an alliance in the first place.

What difficulty are you on? Do we know if harder difficulties just give the ai more bonuses or does it actually have more strategies available?

I'm actually on normal difficulty, believe it or not. I declared war on Sparta and Macedon by proxy since they were both allies. Macedon offered me a peace treaty, which I rejected (also another big mistake on my part). The turn after that, Athens declared war on me and I was fighting all of Greece by myself. The hardest thing is the unrelenting attacks. Even after defeating their armies, they gather their forces and come back in unison; three rag-tag armies still make for one formidable force. And then even after defeating that, the Macedonians end up employing an mercenary army and attacked me again without reprieve. And not to mention their agents are frustrating as fuck. They mostly fail their missions but with all three Greek nations employing agents at me at the same time, some of them get through. I've ended up cycling through two to three generals from assassinations alone.

Patch 2 is now fully live. Patch 3 will have "changes to battle gameplay and further improvements for specific hardware configurations".

Yeah, patch 2 has turned up the heat.....

Currently playing as Epirus, and have had both Sparta and Athens at my throat from the start. Macedon asking for and getting a NAP, as they were having issues in the east. I had a mixed army of around 3000 besieging Athens, as all of their armies had died attacking Appolonia, and there were only a 100 'normal' troops left plus the garrison. Before I know it, Sparta drops a pair of half stacks on me, pinning me between the garrison and the sea.

Turned into bit of a turning point, as I managed to wipe the garrison easy enough, and ended up with the Spartans merging the armies together to take me on, thankfully I managed to establish a choke point near the CP which diminished their light infantry.

In the end it ended up as a slugging match between a trio of my Pikemen regiments and the Generals Royal Spartans, which boiled down to the Immoveable Object meeting the Unstoppable Force. Ended with 98% losses on both sides, wiping out my principle assault army, but also annihilating the majority of Spartans forces. Thankfully I had the foresight to begin the formation of a third army beforehand, who are now enroute to Sparta, to chuck loudmouthed neckbeards down a well.

http://wiki.totalwar.com/w/Total_War_ROME_II:_Patch_3

Patch 3 is in beta, and here are the notes. Another very long list of fixes, changes, improvements, rebalancing, and general goodness. My favorites:

When the player is attacked whilst in a minor settlement (not provincial capital), a new "Sally Forth" button is available on the pre-battle panel to fight the attackers in an open field battle.

When an army in forced march is attacked on the Campaign Map, an ambush battle is now triggered, rather than a baggage train Victory Point battle .

Fixed chasing down of routers at the end of battles, so they engage in combat more often and can be killed more easily

Squalor and food consumption have been rebalanced (reduction for higher-level buildings) in Campaign modes.

Units that charge while in formation (e.g. block formation) stop sooner on contact with the enemy, to reduce "blobbing" where units converge into a disorganised brawl.

So, how is this game shaping up, after all these patches?

Would you say it was better or worse than late-build Empire, for example?

I'm considering making my occasional PC upgrade now, specifically for this game, as I love me some Total War. Think it's worth it, or worth putting it off?

Watched a gameplay video again, which freaking idiot decided it was a good idea to have the small portraits replaced by large drawn caricatures of men? Another change for no reason. Before I could easily see the number of men, what unit they were and how they are fearing.

The UI does conceal an absolute ton of imporant information such as morale, the thing that wins battles. If I could stand playing it, I'd comment on some of the gameplay ideas, but the UI is really really bad.

Has the UI ever been good about showing morale in any way other than 'unit's flag starts to turn white, they must be about to break.'?

Being massively less good at that is kind of an accomplishment.

Vehrec wrote:Has the UI ever been good about showing morale in any way other than 'unit's flag starts to turn white, they must be about to break.'?

They also had little images changing on unit portraits, like the portraits starting to flicker when in danger of breaking or showing white flags.

Sinewmire wrote:So, how is this game shaping up, after all these patches?

Would you say it was better or worse than late-build Empire, for example?

I'm considering making my occasional PC upgrade now, specifically for this game, as I love me some Total War. Think it's worth it, or worth putting it off?

For me its quite playable after Patch 2, but I really want Patch 3 to hurry up and come out because chasing down routing units is still borked.

I don't think it'll cost you anything to wait for a few more patches, but if you want to play right now your experience will be mostly fine provided you have a powerful system.

xthetenth wrote:The UI does conceal an absolute ton of imporant information such as morale, the thing that wins battles. If I could stand playing it, I'd comment on some of the gameplay ideas, but the UI is really really bad.

I don't find it all that different from previous games. The UI is less intrusive and I can still tell pretty easily whether I'm winning or losing, same as always.

I'm mainly pissed at how sprawling the game is.
It REALLY should have an option to play for a smaller map, say "The East" mini campaign, "Untamed Europa", and a "Mediterannean" campaign.
As it is, i'm zigzagging all over the map, and the campaign just won't bloody end.
And also, less damn factions/absurd turn time lengths.

xtheenth wrote:The UI does conceal an absolute ton of imporant information such as morale, the thing that wins battles. If I could stand playing it, I'd comment on some of the gameplay ideas, but the UI is really really bad.

OK, I heard people complain about the UI but I just don't see it. It's like in the TW games before, the flag getting damaged, blinking or disappearing tells you what status units are in. Is this the first TW game you've played?

I'm mainly pissed at how sprawling the game is.
It REALLY should have an option to play for a smaller map, say "The East" mini campaign, "Untamed Europa", and a "Mediterannean" campaign.
As it is, i'm zigzagging all over the map, and the campaign just won't bloody end.
And also, less damn factions/absurd turn time lengths.

The length is a lot less pronounced if you turn on limited AI moves (if you haven't already). Also I find the turns get shorter given that large numbers of factions get eliminated as time goes on. It may also be performance based.

I like the huge map personally - you can't very well recreate the Roman Empire of Trajan on a series of smaller maps.

Yeah, the huge map makes me finally feel that I'm building something epic. A refreshing experience after just conquering the same small island set thrice in the last installment. Unlike many others I actually like E:TW which had the same epic map and was disappointed that N:TW was drastically reduced in scope.

The many minor factions actually add quite a lot of color and immersion to the game. It's for sure better than having just the same few half a dozen nations be the only relevant players and the rest as generic, gray "rebels" which R:TW had.

Metahive wrote:

xtheenth wrote:The UI does conceal an absolute ton of imporant information such as morale, the thing that wins battles. If I could stand playing it, I'd comment on some of the gameplay ideas, but the UI is really really bad.

OK, I heard people complain about the UI but I just don't see it. It's like in the TW games before, the flag getting damaged, blinking or disappearing tells you what status units are in. Is this the first TW game you've played?

No, that would be Shogun. I tried it again and yeah, it's more passable than I said. I guess that the horrid framerate I was getting combined with all the extra particle effects made it a lot harder to read. However, not getting the more detailed information in non-icon form without waiting half the time is still bad.

Patch 4 has gone live. They're really improving/fixing the shit out of this game. The play experience gets better in each patch. It just "feels" better, and all the battle and AI improvements listed are welcome. One thing I noticed immediately - while diplomacy has been much better in this game, there were still some factions who I fucked up - and then made peace with - who refused to trade with me even many turns after the war ended (in the case of Colchis, they were destroyed by another faction until rebels re-established them). After this patch, they accepted my offer to trade immediately. Same with the Marcomani, who I made a client state (after establishing the historical Roman border frontier).

Vympel wrote:Patch 4 has gone live. They're really improving/fixing the shit out of this game. The play experience gets better in each patch. It just "feels" better, and all the battle and AI improvements listed are welcome. One thing I noticed immediately - while diplomacy has been much better in this game, there were still some factions who I fucked up - and then made peace with - who refused to trade with me even many turns after the war ended (in the case of Colchis, they were destroyed by another faction until rebels re-established them). After this patch, they accepted my offer to trade immediately. Same with the Marcomani, who I made a client state (after establishing the historical Roman border frontier).

Excellent, that bug was pissing me off. I try to keep trade agreements with everyone that I can, and even nations that were strapped for cash were just refusing to trade.

Reduced qualifying trait list for various "Mad" traits (such as "Not quite right" or "Unhinged") for generals in campaign modes.

Also good. I'm pretty sure half of my generals and admirals at any given time were always insane.

Things are getting much better. The game is mostly playable for me now, though large battles are still unacceptably sluggish. The campaign and small battles run much more smoothly, though.

Started an Iceni game to play around with things, and I like the barbarian mechanics. Forming a confederation is cool, and gives me some vague King of Dragon Pass vibes. Apart from slowing down the AI turns, having 80 zillion different minor factions is cool. I just wish more were playable.

http://wiki.totalwar.com/w/Total_War_ROME_II:_Patch_5

Patch 5 is out, and with it, the long-awaited (by me) Seleucid faction DLC

Like this one:

Added unit numbers to Unit Cards. These can now be enabled in battle interface options ("Unit Card Man Count" check box).

Why that wasn't there from the beginning, I have no idea.

I'm pretty sure there's a long list of things in their bug tracker/feature list that you're going to be wondering the same thing about when it's just simply that other things got prioritized.

I can understand issues with ai etc that appear easy being a difficult fix, but surely sticking a number on a card is the sort of low hanging fruit you want to knock out first so people can see visible progress.

I want to get back in to this, but I haven't had time recently. Managed to get one turn in a couple of days ago but not enough to really tell if things had changed much, although the rebalancing had left me with a 130 food surplus and tripled my earnings. I kind of feel that troop costs should be at least as high as they were at launch, especially for Romans and doubly for elite units, so that army composition isn't just the best you can build spammed and still have cash to spare. I'd like to have to balance cost and upkeep so that elite units would be special and actually stand out in battle, while you make do with standard troops most of the time.