My Rome 2 Total War Review

Rome 2 Review

When we say that Rome wasn't built in a day, its pretty clear that its applied to Total War: Rome 2. In this review I will be focusing on Gameplay, Economy, Diplomacy, CAI, BAI and cats, well not really the last one.

Rome 2 is an ambitious project you can actually tell from the revamped feel and presentation that they have thrown at us, for some so forcefully that its bordering , for others enjoyable and fun.

I'm not going to enter in the technical flaws, I'm affected by it, but its one thing that will be eventually solved, albeit some being structural due to being the engine problem (i.e. cpu usage)

I'm a veteran TW fanatic, I have played all of the games and all the expansions logging a sizeable portion of my life into that series, think that each game I have around 300-500 hours on it, the exceptions are Napoleon Total War, Shogun Total War, Medieval Total War and Medieval 2 Total War, which I have around 30-50h, so yeah half the series.

So let's go with the Jack the Ripper method and go bit by bit.

Gameplay is going to be divided in several categories, namely UI, features, balance, so moving unto UI.

UI

UI has received a major overhaul, its clear that those endless panels of cluttered information have given way to a more simple approach of hover and drop down. Im just going to say outright, I like it. I do have some gripes with it, the hovering mouse for actions is not only annoying but hinders your usual response that is to click, this is a glaring flaw on design that I don't know how it came to be, moreover its a simple things to know. I also miss more detailed information on generals and current political situation, simply there isn't enough info on there.

The battle UI received an overhaul as well, it suffers from the same hover drop down problem for actions and now the army roster takes more space on screen, sincerely there isn't enough things here to be called an overhaul, they simply changed the aesthetics of how things were shown since the beginning of the series, nothing new, nothing interesting.

I'm going to make it simple here, information that isn't selected and deployed in a manner that we can not only grasp it, but apply it immediately is useless. Strategy games that tend/try to be more complex suffer from this badly, there is so much useless things in a single panel that its trash, thats not information its garbage collection.

With the UI out of the way, lets move to features, and this is going to be a long part, so shall we?

FEATURES

Rome 2 has some ambitious propositions to remake the game that really catapulted the series Up to Eleven and sincerely if you negate the tech problems that some seem to be afflicted, me included, it tries to deliver some new things to the series and generally it does so well.

PROVINCE SYSTEM

The Province System is basically a more compact and expanded revision of Empire: Total War system for theaters. Its a good system, it simply works and adds more flavor to the campaign part.
Its a basic division of what was before, we had at the pre Warscape games a city that had some territory around it and some icons to demonstrate resources present in that territory, the new engine removes those icons and escalate them to mini cities, Rome 2 blends the new engine approach with the old engine approach.

The Province System now is divided into minor cities that can number from 1-3 and a Capital. The latter is the only walled city of the province and that represents an effort to diminish the siege spam, on contrast that effort is the only thing that is inherently tied to this new management system that is broken. We simply swapped the walled battles for battles with obstacles, read houses some fences and a capture point to boot.

Aside that expansion of the city is still limited compared to pre Warscape titles, you have between 3-4 slots that you can construct your buildings in a minor city and 5-6 in the capital, and the variety of what you can do in a main settlement is different than on a minor one, so that another layer of flavor to the system.

With that we can now have edicts that boost the province capabilities, which is a feature that I actually appreciate and the limited number of those does bring another layer of depth to the system.

The other problem with the system is that now all changes are global to the province, simply put, if I conquer a minor settlement and have the culture penalty removed from it, it applies to all the cities in that province, so my penalties are much less and my armies can move faster and conquer the rest of the province with much impunity, this is specially true at the beginning of the game when we have all those one settlement factions, so I move in for a province and remove the culture from it, the other penalties that will upset the rhythm of one expansion is removed, and only the usual squalor, taxes and resistance to occupation will appear. In mid game this disappears since the factions will have more or less have a good foothold so a swift and fast action is necessary to kill the faction itself than to conquer the province.

POLITICAL SYTEM

Political System is another idea that is brought to this game, its basically a revamped and expanded feature that was in there since Empire, the prestige that was gradually developed into something that matters has received a new boost, however I think that this boost is not enough. I have mentioned that there is a lack of information regarding this system in the UI part, simply put its something that is a great idea, with a somewhat mixed execution, we don't have enough info to be a mini game and its previous attribute that was to trigger realm divided mechanic is there.

My take is that this system can constitute, as aforementioned, a mini game and an interesting one on top of that. With the political dispute being a major play on all of humanity history, this is something that not only is interesting but one more thing to bring small drops of reality and complexity into a game. With more information and possibly some changes to this system this is going to be one of the major funs of the game.

ARMIES

Armies have changed to a centralized recruitment system and a limit on how many you can spam on your campaign, and that is a good thing. For one the need to build more than 6 armies on any TW game is debatable, so the limit is actually not there, what does present a problem is the guarding of your borders. Before one would have to balance the economy so that the armies could go conquer, pillage, ravage the lands of those pitiful enemies, now the player is faced with another challenge to balance the expansion, defense and the economy.

Let me be clear, its really not even heard or complex to do that. While before we did recruit some garrison forces and deployed those to selected settlements now we are faced with pre built garrison forces that are based on what buildings you have in your settlement, so defense has become an actual task.

In pre Warscape I had 3 armies to form a group, the battle force, the replenishment force and the occupation/defense force. With the auto replenishment system I got a bonus to my economy with no penalty to expansion, now we are faced with the challenge of balance, sincerely after you set up your economy there is nothing to stop you from rampant expansion. In all my campaigns I would focus on economy and immediate threat extermination, after that it was a basic steam roll. So the fun was really at the start and middle of the campaign, which was when I would them proceed to destroy everything with impunity. Now we have to balance the defense with limited resources, it really brings more depth and more complexity.

The recruitment system is an improvement, I keep hearing that it limits player choices and that we are now also faced with long travels for the recruitment center that you have established somewhere along your empire. Truthfully, I don't see how that is relevant, simply put unless you make your armies of only levies, recruiting another unit that was destroyed in battle always took you a long time, what it does now is that it negates you the ability of sending that unit from afar to your army. I still don't see a problem here.

The Mixed battles are something very very interesting and bring a new flavor to the campaign and battles in general. Currently its held back by the AI, both in terms of CAI and BAI, for the player there is a new very open possibility, to attack a settlement using only your navy, or doing a mixed invasion.

The new battle types done by the several instances that are possible for armies, are interesting, the forced march puts you in the spot of a defend your wagons so that your army isn't destroyed by lack of supplies. However I have one gripe that is the fortified instance, I don't much care that you have to defend a capture point, since you are fortified anyway, thus you have a fort. The problem lies that in name of diminishing sieges you are faced with a non usable fort. its too small. Although from my take after I played its on scale, but its basically a fortified encampment than an actual fort as one would expect

So to sum it all up in terms of gameplay this game offers something new, something used, something borrowed and something blue. The new things and they are basically revamped with a new spin or not, offer value to the game and while inherently there would be flaws, as all things have, there isn't one single thing that I think in terms of features that is completely broken or that needs fixing asap. They simply work. Blues are still blue anyway.

ECONOMY

The economy is more complex now. There is no beating the bush here, its more challenging to build an economy now, and there is only one reason why, squalor.

Squalor is a make or break plague on your empire, simply put, with my experiments, I have discovered that you simply can't walk into mordor, so no building to the limit like you did in previous games of the series, you seriously have to balance what you are trying to do.

Aside those filthy things we also have the following problem, food. Its global, its not only there so you can expand or not your cities, you armies will wither in the field, revolts will appear, your economy will falter and you will be killed from the inside.

The relationship between squalor, food and money is pretty simple, the more you want or not from each one of them, you need the other 2. So I want to build higher tier and more money earning building, I will either need more food or will have to endure more squalor. Thus given that I have incurred the need for more food, I will produce more food generating more squalor, therefore I will be begging people to kill the rats and be healthy, because to fight squalor I need food.

So all in all its a simple system that involves 3 major resources that you have to balance those in a cyclical way. And that is loads of fun. Currently I still think that squalor needs to be toned down a bit, but just a bit.

So far the best strategy is not to balance, but to go for specialization, yes province level specialization, this is the most beneficial strategy so far. So go all out agricultural so that your industrialized cities can have the food that they need, not to mention that gives you the best overall monetary benefit, since food surplus gives you boost to replenishment and settlement growth, not to mention that this strategy gives you tons of money. For example in my last roman campaign I got the 80k per turn victory condition with half of gaul, iberia, italy and greece, that's not even half of the map. I had 6 armies and 3 navies, all of them using elite troops.

DIPLOMACY

Its a strange beast, it works as per shogun 2, you now have serious handicaps due to your culture, meaning within your culture you can easily go make trade agreements, however if its out of that boundary, you are in for some serious cash throwing.

Peace can be maintained, the treaties are respected, so it simply works.

CAI

I had no major problems with the CAI, it works mostly. People claim its not aggressive enough, but since I was always on good terms with the other factions I never had a problem with aggro, no I don't play on legendary.

There are 2 things that are troublesome, one is that the armies that the CAI is raising, are to say the least pitiful. The best roster that I had so far was in the civil war, where there armies not made only by levies.

The 2nd is that as per the previous troubles with the CAIs, is that it can't create and maintain a good economy, so the armies are basic troops, in quantity. And that is troublesome given that they don't offer you a challenge.

Another thing is that I find interesting the strategy of the AI to blockade ports, its all in all a good strategy, within the mechanics that we have available its a reliable one and that can cause troubles to your enemies and to your allies as well.

I just wish that it would muster better forces as per the idea of more significant battles, that would not only solve the problem of the continuous blockades, but would give you more interesting battles. But to do that, we need to fix the economic problem of the AI and its inability to maintain a working economy.

BAI

Following from the good show from shogun and napoleon we receive something that is broken. Its on the same level as the other titles from the series, except those 2. So you know terrible. Its not only a poor job, but because the CAI is not balanced, I'm destroying numerical superior forces of 5-1 with very few casualties, usually less than 300. One grave example was one battle that I killed more than 3.000 troops with only a 100 casualties, force composition was nothing special (4 levy peltasts, 2 levy slingers, 6 pike phalanx [the one above the levy phalanx], 6 hoplites, 1 companion cavalry and 1 foot companion general), the settings were normal, with medium unit sizes.

Yes I do think the battles are too fast, they really are fast paced now, and given that the troops don't have auto attack its becoming troublesome to play without using pause, specially since I'm having performance issues, so suddenly susan things stop responding, 10s latter we have the game unfreeze again, then we also have the mouse not responding, or the continuous input of something (for example using wasd to move around the map, I will often find myself staring at the edge of the map)


CATS

Cats are feline and I like em. I like dogs too specially mongrels. This must be the most interesting part of all this.

GRADE

Grades are not averaged in any single way or form possible, so no n distribution or f or whatever you want. And I'm not going to

Gameplay - 9

Economy - 9

Diplomacy - 9

CAI - 6

BAI - 1

Total - 7

cats - 11

 

excellent, balanced review.

my bai doesnt seem as bad as you make it, but maybe i am just not as good a player. but it is definitely worse than shogun 2's.

 

thanks. I tried to input and evaluate as much of the core as possible, the bugs that exist now should be fixed in the future, for example my performance is actually much better now, and there is no need to actually wine about it, they are fixing it and there already tons of people raging over the game already, more bashing doesn't accomplish much

My BAI is not as bad as the other people that are posting on youtube, I don't have the pathfinding problems that some people have and I only once saw the attack and retreat of a skirmish unit (probably bad coding, its probably still in skirmish mode so you asked it to attack me and its out of ammo, thats not going to happen), and I didn't saw the loony frontal charge of cavalry against spears

The AI is simply inefficient to create a good enough roster and to try to do something with it. I was actually scared when there was a battle that was basically 10 units of levy slingers along with 6 mixed spear and sword infantry, I thought that I was a goner, but due to bad positioning I manage to simply charge the enemy front lines and get the slingers a ticket to hades

My main gripes with the game right now are:

performance issues - while its MUCH better, I still can play shogun on medium high, while here its all on low

Balance - Squalor is simply too much, and I noticed that its not applying correctly the bonus of the sanitation buildings, so they are worthless now, that is one example and the one that Im more concerned, slingers are death machines now, they actually kill about the same amount of people as javelins

AI - the best proposition that I have is to remove the penalties for the AI factions, squalor, food and so forth, that would give them a major boost, they can't get it to work right now, and I can't blame some of it, given that some factions start with only the capital, so food production is not only limited (the highest temple that gives food that I saw is 6, only 6, thats incredibly small.) For the BAI, I really don't know what to do, they try to maintain formation, reform when reinforcements arrive on their back or simply attack when the reinforcements are in a flanking position, but its still ineffective

 

they were trying to make the ai more organic, and kudos to them for trying. instead of choosing from a set number of battle presets, it tries to 'read' the battlefield and campaign map. unfrotunately, its not quite there yet.

they did the same thing with medieval 2 when they did away with the rock-paper-scissors metagame. instead they developed a system based on armor, weight, momentum, penetration, etc that was meant to emphasize the knight's battlefield importance. afaik, that was the most intricate system in any tw game. again, it didnt necessarily work as planned but imho, it was not as bad as others made it out to be.

 

I don't know m2tw it was basically still a rock paper shotgun scheme, shotgun was simply the pike shot formation with heavy cavalry still in there, it was unbeatable.

I really don't know what to make the BAI better, it got everything that we wished for, it advances on formation, but its inefficiency in battle is extraordinary. I have lost only one battle till today, it was in my now macedon campaign, I was as usual outnumbered 4-1, fairly good army, basically 7 thorax phalanx, 4 royal peltasts, 4 levy peltasts, 4 tessalian cavalry and 1 foot companion as a general all silver chevroned

the enemy force was one of the most balanced that I saw, they had ultra long range support with 2 units of greek balista, a balanced roster of long range with slingers, medium range with peltasts and decent balance of spear and swords, to top all that they army was even experienced! thats the main army, the supports were also balanced they had 5 armies in total, not all full stacks

a dream come true right? I only saw a few of those in shogun 2 in my campaigns I was excited!

I arranged my troops in a defensive formation (the AI attacked me), it was brilliant peltasts on the back of the phalanx, forward wings being formed with royal peltasts defensive wings formed with the heavy cavalry!

the enemy started moving forward bombarding me in long range, I took the shots, praying for the inaccuracy, when they got far away enough I moved my cavalry and destroyed their balista, only to remember that I was in forced march, stupidly I entered enemy territory in that stance and the AI was moving for my wagons... I rushed to the capture point that was far away, I forgot the reinforcements and they started to attack me from afar and send units to flank me on 3 sides, it was a perfect kill box. I lost my entire veteran army because of 2 noob mistakes, oh and they did capture and tried hard to maintain the capture point.

They still lost 3k units, I at least had to make them suffer. thus they still had 1k of troops an entire army (Im playing on medium sizes)

that was the only instance that it ever happened on this game.

Im not perfect nor Im that good in battles, to think that Im still winning against those usual odds is strange.

 

im quite sure about mw2. its one of the reasons why non bodkin arrows were useless against knights and landschneks; and why the knights charge was devastating even to spear units short of a pike formation.

with regards to rome 2's bai, maybe they factored in too many variables that the ai just cant compute them all to formulate a viable strategy. but you are right we actually got what the community wanted, it just didnt pan out the way it was supposed to.

 

the problem was the charge of cavalry, it was devastating no matter what unit you put against it, pike shot was a classic formation that the community developed.

basically you put musketeers inside the pike, they shoot whatever is coming, the pike does defence of the shot and attack if close combat is needed, coupled with heavy cavalry no army can beat you

I still think its a matter of economy, with better armies the AI would fare better in battles.

that one was the only one that I ever encountered artillery units in a stack and the tactics was solid, they ran to the capture point in formation, attacked me in the flanks in formation, while bombarding me from 2 different directions

maybe the BAI fights better with a more robust roster of units, since it has more leeway to deploy and engage in multiple scenarios, thus I think your theory on the BAi is correct