Total War: Rome 2 announced for 2013!

Total War: Rome 2 preview: every detail there is to know

Total War Rome 2 preview: every detail about the new engine, naval combat, multiplayer and mods


The original Rome is one of the most enduringly popular games in the Total War series. It did away with sprites, rendering warfare in full 3D. It added depth and flexibility to the campaign game, coupled with one of the most varied and evocative eras in the history of human conflict. It even formed the basis of a historical TV show.

A sequel to Rome is, according to Total War lead designer James Russell, the most frequent request that Creative Assembly receive – and a few weeks ago, I visited the developer to see that sequel for myself. I was shown a ten minute battle demonstration, running live and in-engine but with pre-scripted troop movements and a planned outcome. What I saw was really exciting, but it’s worth being clear about the fact that this was a first look at a game that is early in development, with a lot that the developers aren’t willing to show. The impression I got was that there’s much still to be nailed down behind the scenes and as such a lot of the specific detail that Total War fans will be looking far was hard to come by. They were however willing to talk about the direction and themes of Rome 2’s design, and I was given exclusive interviews with the people behind the game. Here’s everything there is to know so far.
Bigger, more detailed battles


The setting for the demonstration was the Roman siege of Carthage at the end of the Thrid Punic War, circa 146 – the battle that famously ended with the total destruction of the north African city by Roman forces. The opening shot was a close-up on Roman consul Scipio Aemilianus, giving orders to his men on board a warship. Total War: Rome 2 runs on a new engine that supports the largest and most detailed battles in the series’ history, to the extent of supporting full, in-engine cutscenes. In place of a traditional general’s speech, then, the siege of Carthage began with an actual conversation between Scipio and his men, before zooming out to take in the sight of the Roman fleet approaching the heavily-defended shoreline.

Ships and armies can now take part in the same battles when the situation demands it. As troop-carrying biremes crashed into the shore, Roman boats armed with catapults kept their distance and provided covering fire for the dismounting troops, who formed into ranks before charging up the beach towards the walls. I later asked if this ‘rolling start’ meant that the deployment phase was a thing of the past, but that’s not the case – instead, CA are looking to be more flexible about how battles can begin, based on various circumstances. Beach landings are a confirmed feature, according to lead battle designer Jamie Ferguson, and there’s room for other non-traditional openings as well.

“There’s something very special about Total War in terms of the scale,” James Russell told me. “If you look at a battle you have incredible detail close up, where you can see two men fighting it out – and you zoom out and you can see thousands and thousands of them on the battlefield, and we really want to push both ends of that spectrum in Rome 2.”

The developers used a free camera to show off different aspects of the battle – Roman archers taking cover behind wooden barricades to return fire on the Carthaginian defenders, siege towers moving into place, off-shore Roman artillery causing a breach in the city’s harbour walls. They were keen to stress, however, that in the final game it’ll no longer be necessary to swing the camera around to keep track of the battlefield. Rome 2 will feature a tactical view that allows players to zoom the camera out to a top-down, kilometer-square overview where units are represented by simplified icons. Commanding individual cohorts effectively from this perspective won’t be possible, but it should make getting your bearings easier and reduce the amount of time you spend squinting at the mini-map.

Making battles easier absorb on the macroscale belies Creative Assembly’s most frequently stated aim for Rome 2, which is to add character and humanity to the scores of tiny soldiers that live or die by your command. The new closest zoom setting is an absurdly detailed close-up that allows you to hover over a individual combatant’s shoulder in third-person. In the demonstration, this was shown off by leaping into Scipio Aemilianus’ unit as they prepared to storm the Carthaginian walls using a siege tower. The same Romans that had just been swarming from biremes by the hundred were now fidgeting and shifting as nervous individuals, listening to the orders of a general a few feet away.

Scripted? Yes, and Creative Assembly wouldn’t comment on how these mid-battle moments would play out as part of regular play. Impressive, though? Certainly, particularly when the Romans reached the walls. Shogun 2’s samurai occasionally broke off into brief animated duels, but Rome 2 takes the specifics of melee combat much further – men lunge and dodge and shield-bash each other, the game taking full advantage of both Creative Assembly’s meticulous research – which involves work with professional ancient warfare reenactors – and the new engine’s enhanced animation capabilities.

The importance of this extra detail, according to lead battle designer Jamie Ferguson, is that it involves the player in the lives of their men. “When they give those guys an order to take the walls they can experience that themselves” he explains, “and see what those guys are going [through] and realise that they’re not just a bunch of clones climbing a ladder, that there are individuals in there and they’re all doing their best for you.”

The walls taken, the battle continued in the streets. Roman troops entering by another route – that breach in the harbour wall – trapped the Carthaginians at a crossroads with a flanking maneuver, forcing the defenders further back into their own city. This part of the demo closely resembled equivalent encounters in other recent Total War games, but the sheer size of cities necessitates that battles be more complex than simply capturing and holding a single central location. In Rome 2, a successful siege will be a multi-part affair, with several dynamic objectives.

For the sake of the demo, the sack of Carthage was limited to these opening minutes. To conclude, the team zoomed back into Scipio Aemilianus’ unit as the consul lead the charge into the city. A collapsing tower sent a cloud of dust and smoke into the street, causing the Romans to hesitate. There was a pause, and a yelled order to hold the line. The silhouettes of charging war elephants emerged from the smoke, and, well, that was it for the world’s first glimpse at Rome 2. In an epilogue, a victorious Scipio surveyed defeated Carthage and gave the order to burn the city to the ground.

Obviously, these bookending cutscenes are too specific and too neat to apply to every campaign – as ever in an open-ended Total War game, Carthage is just as likely to be sacked by rampaging Gauls as it is by the Roman Republic – and Creative Assembly say that the siege of Carthage is more likely to end up as a standalone historical battle. It’s a striking statement of Rome 2’s cinematic intent, though, and my impression from the demo was that this new level of detail has the potential to enhance the drama of the whole game.

Reinventing the campaign game


“What we’re trying to do is create a game where warfare more meaningful,” Jamie Ferguson told me. “We’re placing much more importance on battles, that when an army turns up it is an army. You may find that the campaign game doesn’t look like it might have in previous games.”

Despite the tease, CA aren’t willing to show off anything of Rome 2’s campaign map at this stage. The impression I got however was that they’re taking a serious and critical look at the structure of the turn-based part of the game, again with an eye to making the player care more about the individual soldiers, cohorts and armies at their command.

“We’re … trying to focus attention on a much smaller number of armies and a smaller number of more significant battles” James Russell explains. “We’re trying to reduce the management you’ve got to do [with] assembling armies, and that kind of thing.”

One example of this kind of refinement will be the ability to govern whole provinces made up of a number of individual regions. Rather than delving into the micromanagement of each individual territory, it sounds like it’ll be possible to set policies for an entire region – but when it comes to warfare, each one of those areas will need to be conquered separately. “We still have that strategic depth where a province is made of up several regions which you can conquer”, Russell says. “And what that means is that you can have the benefit of scale but you don’t have the management detail.”

Discussing the occurrence of actual historical events during the campaign, Jamie Ferguson stresses that player freedom is still paramount. “We’re not putting the player on rails” he explains. “[Events] will be triggered depending on what the player is doing how how the player is behaving… it’s really our core goal to integrate the player’s interaction with the rich tapestry of the ancient world.”

That integration is key to Total War, he argues. “The point of Total War games isn’t just to recreate history. What we’re trying to do is get a counterfactual history going. We start from a historical point of view – this is how things were at, lets pick a date at random, 325 BC – and from that point onwards, it’s about player action and interaction, with the AI and their environment. That determines how the game develops.”

This will apply to everything from political systems to army composition. Using the example of the crown offered to Julius Caesar, Ferguson says that there’s no reason that the Roman Republic necessarily needs to become an Empire – it could have historically gone back to a kingship, and if the player chooses to make that decision then that’s something Creative Assembly want to support. Likewise, there’s nothing – geography and resources aside – stopping a sufficiently well-managed coalition of Germanic tribes from becoming the dominant force of their time.

Giving the player the power to pick the loadout of individual units of troops is something else that Creative Assembly are exploring. “There’s no reason that we can’t allow the player, maybe, to change the way those units are equipped” Ferguson says. “For example there’s the cavalry sword – the spatha. In reality that didn’t really become part of standard Roman equipment until very late, in the [Imperial] period – but there’s no reason that some general at some point might not have decided, ‘well lets do that earlier on’.” The idea of history as a sandbox is still at the forefront of Total War’s identity.
(Re)designing the ancient world


It’s also worth mentioning that Rome 2 looks stunning, and that’s as much thanks to its art direction as it is to the new engine. Shogun 2 was rightly praised for having a comprehensive visual identity of its own, and Rome 2 continues that trend – which is even more impressive given how familiar Roman warfare is to a western audience. There’s a strong attention to colour and lighting in particular, with Carthage rendered in orange, brown and olive green against the white of its defenders and deep red of the invading Romans. Smoke from fires throughout the city changes the nature of the lighting – in real time, I’m told – diffusing glaring sunlight into a gathering gloom. It’s effective, dramatic, believable stuff.

Soldiers’ weapons and armour is chipped and looks used, and the walls of cities are adorned with ancient graffiti. This “lived-in” sense is one of the key things that makes Rome 2’s design stand out. Despite the prevalence of Rome in film and TV, the team have gone back to original archaeological sources, rebuilt them, and then beaten them up. If Carthage looks this good, I cannot wait to see the Eternal City itself.
Multiplayer and mods


Multiplayer is confirmed, but aside from the fact that Creative Assembly are “planning to do something really big”, no details are available yet. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect something along the lines of Shogun 2’s matchmaking and online campaign systems.

Whether or not Rome 2 will include the content creation tools recently rolled out to Shogun 2 is less clear. “We do our best” James Russell told me. “It has become harder, in the old days we worked with very simple text files that were very easy to mod, now we have a proper authenticated database. We don’t necessarily have all the editor tools that the players out there think we do.”
The road to Rome


Total War: Rome 2 is due in 2013. If Creative Assembly can successfully balance revitalising the campaign game with chasing a new, cinematic depth to individual battles then there’s every reason to be very excited. More on Rome 2 is available in PCG UK issue 242, out July 4th, and PCG US issue 230, out July 17th. You can also check out our video interviews with the game’s lead designers.
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HOT DOGGY! I love me some TW. Looks like SC2 is going back on the shelf for a loooong time.
Those graphics are amazing! I am afraid the game is going to make most laptops melt though lol. Seems like only the m18x and a select few others will be able to play this at high/max settings. And I am glad I put off my purchase till next year. Hopefully dual mobile 780's in SLI will be able to take this game head on in all its maxed graphics glory.

 

I love Rome and Medieval II!

Though I hope they are re-working some of the series long time issues. Like the AI. And Pathing. Things have improved, but it's never been ideal.

Secondly, to me the greatest thing about Total War is creating your massive battles and watching them unfold like the epic swords and sandals army scenes from movies like Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven and Troy. It would be great if they added some sort of close action combat angle. Just seeing things through the eyes of a single troop or soldier in a battle of 10.000+. that would be fun.


I also would love to see more merging between the real time and turn based. Black and White 2 had this great concept where every citizen would need to be recruited for war. and everyone had their own job when not being in the army, and a house they lived in, and an actual name, and they would live their lives and eventually die of old age.
basically the tiny units where developed and had their own lives. that was a cool concept I havent seen since.



Roman soldiers who fared well, like Centurions often got their own lands when their army career ended. a fitting reward for a dangerous occupation.

 

The AI should be much better, and several other issues should also be fixed (for the most part) by the new engine.

 

Rome TW and Medieval 2 TW are some of my favorite games of all. I've sunk hundreds of hours into each game. Prolly cuz they happen to cover some of my favorite eras in human history.

Anyway I hope the game won't be too demanding to run because it'll definitely drive me crazy if I can't turn the settings up to at least medium. I will definitely be looking forward to this!

 

This is going to be like the BF3 of RTS when it lands...

 

Yupp this is precisely the reason we have such a performance jump this generation, these graphics are more than amazing, it is impossible to pull of with 40nm.. Something big about graphics design is approaching...

 

The crossing of the uncanny valley is approaching. I am betting cinematics reach it in 5 years, and games in 10. Those RTW2 graphics look almost as good as skyrim.

 

omg, i just saw the game that will make my 485m obsolete.

 

Talk about milking the franchise...

 

how are they killing the franchise? The first Rome tw came out in 2004. It's not like their coming out with the same game every year like Madden...

 

Thanks for sharing, a very interesting read

I doubt it will be this demanding on hardware, though. The only thing I really disliked in Shogun 2 was the extremely long load times. I could wait almost 5 minutes for the game to start. I hope they'll handle that issue.

Can't wait!

 

THAT SIMPLE! I have been waiting for this to happen since ETW

I'm now anxiously waiting for that thunderbolt egpu

The waiting times are solved by using a SSD.

here is a nice thread compiling all those interesting bits and pieces that are out, so feeeewwww

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=547893

 

Yeah, Rome was perhaps the only one really good out of the box w/out mods.

I hope they optimise the game though - Creative are horrible in optimising their games in my experience.

 

SUPER EXCITED! as a total war fan to the core, i am super stoked for this game and i hope they do beta testing!

 

Skyrim level graphics for an rts (mass amount ofcontrolled units, crazy depth of field) = impossible for current hardware, I am sure even 28nm will have tough time with it, I still cannot believe they are able to merge naval and land warfare, that alone is nuts even to pull off with warscape engine

also about milking, I am all for it, I hope they do TW100

 

Apparently they really wanted to have China and Korea in Shogun TW 2, but they didn't do it for political reasons.

I wish at some point they would either do a WW1 game, where there would be lots of stuff like poison gas, machine guns, and tanks, but still huge armies facing off against each other.
Another thing I wish they would do would be a sort of "day one" game where the continent you are on starts off in the stone age and you can eventually get to the late bronze age/early iron age.

 

Oh yes, that vintage aoe desire will always stays the same, when your villager brings home food amd wood and you produce your first bowman, only to be killed by a clubman

But about ww2, that won't happen as 10k against 10k on open battlefield never happened, it was mostly close quarters guerilla fights, which is kinda against the concept of tw imho

 

Live action trailer here.
Rome: Total War II - Faces of Rome Live Action Trailer - YouTube

 

I disagree completely. without patchs that game was a nightmare. The replayability drops a lot since the factions were just meh.

The game was just too unbalanced. The focus was on rome, and other ''civilized'' factions. too shallow, thankfully there is europa barbarorum, roma surrectum, SPQR to make things interesting.

The only game that I liked out of the box was Shogun 2, and empire/napoleon came in close second

The thing here is that the low number of units was a due to the standardization that the armies were suffering at the time, or due to being one ''large'' faction cut in pieces (shogun). it didnt need to suffer the roman ninjas or the still roasting bacon, or the golden armies, or the grey legionnaires.

Wont comment on M2tw or the other games since the first I dont like period, and the latter is simply to old to meaningful, although MTW had one of the best roost that we saw. And with some tweaks it was a great game

 

I am talking about WW1. Where battles happened that that killed tens of thousands in a single day.
Imagine your looking over your army of 50 thousand in its trenches. the opposing force is in their trenches. Then both sides start shelling. The other guy is a total scumbag so he starts using mustard gas shells. You decide its time to break the stalemate and order a full attack. You lose 15 THOUSAND just crossing the no mans land, but eventually your force makes it to the enemy position. brutal melee fighting starts up and you move in your reserves. When the enemy force starts to fall back, you send in your cavalry to kill them all.
then suddenly TANKS.
You have to scatter your forces and have your engineer brigades start dropping mines and gigging tank traps. You manage to get the tanks stuck and then you start shelling the living hell out of them.
Throw in some light air support and you have an epic gaming experience right there.

and the naval battles /drool....

 

some other info on r2tw

Exclusive Content and Dev chat for Total War Center - Total War Center Forums

 

You're talking about replayability and balance, and there might have been a bit too much emphasis on Rome itself, but I guess this is the whole point. They really wanted to show and let the player feel the might of the roman empire back then, and they succeeded IMO, as you could steamroll on everyone around you. That doesn't make it shallow, it was just great right out the door. No mods were needed, at least not for me.

I liked Empire's overall atmosphere very much but it had no AI upon release. The AI was completely passive.

Shogun 2 was awful from a technical standpoint. Excellent game, but not my favorite.

I loved the first Shogun and the first Medieval. They were really groundbreaking back then. Amazing fun. I didn't like Medieval 2, though. Cheaty AI, micromanagement hell that bogged me down, it was just a mess IMO. A different studio did M2, and you could tell they were less talented. It felt like an unprofessional Rome mod to me.

 

The AI is the same for all the total war series, its going to cheat on money, it was worst pre warscape engine, simply because even the units have been buffed up, you could have ubber peasants.

The micro on m2tw was better than on rtw, to conquer all the map in rtw you had to have a full garrison of peasants in some towns, just to quell the revolts.

s2tw I dont see how its awful from a technical standpoint. Do please explain.

You should read more about rome, the boii, arveni, arche seleukeia, the ptolemaios... the idea that rome can steam roll everyone is baseless and absurd. it makes it shallow by not putting the complexity of the ''barbarians'', Im not even going to say how the falx made the romans stop their conquering, and how the phalangites combined with other native troops in the seleuceia made a bloody mess of the legions, there are several more examples. That is just ridiculous.

 

that, I am all for it, I would love to replay big naval/land conflicts such as the battle of the dardanelles..

 

Exactly. Its the perfect conflict for a TW game. There is lots of awesome units and tech that is somewhat modern, but not modern enough to not have huge armies facing off against each other with hefty amounts of melee and even cavalry fighting.

 

The problem in M2 was the overly blatant cheating. You could slay an enemy's army, only to have another full army pop up right next to you. And then another. And another. They covered the AI faults with high resources and speedy production, it was ridiculous. And not very fun.

The micro on M2 was better than Rome? OK, that is just false. M2 had all of Rome's micromanagement, plus you needed to either build your settlements as fortresses or cities and discern between them constantly. The diplomats, spies and assassins in Rome were more than enough to babysit around the map, but to that they added the needless princesses and the boring merchants. The whole crusades notion was done terribly and the papal state was extremely annoying. This was hell. For me, at least.

Shogun 2 was sluggish to start up, sluggish to pass a turn and had such a delay from the campaign map to the battles, that I simply had to pass on 90% of my battles. My desktop at the time had a i7-860, 4GB RAM and a beefy 5870, it handled almost everything I threw at it on ultra settings without blinking, but Shogun 2 seems to be too much for it in terms of loading times. Lowering the graphics didn't do squat to help, either, as when the game did finally load, the turn finally passed and the battle finally commenced, everything played just great, the problems were in between. And that is a lousy technical design.

Regarding Rome - this amount of detail isn't necessary to depict the power of the roman empire at its peak. Overemphasizing the details tend to drown the subject matter, missing your target audience altogether. Nothing in life, let alone history, is such black and white, but this definitely doesn't qualify as being shallow. Speaking of which, Empire was much shallower when looking at its subject matter, but it doesn't matter, as Total War is not a wargame or Europa Universalis, and most certainly not a history lecture at a university. Total War is a light-mid strategy game that happens to also teach some history to gamers, and I see nothing wrong with that. Just because you're almost overly fascinated with the actual history of Rome doesn't mean it does anything worse than the rest of the series.

 

what you are talking about S2TW never affected me, I had installed in my SSD, loading times were fast on it.

The deal with historical accuracies... Im not going to enter into that, but flaming pigs? ninjas? seriously?!

Rome at the start of the game aint at its peak power, and that is the fun. To have more than raging ''barbarians'' for enemies is fun and it should have been there. There are mods that fix this, SPQR, RTR, EB, those are great mods that focus on battles, give you more units, and expand the civs, simple? Not that much, I do like history so I usually play EB or RTR, and they tend to focus on history a lot, research is paramount there, however I dont think that the game benefits that much from it, from a gameplay pov SPQR is much more fun, its simple, its direct, and the battles are hard. To halt Hanibal at the start of the game is just fun, for some too much, since the army that you have aint a match to what the enemy has, and he is at your gates.

Micro on a more complex system is what happens, at least you dont need a ton of troops to take care of your empire, I dont know what your point is about on the crusades, its simple, you have to take kill muslims, go with an army there and expect desertions as it happened.

Its simple, get the princess and marry them with whomever will give you the better benefit atm.

Merchants, put them at resources.

The papal state is an added difficulty, the developers have taken the idea of the senate in RTW and expanded. Simple. Need someone there, make it happen.

basically you are focusing that you are going to spend 5 min microing m2tw, and not dealing with rebellions on your far cities like cities, and the endless building scroll that appeared at the start of the turn that Im onto. Im focusing on the maintenance of am empire, when you are on turn 20-30 you already have a large mass of land, but its difficult to hold it in RTW, in m2tw its way easier. You also have other sources of income and diplomacy, so yeah, micro is way better, it gives you more options to deal with the need to maintain the macro, unlike rome which was basically deciding when to let the settlement revolt and raze it since you cant deal with more than 30k of pop without a revolt. It became tedious in the end. At least EB makes it possible to have a 80k settlement and even diminish the pop without you actually killing it. So yeah to conquer the entire map at turn 50 can happen without a catastrophe.

The deal with the sudden appearing armies is there since the start of the series, the money is the main cheat, it has diminished on warscape, at least on the troop production thing. And regarding EU3 it uses the same thing of sudden appearing troops, it was a nightmare to conquer what is france today with the portuguese, I only had 5 armies, they had more than 7 at the start, suddenly they had more than 15. And those were regular troops, not mercs.

 

You make it sound so simple in M2, but it wasn't really - it was a chore. An unneeded chore. I used to forget moving my princesses for tens of turns until they died of old age, I used to lose resources because I forgot moving the merchants to the resources due to an emerging battle or an economy issue and all that. I KNOW what the papal state and the crusades are all about, that doesn't make it fun having to do these on top of everything and to try keep track and chase more little people around the entire map.

And regardless how you try to oversimplify these issues to make them seem less than what they were, M2 was a micro nightmare, without much a need. You may have liked it more, but in no way this makes it any better.

I could do with Rome as well, see: rebellions? just move an army and kill those peasants. Done. More rebellions? move more armies, duh!

But really, dealing with those rebellions in Rome isn't too hard, it's actually a very nice source of income at the end of the game - wait for them to rebel, kill them, then raze the city to the ground and plunder their gold. No more rebellions for the rest of the game from that settlement. I actually would encourage those rebellions by moving out my troops and overtax them to keep funding my war machine in order to finish the game.

And yes, Rome wasn't in any way 100% historical accurate. Sometimes you have to sacrifice reality for the sake of fun, especially in gaming. But we'll leave it at that.

 

Rome aint even 10% accurate. And sincerely that is my favorite game in the series. I know I have spent more than 300h on it, counted via steam, I dont know how many hours I have spent when I just had the CD.

Its best for you to remember. I know some people that played this game with spread sheets and diaries, to make the role playing more interesting for them, I didnt do any of that. I just remember to move what I had.

If you only suppress a city once, I dont know how much money you were making, but it wasnt much.

 

for historically themed games, its always been a question a accuracy and accessibility.
coming from very accurate boardgames from avalon hill, spi and the like; i want my games as accurate as possible.
but i do understand ca's predicament for doing what they did with the series. in choosing a more accessible gameplay, they make their game appeal to a larger market. and (unfortunately) putting more effort into the barbarian 'horde' design, etc would most likely increase the development cycle.
so just like most everyone in this business, although they seek to entertain, the bottom line is always profit. and looking at it from that angle, you kinda understand the decisions they make.

 

indeed, but I still dislike it.

I still play RTW occasionally with EB or RS2, you should try those for historical accuracy, more the former than the latter.

 

Truely. Almost all total war games are better with one mod or the other.
I dont play Rome or medieval 2 anymore but I use darth mod for both etw and tw2.

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2

 

Woooot! Rome: Total War was one of my favorite total war games (because it was the only one compatible with mac), I'm pretty damn scared to see how much power it'll take to run, because those graphics look better than Skyrim and if it runs on DX11...

 

I thought Shogun 2 had the completely OP artillery pieces. Loved the first one, but it continually feels like basic issues are always overlooked by Creative.

 

BALLISTAS.

BALLISTAS EVERYWHERE.

I wonder what the max amount of troops in a game is. I remember setting troop sizes to max and adding the max amount of AI players in the first game. Epic battle...

 

Man it's been a while since i have played Rome Total War and Medieval Total War 2 but i am so excited to see this out finally and truly is the best time for this to come out!

 

you mean next year? Some are taunting for a march release, others think that CA is going for back for the usual time frame of november october and some think that these dumb traditions should be gone and they re going to release in xmas.

Sincerely Im either going to wait to buy a notebook by that time frame when the game launches, if indeed it goes for march, Im going to wait until haswell comes to the market.

Fair warning, the warscape engine, though heavily modified in this release, dont really uses more than 2 cores. It usually loads the 1st core heavily (100%) the 2nd core at 30-40% and the others sometimes dont even register 10% utilization.

Thus IPC>clocks>Cores is the idea behind a better performance when 20k battles happen.

IPC = instructions per clock

 

Im going to necro this,

Interview with Creative Assembly - Total War Center Forums

interview with lead unit designer, talking about some bits and pieces or r2tw, remember that jack is/was a modder that got hired, and those people aint professional interviewers, but its quite fun if you know the guys

 

Yeah, bloody total war games always have crappy coding from a performance stand point, and they run like crap on the i-series CPUs. Unless you have a maxed rig, you're always gonna have to drop settings. But the Shogun 2 is pretty scalable though - if I drop some settings to low on a 1st gen i5 laptop, I can maintain ~40 fps in some bigger close ups of melee battles. But CA really have to find a way to manage cpu load better. Medieval 2 runs worse for me than Shogun 2

In terms of gameplay, Shogun 2 has been the best out of the box by far cf. the other newer gen games. I remember in Empire British was an easy win coz the AI couldn't manage Naval battles properly. In shogun 2 diplomacy etc is pretty important in order to stay alive.

My one big beef with S2 is the lack of unit diversity. Alleviated to a degree in FotS but honestly, CA needed to be a bit more CREATIVE.

 

Actually, they will run pretty dandy on the i series cpus, they run a LOT better than on a AMD whatever version cpu/apu/mother thing.

For example a i7 2600k non OCed, will give you 26-30 min fps in battles, while a FX whatever, will give you 16-20 min fps in battles. But yeah, you need the hardware to run the game well. For s2tw the 680m and 7970m can deliver maxed performance or close to it. For me that game on a lowly mbp 13, Im sticking to third age total war for now, never liked m2tw, but this is a great mod.

The diversity was expected on shogun, its a single country and small one to add to that. I do prefer no fantasy units.

we have 2 more interesting photos, one is from a part of the wall that the romans are invading with towers, and there are arrows stuck to their shields, and it appears that they are hiding behind those.

 

Total war is always the same ... the AI ​​is not really demanding, particularly on the strategy map.

 

yeah sure, now go and play with the new ones and compare to the old ones, they are reaaaaally the same

 

necro master!

Total War: ROME II - First gameplay footage (US) - YouTube

gameplay video of the good old battle of carthage. I like the new camera thingy, it going to be fun to waste 10 min on it once and never use it again, while it took them several days to make that thing happen.

and rally point 6, motion capture!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=vz5MMr1zQRc

 

I'm keen to see the results of the Steam workshop support and modding tools. Would be awesome if they did a Warhammer 40k mod for Shogun 2. Also I'm hoping this trend carries over to Rome II (I imagine it will be).

 

well there will be a modding summit or already happened I dont remember the date, several members of twcenter and the org were invited to share what they want what they need and etc... They have also released modding tools for s2tw and the source code for rtw, the m2tw source code was lost in the CA australian branch (I dont know what happened there btw)

 

Similar games true, but thats a good thing from where I stand.

I also agree AI is always somewhat sub-par. Maybe Shogun 2 was the first one I really had to think.

But then again, thats what Darthmod is for.

 

here is some Q&A with jack lusted, the lead unit designer of the game:

 

there was a fraction of a second in that preview that it thought looked 90% like it was from a movie this looks good

 

and another answer from jack lusted to a question that a lot of folks werent even wondering.

 

Total War: Rome II - Preview Pictures & Videos Thread - Page 60 - Total War Center Forums

new pics of the battle of carthage