Total War: Rome 2 announced for 2013!

graphically speaking, i liked what i saw in the egyptian and german gameplay videos. mainly because the gfx looked similar to shogun 2. for me thats in a sense good news cause i will be able to play the game in (hopefully) high/ultra without aa.

the gfx in their first gameplay vid, carthage, looked more detailed and the scenery was more sprawling. i dont know if they toned it down a little but that video just looked better imho. they also seemed to use a darker, brownish color palette in the carthage video which made it look grittier. they seemed to have reverted back to the more colorful palette of shogun 2 in the newer vids.

 

I dont know if you look at the details of the forest and terrain you can see that the teutoberg will be equally as beautiful. regarding E3, they used much less powerful pcs in there, its not what in terms of gfx the tweaks to the engine can produce

 

yeah the still of teuoberg were amazing but the gameplay video itself didnt seem like much more than shogun 2 for me. but thats not necessarily a bad thing.

its a good thing that ca is also concerned about the game playing well in mid range machines.

 

tell me about it

 

i enjoy the campaign itself a lot more at times than the battle. All i want out of CA is that they make the game support multi core CPUs so i dont lag in battles because my CPU is running on 1 core is bottlenecks my graphics card

 

They just updated shogun 2 to better multi core support so chances are you'll get your wish.

Sent from a Galaxy far far away

 

its been since empire that I dont see 1 core 100%, 2 core 30%, 3 core 30%, 4 core 30%, now we get slightly higher core usage, even NTW had better multi core support

 

this is the dev session of rezeed, i skipped the 10min of nothingness (just showing the audience and the dev sessions opening ppt)

its a very long video be warned, and I havent watched it yet

 

Looks awesome! Already preordered and looking forward to it.

I don't like that they claim the fact you can look at what the AI thinks about you and why as a new feature, though, as it was that way since Empire. And besides, you could hardly change someone's opinion in Total War games, giving a few coins to someone who has -200 towards you from the get go won't help much.

And the bartering keeps on being bad, you can never know what do you need to do in order to seal the deal. They should have went the Civilization way - What would you give me for X? What do you want for the exchange of Y?

But still, looks quite good.

 

Well, they have broken down whats affecting your relationship, you can see in the video, trade with pontus, war with parthia... I like that, since I can actually know whats affecting things, its not like war -134, but you are not at war with that nation, and that nation has no allies

But I agree with that simpler way that civ does, to get me X I have to give you Y. Though it helped immensely on shogun2 the different stances of appraisal to the offer, and I could adjust from there.

Regarding changing someones opinion on the game, it was hard, but very doable, I did that and kept doing it in warscape games, except napoleon, so empire and shogun. In napoleon there wasnt enough time to do it, nor any real possible way to do it. I basically can do it, because I try to stay in peace as long as possible, and than blitzkrieg the faction that Im at war, multiple fronts, destroying their lesser allies first, multiple armies, and keeping a reserve militia army always on the track of the main army, so that I could move and continue conquering on the next turn, usually within 5-10 turns I can conquer around 9-15 provinces, using 3 stacks and 6 militia armies

I really like the family structure now and how we have to balance the power between factions and how that can bring the realm divide. aside that the strategic view of the campaign map is very useful for large maps, since clicking the mini map rarely brought you to the point where you wanted to be.

I love the new province system and how that affects the settlements and management (they basically expanded on the empire different theaters settings), how they brought the avatar system into the game and tweaked it (I was terrible at that, tried 3x times and forgot about it), the new types of victories are also a very nice plus

So far my main dislike is the simplistic unit names, I really liked the roompharoi, hoplite ekodromoi and so forth that was available on mods. but it makes sense, you dont need to know the specific "name" of the unit, you just can move more freely from playing hellenistic factions to other types of culture

 

When it comes to diplomacy, you can still see it the exact same way in Empire. Hover your cursor over the empire you want to deal with in the diplomacy screen and it shows the exact same thing.

Changing opinion over time didn't work for me for some reason, the AI was so angry with me that I could mostly just fight with it.

Actually, only in the old Total War games up until the first Rome I was able to enjoy the battles and conquest. Maybe I'm getting old and squeamish, but in Empire and Shogun 2 I got bored from the battles and used to automate them constantly. Waging wars got really tedious, really fast, which was kinda the whole point in Shogun 2. I hope this will change in Rome 2.

I liked the province and management as well, and especially the unit training mechanism, anything that cuts back on micromanagement is a blessing for me.

 

the original total war was conceived solely for the battles with a strategic world map wrapper to create a 'reason' for the battles.
with the more recent iterations of the series, the strategic gameplay has gotten so well that for some it has totally eclipsed the real time battles (which is the reason for the product's existence). that some good game development imho.

 

Maybe...

I mainly don't like the long loading times in and out of battles. If I'm just staring at a loading screen for so long, I prefer to get going with the game.

I mean, just look at this 06:45 :
Shogun 2 Total War: Chosokabe Campaign Part 1 - YouTube

I know this is an old game running on a new system, but still, look at this 02:50 :
Shogun Total War : Imagawa Story 1 - YouTube

This is becoming a real problem.

 

didnt check your videos as i do have the game. i know what yu mean by long load times. i think shogun 2 is one game that benefits from an ssd, and even with that it will still take time to load.

as for me i never minded the loading times. there are just times when i enjoy the strategic game much more. in fact if i just want to play a battle i just set up a custom one instead of going into a campaign.

 

Ah well, I enjoyed very much the battles on rome, actually only in rome, and heavily modded, but it got tiresome to say the least after a while.

it really stopped making sense to fight near the middle to the end of the campaign, in FOTS I stopped playing the battles after I built 2 armies (I know its lame, but I usually play with satsuma or chosu, they were the ones that carried the bakumatsu after all), with those 2 armies the AI doesnt stand a chance, neither on auto resolve nor on the battlefield. 8 imperial infantry, 4 armstrong cannons, thats it, I complement it with 4x carbine cavalry after a while with 2 more armstrong cannons. By the time I reached kyoto, I have 4 armies, with all units at or near max xp, and given that I move to accuracy in the gunsmith and the army camp, my units are usually over 70 accuracy for the artie and over 100 for the infantry, I dont have penalties for cover fire basically (though I research that much latter, when Im near tokyo already), really those 6 cannons just destroy the units morale, not to mention outright eliminate 2-4 units before the infantry engagement began

I have been experimenting and 8 infantry, 1 general and 11 cannons you can hold in a battle against 60-80 units, for a good victory throw in some guards and its a deal.

for me basically the campaign ends when Im past that blood lust are that is just a bit over kyoto, a lot of provinces, tons of navies and very large numbers of full stacks.

regarding diplomacy I never noticed that it did describe that faction X trade agreement or that you are at with war with faction Y affected the diplomacy with faction Z, they had a breakdown, its not as detailed as it is now, it was simply, war -100, territorial expansion - 400, trade agreement broken -30 and so on.

for changing opinion you have to remain in peace as long as possible and at war as short as possible, trade agreements are your most important tool. I managed to be in peace with the shogunate vanguard for 10 turns after realm divide, we had a very good relationship of 200 positive or so. Strangely on that same campaign one of my allies declared war on me after realm divide and defected. I will try to go for republic once in my next campaign, however trade as beneficial as it is, I still get 10-20k per turn once realm divide sets in, I really invest on infrastructure and the economy tech tree

 

What's with me with YouTube today?

Anyway, watch that (from around 0:45, pause at 0:48):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5vDSyHtZIY
You'll see everything they showed in that Rome 2 video regarding diplomacy, I think.

 

now there are more details, thats why I used specific points, its really not revolutionary, but its a good thing



and another dev session, I havent watched it yet

 

watched both vids you posted thanks.
they basically show similar gameplay footage.
the q n a was more interesting. many q's about ai. the answers were not very specific though. im thinking bai might be a slight improvement of shogun 2 at best ; and a much better cai

 

Watching this demo, I just realized that the loading screen took around ~3 minutes from the campaign to the battle.

Does nobody tell them this is becoming a factor for some players?

 

there were several complaints about the growing loading times, but if you noticed in the 1st video (still havent watched the 2nd), they are showing the the romans campaign, and then suddenly he is playing as the ptolomies? I think it loaded a saved game?

I think they will be in the same spot as any warscape game, a very long time

what I do now is to put the TW games on the SSD and just leave something to read or watch, it does annoy me

 

Wow I actually watched the entire video. I did fast forward in some parts. I cant wait for this game to come out, I have waited since day one when it was announced.

 

Looks like a fun game.

 

between this and company of heroes 2, strategy gamers are in for a treat huh?

 

i have coh2 and honestly i was a bit dissapointed. there is much more content in blitzkreig mod for coh1 imho.

 

Total War: Rome 2 system requirements released alongside big picture full of elephants | News | PC Gamer

 

Those specs don't say much

Sent from a Galaxy far far away

 

well that means the game is not very demanding.

 

completely the opposite, shogun 2 is a very very demanding game on the leagues of crysis and BF3

 

Man, cant wait to play this game and charge my Averni heavy infantry at the Roman and smashing thru there lines all the way to Rome!

 

and now for the bride the new rally point

 

The smallest settlements are the size of the biggest in shogun 2. Oh no lol.

Sent from a Galaxy far, far away

 

well in rome the small cities were really really big, while the hige cities were really small in comparison

 

well yeah the settlements were all the same sizes in romes campaign map.
but the dev was talking about battlscape sieges.

 

warscape brought smaller maps, which is a mixed proposition, since:

1) they now support much larger battles
2) the settlement map made a fairly large change in prospect, i.e. you conquer the defences not the settlement itself

I really dont mind, I dont like siege battles, and with the amount artillery that I use or archers...

 

Can you please explain that a bit? What does it mean?

 

on warscape you fight the battle on the city defences, not the city itself, there was on ETW and I think NTW the instance when you didnt have the 1st wall that you fought a battle on the outskirts of the town

 

But the dev did mention that they improved battle ai to take into account moving through the tight streets of a besieged city and the Carthage siege demo took place within the city itself right?
Maybe you could go through the whole city if you wanted but the battle is over once you've overwhelmed the defenses.

Sent from a Galaxy far, far away

 

jesus, I miss the time when AAA games poured good resources on sound



and for the BAI AI on cities

I really missed the beat on posting that one

 

and another video, this week has been full of pics and videos!

in case you missed the pics, one was about the arrow tracers and how they are more subdued and the other I cant remember!

 

triple post!

they look tasty, I want to roll some great balls of fire and eat it!

and now they are going full P R style

http://forums.totalwar.com/showthread.php/71779-Total-War-ROME-II-previews-hit-and-here-they-are!?

today there will be a lot of interviews and previews of the game check those at that thread

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?611474-Lot-of-previews-coming-today

or this one

and we have a new trailer and for anyone who speaks dutch there is a video and an article


I had forgot about this thread

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/show...ew-quot-you-got-the-sandals-wrong-quot-thread

its a good one

and now the intro for rome 2

http://www.gamestar.de/videos/specials,20/total-war-rome-2,71178.html

or das intro

 

Interviews!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go694k-5d8g

with CA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3AQAsbhbbU

events detailed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d-aKnkG61w

with james russell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d-aKnkG61w

Rome Event Banquinterview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4PcBD2fkoY

Prologue campaign. campaign map

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1LiN0M7pOs

Prologue campaign. battle map

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgVpxM_KsHY

Rome 2 special event

http://uk.gamespot.com/total-war-ro...tting-the-stage-for-world-domination-6412318/

AI video

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/08/01/hands-on-total-war-rome-ii/

 

interesting site

Total War: ROME II Campaign Map Planner

its a campaign map planner you can see each region and province and what belongs to who

 

that site is neat. now we can plot our campaign way ahead of time huh.

 

the only useful thing for me was more detail on region distribution I like that, its not an essential map for the campaign like the one in the recruitment viewer from europa barbarorum, without it you didnt know how to replenish armies, nor how to build armies for the regions you were going to conquer, if you didnt do that your logistics would be a very large fail. and why is that? they implemented an AOR system (area of recruitment) that way your ubber stack of mighty special units would be without troops as soon as the battles kept pilling up Seleucids and rome were the favoured faction in that regard

btw thats a rome tw mod from years ago

 

sorry for the early bump, but this is pretty worth it

Battles & Drinks - Try your hand at Rome II at London’s gaming bar!!

they are going to host a battles and drinks in london, I wish I was there!

 

Jack Answers!!

and jack answers!

 

That's a fine thread, thanks

 

Al the dread Bickham as Macedon VS Rome



he is really terrible

 

I wonder what would you do differently? I would probably wouldn't let the Triarii finish off my cavalry so easily, and would also keep some units in reserves or at flanking positions, but this is a very hard difficulty AI, I'm not ashamed to admit it would probably annihilate me in a few minutes

I, for one, would use a lot more of the pause function to avoid getting overwhelmed, but I guess they wanted things to look more fluent in those videos.

I'm really impressed with the new general and cavalry's special tactics/actions that can be triggered upon command. And the little graphical details are amazing: look at 6:10, I was exhilarated to see the Romans face their large shields forwards to block the peltasts' charge (who charges headlong with peltasts, anyway?), the forest looks impressive, and over all, this looks like a really well done game.

25 days and counting. Or, since I'm not in the US, probably 27-28 days..