Total War: Rome 2 announced for 2013!

Man the graphics are just horrendous (well, compared to what they advertised) I cannot believe even Total War pulled off The-Colonial-Marines on us I am so sad, I just wanna stop gaming as I feel cheated... (Thank goodness BF4 and Star Citizen are coming!)

 

i think im enjoying the game more than most because i am playing custom and historical battles rather than the campaign. so im kinda shielded from the capping wars, no wall cities, and long game turns that many complain about.

add to that the fact that i dont seem to be getting graphical glitches and the ui isnt rushing to cap, then you have a decent game. but yes the ai is just a step back.

 

is there a demo i can try?

 

no there isn't

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?618567-Rome-2-performance-issues-poll

here is a minor poll of the tech issues, its not representative, specially now that twcenter is trying to fix its DB issues along with other things

 

here is a demonstration on how the BAI acts. the BAI is set on very hard difficulty. both armies are BAI.

http://i615.photobucket.com/albums/tt235/pinoy_92/rome2_2013_09_06_11_39_45_698_zps074ce0fe.png

http://i615.photobucket.com/albums/tt235/pinoy_92/rome2_2013_09_06_11_43_06_400_zps115c9cdd.png

notice the time difference between the two. notice how neither one of them moved.

BTW, the new patch kinda helped, but still needs alot of work. im guessing at this point its a driver issue. i got a 7970m, so im guessing for amd users, this game will be optimized next month.

 

Im currently able to enjoy the game, unfortunately the beta driver launched 2 days ago, doesn't cover me, since Im in the legacy status now

very happy to enjoy the game at last

 

enjoying it at last because of the new patch? what happened all of a sudden?

 

its playable but it needs to be more optimized. the screenshot below is with the patch and 13.10 beta driver.

http://i615.photobucket.com/albums/tt235/pinoy_92/rome2_2013_09_06_18_19_53_813_zps8077a6c6.png

 

the patch solved my performance issues, driver support is another story

found a bug, I did all of the prologue, it doesn't mark as finished

now Im starting a rome campaign next is macedon

 

glad to see you guys starting to enjoy.
ive been able to play it with no gfx bugs, just performance issues with the bigger siege battles.
ill see if the patch has improved performance and gameplay for me...

 

nice to hear bugs are getting resolved fast! however what do you guys think about the graphics? it is definitely much worse than the demonstrations a year ago, and they were claiming it to be in engine demos I never thought CA to be the lying type

 

just tried the new patch. graphics wise everything was exactly the same for me in terms of quality and performance. well i never had graphics issues from the start anyways. but glad it resolved gfx bugs for others.

edit:
just looked through patch notes and never saw anything that pointed to increased graphics fidelity nor stability really. wondering why its suddenly so playable for so many when there was no fix specifically for this. well, gj nonetheless.

 

there was a bit regarding performance issues, there was also a mention on the official forums

but yes, the units for me looked like when I was playing on fast forward, i.e. the units would lag, I can have some some very stable fps, but the units would lag

I still have some sudden inexplicable drops in performance here and there. In the 2nd battle of the prologue, I was looking at the same spot, then suddenly 30fps, becomes 2fps. So since I didn't enjoy doing battles much and only did for the necessary ones, its a no issue for me so far. but those sudden fps drops are really strange, it was basic troop movement without any conflict, just some skirmishers running around and not discovering the enemy, the only object moving was 2 units of levy slingers, really strange

 

the only gfx 'optimization' they included in the patch was lowering the out of the box presets. but if youre using custom gfx settings as most tw vets do, this has zero effect on you.

they also fixed a couple of texture bugs but this should have no real bearing on actual performance.

also if there was some significant gfx optimization in this patch, it would be the first mentioned in the notes as that is the most requested change. makes me think a lot of people are experiencing some sort of a placebo. but if it gets them to play and like the game more, then its all good. just reinforces my perspective that it wasnt as bad at launch(at least graphically) as some made it out to be.

 

well for me it was pretty real, the units would take around 5-7min to reach the first enemy units in the prologue battle, then more than 20min to reach the siege unit on the other side of the hill. Basically all 2 hours that I logged at first on rome 2 were of that battle, I think I spent 5 min on the campaign map and gave up, since it was really laggy, btw all that was on low, everything on low. Today Im playing on medium. wednesday I did try to do some settings change, so I ran the benchies, the units were stuttering when they walked, today they aren't, neither on low nor medium

today while I was playing the last siege on prologue, I tried to fast forward, no dice, the units would walk as in normal speed, it would only cut the sound. after that i did check the game files if it was alright, and indeed everything was fine, tried once more same results.

 

well glad its working for you, did you try running the same battles again? since you are using the presets it would definitely have some effect on your performance, the amount of that effect probably dependent on how good/bad your hardware is. try to run the benches again to see just how much youve gained. did you update drivers too? that couldve been another factor for increased performance.

as for the ff bug, im not experiencing that myself.

 

drivers are the same, since Im in the legacy

I did test with the benchies and played the prologue battle of capua

interestingly comparing the results, before I had higher avg fps, but the units would stutter, now i have lower fps, around 10fps less, but the units are fine, and actually it applies the meshes correctly now

it was a strange thing, fluent fps, but the unit animations stuttering. I knew it was a bug, when I couldnt see the difference in terms of graphics from none of the settings that I applied on the units, the environment did change, but the units didn't, they looked the same when in extreme, ultra, high, medium, low, exactly the same. to be more stupid, I had more fluent animations when i was benching on extreme, but the fps was on avg 15, so impossible to play

Im enjoying my campaign very much as rome

http://forums.totalwar.com/showthread.php/81021-Review-from-an-Anonymous-Developer-CA-response?

very uninteresting reading

the guy comes with by the book how development works, indeed we follow somewhat those guidelines, however every people/firm that I worked has a different policy, and meanwhile they can be compared, there are truly few policies that work better than the other, and it truly depends on what kind of software you are working on.

I find hilarious that developers don't want to work with deadlines, grow up. everybody works with deadlines, athletes work with deadlines, MDs work with deadlines. If you can't do it, get out

in the end, bugs are expected to happen, specially given that rome 2 has and would sell more than the previous warscape games, aside that we also have large changes to the UI, another backlash waiting to happen, sincerely the game has been stable since the launch of the series! it will have people that won't like it, and they will voice it and it will be freaking annoying

the promised features work, I don't like some, I really enjoy most

btw I LOLed when he said PROFESSIONAL testers! the testing of this game alone would have cost millions, he is out of his freaking mind! The need for the same player to play all the factions, using all the families, SEVERAL times is ridiculous. People usually use internal testing for that for good reason, after that is done, you can opt or not for a beta wide spread launch, however there are still some features that will be in alpha stages and other sort of problems, indeed this policy aside paying ridiculous amounts of money for professional testers, is up for debate depending on the team, the complexity of the software, the adoption rate, the public focus, the deadlines.... its a long list of things

basically its a matter of methodology, by the book doesn't exist, its merely an aggregation of things that somewhat work and it varies on its application as a case by case basis

 

i dont think he is a real dev. he kept stressing the word professional. the way he/she criticize CA is absurd. if he really is a real dev that "has recently released a PC game in the Military genre," then i wouldnt be criticizing anyone.

i just saw the carthage demo from last year, omg so awesome. AI is pretty bad from pre-alpha. kinda wonky frame rates. some graphical glitches, and there are graffiti on some of the walls. if u watch the video, notice when the camera turns towards the sun, there was some lens flare.

 

im getting crashes on big battles in campaign

 

how big are you talking about?
although it will sometimes slow down on big battles like carthage, ive never had this game crash on me

 

im attacking athenai with 3 groups of around 700-800 people. athens have around 2 groups of 300 people and a garrison of 30 people.

as soon as i breach the walls, the game stops responding.

 

thats not even a big battle - which should be in the thousands. what gpu are you using? ive read in twc that gfx stability issues are much more frequent with amd cards.

 

Luckily for me, and I'm not trying to gloat at all here, but the game is perfectly stable on my machine. I'm running on Extreme settings and the only time it chugs down is on very large battles of 10+ units, which IS a downer. I'm still trying to tweak things, but I think that other than playing on low, the larger battles might be out of reach for my machine.

The game is gorgeous, by the way, at least on Extreme graphics settings in huge sieges. I just finished the tutorial campaign by attacking the enemy's castle with 2 full armies at once in the rain, and it felt like watching the Battle of Minas Tirith all over again (albeit in somewhat of a slow motion at times ). The naval battles are a thing to behold and work just great and the new coastal battles where your huge ships get on land and start regurgitating a seemingly endless supply of your troops feels like the movie Troy, especially when viewed in the cinematic camera.

The stuff they added in this game is amazing, since due to my lack of TW skills, I very rarely got to a point in previous games where I would be able to charge downhill straight from a mountain top or out of a forest en masse or gather 2 huge armies and break the enemy's castle in a pincer movement, but this game allows that with the whole 'Ambush' mechanic and the fact that it automatically 'understands' that if you bring an army and another one for reinforcement to the battle, you prefer if they will attack from 2 opposing sides instead of just..you know..reinforcing and stuff

Yup, it's a much more 'arcade-y' TW, and I sure understand the avid fans' grips, but this game suits me just fine.

The new feature that allows the AI to handle your units, though, is pretty horrible. Don't let it handle anything, especially large armies. At the said siege battle, I let the new attack AI handle one of my advancing armies after breaching the main door, and it just stood there, doing nothing at all. I tried prodding it by moving the army again on my own and then deactivated the AI mode and re-activated it and I watched in terror as it just flung all of my cavalry units into the enemy's city center. I shrugged and thought that maybe this is a diversion tactic or something that I'm not familiar with, left it alone for a second to handle the second army and then I get a message that my general is dead. I moved back and, surprise, surprise, all of my cavalry units are routed and my melee units just stand there, getting hammered by skirmishers while the AI does nothing. A this point I got really fed up, lassoed all my units and just slammed them into the enemy and won.

Talk about grand tactics.

 

I don't see this game as more arcady

Its a matter of a simpler UI and information delivery systems, a bunch of information thrown at your face is not information at all, just a bunch of garbage.

I really like the new army system, although its a pain when you are far away from your recruitment centre (mine is italia), and you lost a unit in battle, you can't reinforce it. But I find its more challenging this way

Yesterday I had to fight some battles (around 20, damn hand that accidentally clicked on the battle button) and I didn't notice anything strange in terms of BAI, it actually tries to maintain formation, which is something new, and when reinforcements arrive tries to expand said formation.

However, the problem of competence is still there, Im a veteran I know several tricks and I will defeat the BAI even with overwhelming numbers. I still suck in naval battles.

CAI is improved but it can't handle the economy, I see several armies that are basically levies or low quality armies, Fighting against my balanced army of 4 legionnaires, 4 veterans legionnaires, 2 first cohort, 1 praetorians, 4 cavalry and 4 slingers. They don't stand a chance and are quickly and effortlessly wiped. I remember a battle were winning was impossible given that the AI had the garrison, 2 armies, 2 navies, true enough I won the battle

The CAI can do treacherous things, I was in a war in Iberia, and true enough it outmanoeuvred me beautifully, the problem was that that strategy would just be a hit and run tactics, in 2 turns I squashed it

In terms of economy, Im already in my 2nd campaign and Im in 93BC, the AI simply can't handle the economy, it became more complex regarding to shogun, specially with the hits from squalor and the power of agents, hunger is a constant shadow throughout my campaign, in the first campaign it was so dire the situation, that I had to do an emergency invasion of Illirya and greece to acquire more food so that I could build more sanitation to reduce squalor, in the end I had to raze a lot of my own provinces so that I could alleviate the problem. In my 2nd campaign more aware of squalor I simply stopped building when I reached level 2 and now Im gradually levelling up to 3, however hunger strikes again

For the CAI this is more dire, I do think that the "bonuses" don't apply to them, basically I don't think they face the same squalor and hunger problems as we do, and when they do its much less pronounced. Example is my Client State, Egypt, it doesn't have the small cities just the capital, and its still producing more armies despite the problem with hunger, squalor and money

So yeah I like the mechanics of the new campaign, specially the levelled up villages from ETW and NTW that became the new cities without walls. I do like the new management system and now in my next turn I shall face a civil war, right now when I was about to recruit anew the troops (basically finally got to get the camp that gives bonus to troops and its at its max, so I will rotate all of the 6 legions and dismantle, build and train again)

I hope that with that civil war, I get to be an empire, interestingly enough most of my generals are from the other houses, so that they could win back the expansion of my house, I hope that it doesn't back fire on me, otherwise I would have gone for a civil war much earlier

finished the campaign, seriously the whole squalor needs a serious tone down, it really needs. I simply won't build past level 3 structures, its simply not worth it, I will only build things past 3 when they are involved with troops, otherwise Im screwed, Italia for example I had 42 good points vs 39 bad points, that translates to lvl 4 barracks and lvl 4 training camp, thats it. all the other buildings sucked food instead of throwing more squalor to the mix, I had only 2 lvl 3 cities, one was rome and the other was the one that produces grain.

So basically only italy and a few other places that produced food I built lvl 3 cities, otherwise its just money making buildings like the industrial line that adds -4 of squalor, the rest that is lvl 3 are the ones that suck food. Thus I did start experimenting, like making one entire province a farm land and it worked, so food shortage stopped being a problem however the most I can gain per province now is just around 2.5k at the maximum I got 3k. So basically as currently it stands the Higher lvl buildings are for show, since you really can't deploy them. I try to maximise the most, I may need more experimenting, but squalor really needs a tone down

We also desperately need another BAI, the more battles I played the more I missed shogun 2 battles

I started my macedon campaign, 5 to 1 outnumbered, with levy quality troops, I won, with 65 casualties, I killed more than 3k of troops, I fielded 900 man at medium sizes, 3 levy phalanx, 3 hoplites, 2 levy slingers, 2 levy javelins. Im not that good.

I got the usual save game bugs, which is not a problem per se, since they are auto saves anyway, 3x times in my last campaign

 

THIS IS CIVIL WAR!!!!

 

anyone who's facing performance issues, must install the beta patch 1.5, it solved my performance problems, maybe it can save yours. I don't know if its in beta though, there was a post by mike simpson stating otherwise, that its actually released now

 

holy pokemon?! how are you suppose to retake the city? and new patch is not beta. my army still looks like zombies without the blood.

 

nothing that 6 full legions can't do

I told it was a performance issue hotfix it was launched as beta 2 days ago or so, I installed it today and it works, no more sudden slow downs, sudden freezes, laggy campaign map, but the problem of cats wanting to sleep on the lap still stands, shall I eat them?

 

where can i see the patch notes?

 

it was posted on TWC and total war official forums

btw has anyone read my review?

Patch 1.5 in BETA Today

http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...-cards/731850-my-rome-2-total-war-review.html

 

'EDIT: In order for these changes to come into effect you must start a new campaign'

That's a huge MEH..

 

hihihihi, since I had formatted my SSD I didn't notice that

 

Total War ROME II: Patch Notes - Total War Wiki

patch 2 beta is available, I just installed, I won't probably play today

from the reports we are going to see people complain more about the game difficulty, the CAI is more aggressive and the BAI has improved with a better roster and apparently pathfinding.

there are reports of better gfx and better performance

 

thanks for the heads up.

just logged in to get the game patched and run the benchmark. my fps went down to 43.3 from 46.6 but the gfx did look much better (same custom settings).

will play a little more in a few hours and post my feedback. gfx-wise however its looking good.

 

its interesting that the usual bashing threads diminished

so they must be playing it

I guess the saying its so bad that I want more of it goes to this game

EDIT: the CAI is much more aggressive, I haven't noticed yet the BAI improvements, they are still forming up and defending what needs to be defended and so forth, Im early in the new macedon campaign (I don't have baktria so macedon has to serve), athens in turn 2 moved to kill epeiros, I guess i will have to kill athens early in the campaign to avoid the nuisance.

PS: as per notes its not save game compatible, in terms of performance Im seeing the same thing as before, patch 1.5 was unmodded from what I see

 

did you guys get patch 2?

i manually opted in for beta patch 2 but my game isnt updating itself to the official patch 2.

 

yep, and Im completely out of the beta no option to chose nothing

 

So your game which was on beta 2 updated to official patch 2?

Sent from a Galaxy far, far away

 

try to restart the pc and thus restarting steam.

if that doesn't patch try to verify the cache

but yes the beta patch 2 is the same as the official patch 2, so what steam did was to close the beta that I was and "update" the status accordingly

patch beta 3 is available
http://wiki.totalwar.com/w/Total_War_ROME_II:_Patch_3

interesting advert

http://www.theguardian.com/total-war-rome-2/interactive/read-and-download-the-roman-gazette

 

How is the performance for most of you? I have been playing Rome 2 exclusively on my desktop and haven't bothered installing it on my laptop because of the occasional lag. I am considering giving it a go on my laptop to get another perspective.

I have a GTX 770 in my desktop with an i5 4670K @ 4.6 GHz OC and it still lags periodically on the campaign map and in large battles. I don't even have my graphics settings all on extreme and it still behaves the same. If I set all graphic options to high the FPS drops are the same as if it is all set to extreme. I have read that shadows and unit detail have the largest impact on performance. My GPU usage rarely goes over 80% in the GPUz log and I have read that the CPU utilization isn't optimized correctly either.

On a positive note I have not experienced many of the bugs I have seen reported. I guess it varies system to system. Besides the random short performance dips the game runs fairly smoothly. There are some annoying gameplay changes that I am not too fond of (phantom army transport ships being my main complaint), but it has been playable and enjoyable. If you have 2GB or more of video memory then select unlimited video memory pool option. If not the game will automatically (inaccurately) detect and downgrade your graphic options for large battles.

 

In my experience, the only the first thread on the first core is being used optimally. I think that is what bottlenecks my laptop. When I turn the graphics higher, the thread cannot keep up and my gpu usage goes down, as well as, my fps.

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 4

 

what cpu is this? im getting 46.6 fps and i dont think my lower end sandybridge qm is bottlenecking my gfx.

 

920xm @3.2 ghz. I used rivatuner and hwinfo and the only thread in my cpu that's getting above 60% usage is the first thread on 1 core.

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 4

 

this is mine:



id say thats really good multi thread usage, especially considering how notoriously sequential most game engines are.

it could be that the game is not optimized for the nrhalem cpus or maybe its your gpu bottlenecking the cpu.

 

IMO Creative Assembly dropped the ball by attempting to make this release more accessible to the casual gamer. I have seen complaints of people running the game with HD 3000 graphics. How can they even launch the game to begin with? I am sure an HD 3000 would struggle with Medieval 2 TW. There is no doubt in my mind that this game is likely being ported to the new consoles this winter and that it was designed more for the casual gamer and not the loyal core audience that has always been around. Typical of nearly everything that is published or produced these days. What was the last great movie released besides maybe Argo and The Dark Knight? Everything is geared towards the masses and not the die hard fan. I can't say I am not surprised, that way I am never really let down...

 

i agree that rome 2 is not the ideal game to introduce to casual gamers but not for the reasons you mentioned. with the amount of provinces, factions, gameplay mechanics, units, etc in rome 2 a new player would just be overwhelmed. shogun 2 on the other hand, has a much smaller scale and is a more mature product, making it the ideal entry point for the casual player.

as for requirements, well any competent pc gamer knows that one has to check such requirements and scale the game accordingly. also any competent pc gamer will know that sometimes, even with systems beyond the recommended settings, the game will still struggle - such as, say, the witcher 2 or metro last light, but this does not in any way make the game automatically bad.

i dont know ca's plans but the tw series is far from being as casual gamer's game, and, contrary to what some may think, rome 2 is in no way an arcadey game. the last beta patch removed the capture point system on amost all maps (except sieges and combined land/naval battles iirc), aside from adding some performance and stability fixes. they could technically try to port tw games, but imho, that really isnt a target market.

 

no the HD3000 can handle the older games quite well. at the engine limitations, however if you go past that results are as expected, it will lag

so far rome 2 has the best multi core usage, followed by shogun 2, they are indeed modifying the multi threaded coded as the series progresses, this is actually quite hard to do.

the combo you have on your desktop to max out shogun 2 and have 30fps when closing in the battle was barely possible, you would hit just above 30 fps as min, rome 2 is a more demanding game, the units are more detailed the environment as well, they warned people that it would be more demanding to max the game. However campaign map lag is something that your rig shouldn't suffer from and it should be addressed in the patch 3, or at least I hope so. I don't know if you are experiencing this lag when scrolling around the map or when you are entering those closed spaces, i.e. using the strategic view, diplomacy screen...

and I can play the game on a P7350+4670m, which basically under performs a HD 4000 in terms of gpu performance slightly and in terms of cpu its quite an enormous gap.

I had an interesting discussion with a member on twcenter, etw sold more than 810k copies in fiscal year 2008. I don't think shogun2 managed the same feat due to the settings of the game, this game should've sold more than 1mil of copies already, Im betting that the game has already payed itself. the game industry is in for franchises, and that was the reason to change the title of the series, from being i.e. rome: total war, to total: war rome 2, focusing on the franchise.

anyway, this is a semi complex game, you have to build, research, expand, trade, while this is a simple game formula, the affects on the gameplay with all the bonuses, counters, management, battle tactics, campaign tactics, brings this far away from the usual strategy game that uses that same formula. Civ V doesn't hold a candle in terms of complexity, I know I have logged considerable hours on all civ games and the latest is the easiest of them all.

aside that this game was indeed geared to a more wide audience, and there is no dumbing down from the previous shogun 2, the contrary is much true.

I do think as per my review that this game was out of the oven way too soon. xmas should be prime time

out with all that, I bring gifts

Home

for an online encyclopaedia that has all the videos and the pictures, I discovered occasionally yesterday

and here is the AOR (area of recruitment) for the auxilia barracks as rome

Total War: Rome 2 Auxillary Forces

I want that AOR map for all the factions available, that would make it dandy.

EDIT: one hell of an interesting PR

http://www.theguardian.com/total-war-rome-2/interactive/read-and-download-the-roman-gazette

if you are familiar with WW2 and what churchill did in the papers you can see the expy

 

DP I know, but the text is already too large above

anyway, the performance increase for me using beta patch 3 is so large, but so large that isn't even funny. I have a better performance on my current settings than i had when playing shogun 2, this is absurd!, although Im playing with everything on low, the fps on the campaign map are around 60fps! I was hovering around 15-20fps! did a small battle with egypt now (new campaign) and its butter smooth, again more than 40fps!

this is an incredible gain in performance, btw its a mixed bag for high end systems.

 

Well, I don't notice any improvement in that regard. The campaign map still works, but the frame rate is choppy, at times.

I'm kinda bummed out that they removed the baggage trains altogether, though, it was quite a nice feature, at least in theory. I like the idea of logistics behind an army, where you can cripple the enemy's supply. Bunch of whiners.

 

indeed I have the same opinion regarding the forced march victory points, they were a good feature and took you off balance, they should just learn that it was a very relevant gameplay mechanic right there that was introduced to make the game more historical, which is something people cried all over the place, me included.