*Warning* DO NOT purchase Rome II: Total War without reading...

Im sorry but the only reason people play games now is because of the bling?

Im really starting to think that Im special

 

ikr. cant play on extreme=bad game

 

i appreciate good graphics, but i dont play a game strictly based on graphics. im still playing rome 2, and i enjoy games like prison architect, dont starve, reus, even old games like counter strike (i play GO).

for rome 2, i dont mind playing on a low graphic setting, as long as, it doesn't drop my fps below 10 every time i end my turn or if i click on an army while its on forced march. the zombie looking army really bothered me.

 

Oh god thank god I didn't buy it

 

I read in one of the comments of this 'lovely' review:

Total War: Rome II Angry Review - YouTube

That Medieval 2 is still a favorite and whatnot, so I dug up my copy of Medieval 2, and the battle graphics are still very good on the top settings and the siege battles are actually better there. Most of the features are there, too, like the minor cut scenes when the walls are breached and the like.

Really, look at that:

Medieval II Total War Online Battle #71: Two vs Three (Siege Battle) - YouTube

The battles haven't changed all that much.

Too bad I don't like the grand campaign in that game: princesses, merchants, agents, towns vs castles, way to much micromanagement, but all in all, maybe Rome 2 might be a slight step backward at the moment.

 

indeed its a great game and yes it has stood the test of time. in fact it is my favorite (kingdoms) in the tw series.

now take a trip back in time by checking the twc forums from when this game was launched to two years after. it was universally reviled as the worst tw game with a broken bai, broken cai, borken combat system, graphics bugs, almost unplayable in the highest end machines, etc etc. 'issues' several times the magnitude of what people are complaining of now.

and that in essence is why i am not worried about rome 2.

 

You sure have a point there.

I actually never liked Medieval 2, though, I'm not sure why..

Oh, now I remember, it was the micromanagement hell that killed it for me - I used to forget moving my princesses until they died of old age and the merchants and priests' shuffling all over the map annoyed me to no end, not to mention the game's poor excuse of a diplomacy and magical full stacks appearing next to my cities all of a sudden and the...you know what? I think I'll stick to Rome 2 afterall

 

heres a sample of what some people consider 'bad' graphics. really???

 

Beautiful indeed, but I don't think that's the kind of graphics people moan about, it just that you can hardly make the game look that way unless you have a HAL 9000 at home

 

no, no i wasnt talking about performance but quality- personally i can run it at close to that quality on my laptop, so pc requirement is not an issue. many who complain can run it like that, but they feel its just not as beautiful as shogun 2's or even empire's.

again this is clearly an issue of taste rather than actual gfx quality. if you like vibrant, oversaturated palletes with less realistic colors that pop then shogun2 is your choice. if you like a more earthy, color balanced palette with a smidge of hdr, which is more reminiscent of the bronze age, then rome2 is your ticket.

 

I think rome 2 angry joe review is one of the most pathetic things that he ever made. Some of the things he reviled are actually things he asked for in his shogun 2 review.

Anyway. the total war series with warscape had each time a little bit better gfx options, and each time the game requirements would increase. Shogun 2 is a very tough game to run in the same league as crisys 3 and bf3

aside that after the beta patch 1.5, people complaining about gfx became a thing of people that don't install the beta drivers and didn't use the beta patch, yesterday the patch 2.0 became official, with no change at all.

anyway people are now complaining why they can't have an easy game with carthage and the future seleucids, because they want all that territory that they had in history, not that to have those provinces they would be practically game breaking, no not that, they want because they can balance it, even when they are playing with it. Surely.

another hot topic is the slingers, I find that the most hilarious one, specially given that the rome 1 slingers received such a backlash because it was too weak, and they ask to ca to make then decent, they made it, now they want archers to be again more powerful than slingers because they think people used longbows and decent composite bows back then. yeah...

this is one amusing quote

it was done on a thread about scraping the warscape engine, the usual people are there with the usual knowledge of what a game engine does. in other terms they don't know what nonsense they are talking about

 

...and two years later:

same whiner: medieval 3 is so broken QQ. why couldnt they make it like rome2, that game was perfect!!!

 

Karamazovmm, those types of whines are idiotic and most of all petty, and most likely these are just different groups of annoying whiners. But say what you will, these games are released in a very poor state in terms of stability and performance, not to mention their game breaking bugs and sometimes even poorly balanced, to boot. I still wait for at least the 3rd patch before starting another campaign.

Heh. I remember how much people complained about the first Rome Total War, it was announced the weakest installment upon arrival. Now it is arguably praised as one of the best.

And I didn't know people actually complained about the best graphical quality in Rome 2, that's ridiculous, graphics is the last thing you can complain about in this game.

Anyway, I just spent a few hours with Medieval 2, and the game is more interesting than I remembered. Even a simple and quick skirmish there takes ages compared to Rome 2. Missile troops there are very cool, but they mostly serve to dwindle down the enemy's army, where in Rome 2 I remember I could make entire armies rout with a few units of velites. Rome 2 is definitely more 'to the point', but I can understand the fans getting all waah about the new change of pace, since they can't seem to accept any form of change, it seems.

 

yeah something like that

anyway, there are 2 groups of whiners there:

1) the new games never caught their interest, and they surely heard of the new games, thus blame everything on dumbing down and the engine

2) played the latest instalments of the series and were unhappy with those

group 1 is influenced by group 2, both groups have high regard for the old rome and m2tw

this is a quote that I did during the multiple personal attacks yesterday.

anyway the point still stands, I don't care if you complain about the game, but actually think first before speaking. specially regarding things you don't know. but you are on the internet so... you can lie all the way you want.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?621755-Battle-and-Unit-teams-What-we-are-working-on

list of things that are being done, I want to start my new campaign with the new beta patch.

I finished my 3rd macedonian campaign, and surely enough they are a damn well balanced faction.

I started by going north this time, so I wiped factions left and right till I reached the northern sea, and moved sideways from there, right at first capturing pontus caspia, and then left, with me engaging a very bloody war with a lot of celt factions that were allied with each other (that was hell I tell you) I spent a lot of turns in the brink of army annihilation since they started doing hit and run raids, razing my settlements and that was my food production area, after I did the respec of my provinces. So i was engaged in a 2 sided war against multiple opponents and had to raise a lot of armies (9 thats the first time I need this much) and they were all dying of starvation, I didn't had enough garrison due to it as well, and didn't had the time to let them replenish

after all that was done, I went to eliminate the people in italy, did that and moved to destroy the powerful seleucids, 2 prong attack, one through turkey and the other through the bekistan nations, it was hell, they had stacks of veteran and quality troops. I attacked with those 9 armies and 4 navies, doing a blitz attack I managed to capture 7 settlements in one turn, off course I left 3 armies for defence of my territories and truly enough thats where the hammer fell. I manage to lose 2 stacks (4 companion cavalry, 8 foot companions, 2 royal peltasts, 2 elite hoplites, 2 tracian skirmishers, 2 slingers), they were veteran stacks with at least silver chevrons and one was a gold one, in both cases I was outnumbered.

Basically the further I moved into seleucid territory and its client states the worse shape I was getting. I had to raise more stacks 3 more, thus again breaking the record and proceeded to kill off, managed to conquer everything till baktria and egypt. I thought about taking out gaul, iberia and the rest of africa, but that campaign wasn't fun anymore. and I was already on 20ac.

EDIT:

@amirfoox

Im not making excuses for no one, just defending my opinion, I do think the game was rushed, I actually made a review and posted here. I truly moved away from the tech problems since I knew that they were going to be fixed and truly a lot has been patched. the game could have more time in the oven, more time working on the formations, more time in bug hunting, fixing tech problems. I think that xmas would be the prime time for it to be launched.

do please don't confuse whining with my actual thinking regarding what could be made better in this game

 

I decided to make a new post the other is already quite long, kill me if you will

I remembered that shogun 2 launch was:

1) I don't care about the setting, give me rome or medieval

2) this game doesn't have AA? what hell how stupid you can be CA

3) backlash because AMD cpus couldn't handle the game, it was indeed a code issue. but about that time people started moving away from AMD cpus due to them being not ipc and their single thread performance was ridiculous. I remember people buying en masse the 6 cores cpus from them, how stupid

4) archers are too powerful - the units don't have shields

5) how come no one has shields? - it wasn't used at the time, nor was common on jap warfare

6) spider sieges strikes again - it was how they fought battles

7) how come the armours are so shiny? - the armours usually had lacquer on then

 

I'm not in the same group as those fools that complain about every little thing and shout their little keyboards out in the forums. I never once said anything in CA's official forums in any Total War game and mostly keep my opinions to myself or mildly vent them in different forums such as this one.

I wasn't implying in the slightest that you are making excuses or are CA's spokesman in some form, I just voiced my opinion yet again about the state the game was released, that's all

 

oh don't take it the wrong way, I was saying that the whiners behave like that, Im not saying that you are a whiner. I complain about the game as well, that doesn't make me a whiner.

 

some new features looks cool (like provinces), but ultimately, the game looks much worse than advertised (nobody should be arguing this, otherwise you gotta get your eyes checked), and this started to get old with games recently.. I am not preordering anything anymore, if we won't be able to trust even CA, then what?

 

yup discussions here have been mature and imho quite constructive. if you look at other tw forums, its a sh*tload of character attacks, overblown issues and unfounded anger.

 

errr... I never trusted CA. well I never trust any gaming company, its a leap of faith that you do, and incredibly that doesn't involve actual faith in the outcome, just that the end result is not worth the bother.

in terms of gfx can't care less how they advertised that, but seeing things on teutoberg and now, they are pretty much the same, comparing carthage to now, oh boy, I want that alpha back

the screenshots aside the usual treatments are actually pretty much what we got when you actually can see on full blown max. Unfortunately you can't max the game on a desktop cpu overclocked with a 680, you need more power, otherwise there will be lag somewhere along the way and the min fps will be less than 30

best option currently is to grab i7 4770k oc to the max that you can and get a titan and flash a vbios to allow real oc of the gpu.

I want to know how people are faring with the SB E cpus and how will the ivy Ex will fare with more cores, so far the core utilisation has been quite high

tell me about it, there were 2 trying to crucify me this week, at least one got suspended

anyway the thing that really ticks me off is their pose of knight in shining armour, and you have 2 instances for them, you are either with or you are just fanboy/CA paid sheep. but no matter what they will save the damsel in distress.

 

I will buy the game no matter what (it has the total war logo in front of it, that is enough for me ), but I was hoping for that killer environmental effects (fog & lightning) AND textures (some textures looks walking dead to me right now) that they have been advertising. Still, the reason I didn't buy yet is not only graphics, but AI and various other bugs that has been plaguing the game so far. As soon as they got that in control, I will give the game a try for sure. Karamazovmm, did you play the alpha?? Was it really the actual alpha which pulled off Carthage demo (and all other demonstrations, like e3 2013 for example, also had crazy graphics)??

 

oh no I haven't played the alpha, but you can see the difference from the battle in that walkthrough of carthage that they showed and how it is now. its a large difference in terms of detail, and I bet that they toned down because while they cherish the fact that its one of the most demanding games, they also want for people to play it on low end hardware, that would detract buyers, but people that know the series already knew that its a very heavy game, as it stands I think its the heaviest we have

yeah, I wish some things were expanded, other things more polished. the beta patch 3 cai is incredibly aggressive. Im playing as egpyt and have a gang bang on my hands right now, I don't know I haven't played much with egypt before, so I can't say how it was changed, maybe I should try a macedon start and see how it fares there.

the AI is much improved now, and so far the battles that I had with the BAI in settlements have been mixed bags, one they beautifully tried to flank me the other they stood there while my only unit of slinger took out 3 of their units, I haven't had open field battles so far

 

Yeah i feel the same way and weekly updates really sad, i'm not as mad as you are OP, but i do understand and now thinking about it makes me angry and i also have played all of the total war games and The 17th 18th century games they made were just so awesome and very innovating and this is just really bad, they probably just made it in 3 months, it's what it feels like to me, it's really such a shame too.