Rome Total War II

[aris]

In what ways does Shogun 2 improves on Rome or Medieval 2? It's a serious question, never played beyond those two after the Empire debacle. Graphics is a non-issue, obviously.

Agents are actually useful, instead of being annoying nuisances on the map, AI is better tenfolds; small factions generally don't suicide, the AI don't move hundreds of 1 stack units around on the map at random, the AI acts with a sense of purpose, diplomacy is less retarded and alliances are less arbitrary, AI allies will also coordinate their attacks, which they have done in no other total war game. You specialise provinces instead of building everything in everything province. Some provinces have key resources that are more important to capture than others, in the other games, each province were more or less equal. Recruiting armies directly to the general, makes you avoid a looot of tedious micromanagement.

 

[Irenaeus]

Thanks for the answer. All seems incline except for recruiting armies directly to the general, which while making you avoid a looot of tedious micromanagement, seems like popamole streamlining.

 

[Dead Guy]

It worked pretty well, imo, since you would replenish regiments so slowly in hostile territory you often had to withdraw to your province for a few turns anyway, if you were sufficiently beaten up. And then you didn't have to drag and drop 10 fucking hastati units and send one home to retrain. But, shit, it's been so long I don't remember, didn't you hire units in the castles first as normal?

 

[aris]

Thanks for the answer. All seems incline except for recruiting armies directly to the general, which while making you avoid a looot of tedious micromanagement, seems like popamole streamlining.

well, it depends on the eye of the beholder. But I don't think all streamlining is popamole. If FPS used to have a mechanics were you needed to control your feet, calves, legs elbows, shoulders hands individually to move, it's not a popamole streamlining to replace all that with w a s d.

 

[Trash]

FFS krauts get your shit together.

That's the official intro? Talk about some serious decline.

Check this trailer for the first Rome for instance.



Even their faction intro videos were better than the entire intro now. Seriously, wtf?

 

[spectre]

Thanks for the answer. All seems incline except for recruiting armies directly to the general, which while making you avoid a looot of tedious micromanagement, seems like popamole streamlining.

You CAN still recruit stuff the old fashioned way. The general simply saves you some clicking.

As a matter of fact you don't replenish regiments in hostile territory at all. Moreover, you get additional attrition in enemy territory in winter season. I kinda like this solution, as a costly victory really feels that way, as you have to slowly rebuild forces after that, making fights on several fronts much more challenging and satisfying. This is especially true after realm divide kicks in, while it's a pretty ham-fisted mechanic, it does give you a challenge in the endgame. Especially since the AI doesn't dick about and you're likely to face large, consolidated factions with pretty big armies. Unfortunately, unit retraining is gone, which makes me a sad panda, whenever I can't upgrade my veteran spearmen with better armor from a newly build smithy.

 

[Declinator]

Why so much whining about cutscenes? I'd personally be happy if there were absolutely no cutscenes or speeches. That would save me from pressing the escape so many times and would make me feel like they put that effort into something more worthwhile (like AI.)

 

[Irenaeus]

Oh, now I get it! Thanks.

 

[KoolNoodles]

Sorry, but STW2 is not better than MTW2 or even RTW(with mods, and that is very very important, because STW2 cannot be modded very well). Stainless Steel, Deus Lo Vult, Europa Barborum, etc. blow STW2 out of the water in terms of complexity, challenge, and gameplay. STW2 is a fine, stable, fun game, it's miles ahead of ETW and NTW and does a lot of things right that they hadn't quite sorted out for their new engine. Tech tree, city planning, Sea warfare, agents sort of, etc. When you compare it side by side with MTW2+mods however, it comes up well short. Deus Lo Vult's character system is eons ahead of what they attempted in STW2. Stainless Steel's AI puts it to shame. Europa Barborium's scope dwarfs it, and siege warfare in the vanilla MTW2 makes STW2's seem laughable. The only hindrance was the AI, which has long since been fixed by modders, so that the games are challenging and enjoyable.

If you want to play a good medieval\ancient era strategy game and already have MTW2/RTW, just stick to the hosted mods. If you want to specifically revisit the era of Sengoku Jidai and can find it on sale, STW2 is a fine game. Just don't expect much longevity out of it.

 

[Brinko]

The only things that are becoming popamole in Rome 2 are agents, where they are becoming extremely homogenized by all of them already being able to assassinate generals and other agents but now they can bribe too, and army recruitment which has already been covered. What I am worried about is the battles being too damn easy due to the AI always running its troops at me and when I fight them they are exhausted and I just kill them all no problem and the bullshit scripts that allow the AI to convert their shit peasant level troops into better versions because the AI is too fucking dumb to build anything else.

 

[Trash]

Bullshit. There is a mod that disables the script that gives the Shogun 2 AI free upgrades and when you use it you suddenly tend to find much more fun diverse AI armies against you. No way you just get peasants. Usually it's a mix of whatever the AI can build. Always puzzled me why CA went with the script that makes AI armies way more homogenous and thus boring when it already builds quite good stacks itself. Methinks they just wanted to buff it a bit more when in reality it really doesn't matter that much.

AI wise the TW games went downhill since the very first Shogun. Shogun 2 inclined the series again but not even close to what their first two games had. I don't really expect a good battle AI this time around, do hope they made the campaign AI a bit more interesting.

 

[Brinko]

Bullshit. There is a mod that disables the script that gives the Shogun 2 AI free upgrades and when you use it you suddenly tend to find much more fun diverse AI armies against you. No way you just get peasants. Usually it's a mix of whatever the AI can build. Always puzzled me why CA went with the script that makes AI armies way more homogenous and thus boring when it already builds quite good stacks itself. Methinks they just wanted to buff it a bit more when in reality it really doesn't matter that much.

AI wise the TW games went downhill since the very first Shogun. Shogun 2 inclined the series again but not even close to what their first two games had. I don't really expect a good battle AI this time around, do hope they made the campaign AI a bit more interesting.

What I meant was that there was and maybe still is a script that would make the AI's armies ashigaru units in S2 upgrade through magic into samurai troops because the AI was working off of cost and troopsize numbers and thought to spam those to win. But this is mostly in the beginning turns I've noticed and they do start to field diverse armies later on featuring katana sam and cavalry. But getting spammed shit peasant tier troops I felt was always par for the course as the AI in M2 in my experience always shit the bed by spamming peasants and town militia at me then come some new army with fuedal knights, dismounted knights, catapults, etc.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Just gimme my head hurlers and flaming pigs damnit, i'll make my own fun.

 

[Trash]

What everyone have seemed to miss is the following gem.

9. Campaign City Appearance on a Siege Map: Besides famous cities such as Rome, Carthage, Alexandria and what have you, other cities will not be specifically rendered on the battlefield. There will be a form of increasing points to capture similar to Shogun 2's castles. Higher tier cities will be larger and have more defensive positions in comparison to lower tier cities, similar to Shogun 2's building system.
Also the non-famous cities will be randomly generated on the battle map.

I was sad we wouldn't get cities reflecting what buildings are build in them when they announced the static nature of the cities. Then I hoped for nicely made maps with perhaps some elements that would come over from the campaign map and was glad to hear the rumors of persistent damage. Then CA announces this. Seriously? They couldn't be bothered to come up with a sprinkling of cool city maps for the 1 in 3 cities you can besiege? Random nonsense that will most likely be one or two templates repeated ad nauseum?

Them leaving the Rome and Medieval 2 engine with their awesome integration of campaign map cells into battle maps for the shit one they used since Empire keeps on pissing me off.

 

[eklektyk]

thats dissapointing ...had no real hope for this but amount of bullshit and "cinematikz assplushions" is very dissapointing.

 

[aris]

Do you really think that the opening cinematic has anything to do with the quality of the gameplay?

If anything I'm disappointed with how popamole the codex is, caring so deeply about opening cinematics.

 

[Endemic]

Well there is the DLC stuff and the marketing angle. One of those "wait and see" scenarios, not that I buy games at full price anyway.

 

[titus]

Well there is the DLC stuff and the marketing angle. One of those "wait and see" scenarios, not that I buy games at full price anyway.

33% off on Steam UK
A decent price for a game. Hopefully it will not suck very much.

 

[Brinko]

You know.

 

[SmartCheetah]

You know.

Hahahaha, Reminded me of my friend who is repeating "you know" every sentence as well LOL!

 

[KoolNoodles]

Still haven't seen a full battle that wasn't in a tutorial/scripted/dev showpiece. Still haven't seen 10+ turns of a campaign in the same vein. One month out. GREAT

 

[Emily]

I mean technically it should be just improved Shogun 2 Ai which is great... however.... I remember when the Shogun 2 was about to come out how they would not shut up about the great AI... This smells very fishy to me, the fact they dont parade their AI the same way as Shogun 2.

 

[Branm]

Well there is the DLC stuff and the marketing angle. One of those "wait and see" scenarios, not that I buy games at full price anyway.

33% off on Steam UK
A decent price for a game. Hopefully it will not suck very much.

100% off any decent 0-day site once this shit is cracked...

The above is my form of purchasing any game made by a big dev/pub who I dont trust.

 

[Brinko]

From the CA facebook page.

Here’s a sneak peek at something you won’t have seen before – the brand new Total War Launcher that’ll be shipping with ROME II. It brings a couple of cool new features, including the ability to “continue campaign”, jumping straight back into your last save game while skipping the intro cinematics. It'll also bring the latest Total War news and videos right to your window!

 

[titus]

From the CA facebook page.

Where's the "Buy all DLC" button?
Maybe that will come as a DLC for the launcher?

 

[Brinko]

http://forums.totalwar.com/showthread.php/72354-Jack-Answers!

Well I can pretty much say this whole Q&A was a giant fail when the dumbfuck answering thinks Shogun 2 was the most moddable game.