In less than two weeks, Creative Assembly and Sega will release TOTAL WAR: ROME II, the eighth game in the acclaimed TOTAL WAR series and the sequel to 2004's ROME: TOTAL WAR.
As with the other TOTAL WAR games, ROME II will mix large-scale, turn-based strategic gameplay with a (pauseable) real-time tactical battle engine. Using the map you recruit and deploy armies and navies, build new structures, expand cities and manage diplomatic and economic matters. When one of your armies comes into contact with an enemy force, combat results. The game then switches to a map in which you directly control your army in battle. The focus in these games is on realistic tactics and unit formations, with a wide range of units to control from skirmishers to cavalry and archers. The same rules apply to naval combat, with you deploying fleets packed with troops and able to engage other fleets in battle and undertake boarding actions. For the first in the history of the series, however, the game will also allow combined-arms battles, with navies and armies fighting on the same coastal maps.
ROME II also allows you to play as different factions. As well as Rome, you can play as Carthage, Macedon, Britannia (the Iceni), Gaul (the Arverni), Germania (the Suebi), Parthia or Egypt. A free expansion (available on release day) adds Pontus, whilst a month or so later another free update will add the Seleucid Empire. Three of the Greek city-states - Athens, Epirus and Sparta - will also be available to play as a paid expansion on release day, although this will be included free for those who pre-order the game. The game will also feature dozens of non-playable minor factions, many of them with unique forces, for you to defeat and conquer as you try to spread your empire across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
Available exclusively for PC, TOTAL WAR: ROME II is the most graphically-impressive-looking game in existence. However, Creative Assembly claim that they have optimised the game so it will work on any machine that can run their previous game, SHOGUN II, without sacrificing visual quality.
For myself, I was a huge fan of the original ROME and MEDIEVAL II (released in 2006) but not so much of the more recent games in the series. But this is certainly looking hugely impressive, and will be the first TOTAL WAR game I get on release day since MEDIEVAL II. Here's hoping it can live up to its immense promise.
TOTAL WAR: ROME II will be released on 3 September 2014. It is available to pre-order now on Steam (though those without fast broadband might want to be forewarned that the game will be a colossal 35GB download, and maybe prefer to get a boxed copy for a faster install).
Anyone else going to be checking this out?
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I'm super psyched about this game.
I've been a fan of the Total War series since the original Total War: Medieval and Rome is my absolute favorite of the series, I've been hoping for a Rome II for quite some time so this is basically a dream come true.
I've been playing a bit of Shogun 2 lately to make the wait easier, but I'm glad the wait is almost over.
Geeze, Wert, did you copy the entire promotional material for that OP? ^^
Yeah, very psyched about it. I got tired of Shogun's mostly samey-samey armies a few months back and after playing through the Third Age mod for Medieval 2, I am more than ready to have something new come this way. Maybe I'll even play a few naval combats, which I've avoided like the plague for Empire and Shogun. ^^
It was for my blog's preview of the game, just seemed easier to copy it over here. Though I did think it was a bit 'PAID ADVERTISEMENT' in tone, Sega unfortunately didn't pay me for it :-)
I actually like Empire - Napoleon the battles were good the gameplay was limited.
I loved Rome and medieval.
I have a Rome game going now.... The mods were good as well... Any word if it will be available to mod?
I have a Rome game going now.... The mods were good as well... Any word if it will be available to mod?
Yes. The extent to which you can mod stuff is unclear, though, and total conversions (like THIRD AGE and WESTEROS for MEDIEVAL II) seem out of the question.
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I actually like Empire - Napoleon the battles were good the gameplay was limited.
I loved Rome and medieval.
I have a Rome game going now.... The mods were good as well... Any word if it will be available to mod?
I seem to remember a Creative Assembly employee saying it will be the most moddable game they have made, even more so than Shogun 2.
I seem to remember a Creative Assembly employee saying it will be the most moddable game they have made, even more so than Shogun 2.
They're blowing smoke. SHOGUN II has 'the most mods' for any of their games, but those 'mods' are almost entirely tiny little changes to the existing game balance, faction unit selection and so on. They're not very comprehensive at all.
OTOH, ROME and especially MEDIEVAL II have total conversions like THIRD AGE and WESTEROS: TOTAL WAR with completely new maps, completely new factions, completely new units and even allow different mechanics to be added (the WWI mod, complete with tanks, is particularly impressive). No game in the series since MEDIEVAL II has allowed that amount of modding to be possible. Hence why brand-new MEDIEVAL II mods continue to be announced, seven years after it came out.
Given that ROME II uses the same engine as SHOGUN II, NAPOLEON and EMPIRE, none of which allowed comprehensive modding, I consider the chances of ROME II changing that to be close to zero. I would absolutely love to be proven wrong on that :)
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I seem to remember a Creative Assembly employee saying it will be the most moddable game they have made, even more so than Shogun 2.They're blowing smoke. SHOGUN II has 'the most mods' for any of their games, but those 'mods' are almost entirely tiny little changes to the existing game balance, faction unit selection and so on. They're not very comprehensive at all.
OTOH, ROME and especially MEDIEVAL II have total conversions like THIRD AGE and WESTEROS: TOTAL WAR with completely new maps, completely new factions, completely new units and even allow different mechanics to be added (the WWI mod, complete with tanks, is particularly impressive). No game in the series since MEDIEVAL II has allowed that amount of modding to be possible. Hence why brand-new MEDIEVAL II mods continue to be announced, seven years after it came out.
Given that ROME II uses the same engine as SHOGUN II, NAPOLEON and EMPIRE, none of which allowed comprehensive modding, I consider the chances of ROME II changing that to be close to zero. I would absolutely love to be proven wrong on that :)
Well, mods or not, I am still getting this game. Pre-ordered it and already finished pre-loading in fact, so I'm all set for tuesday.
Agreed, I have it pre-loaded as well. MEDIEVAL II is still more than playable enough, so the lack of big mods for the more recent games isn't too much of an issue.
Hrmbl, seems like I'll be getting my key only later on, maybe a day before release. Should be enough to pre-load it, though.
Anyone else going to be checking this out?
Not me! I played the heck out of Shogun: Total War, was somewhat fond of Medieval: Total War (the premise was kinda dumb, but the gameplay was fun) and pretty much lost interest from Rome and onwards. I loathed the switch to free map movement. I really liked that sense of pushing chess pieces around the aboard.
Europa Universalis is more my speed, to be honest.
Good stuff:
It's huge, it looks good (if you remember to click the 'unlimited video memory' option, otherwise the game automatically turns details down a lot), the AI on both the campaign map and the battlefield is better than in most of the TOTAL WAR series and there's an enormous sense of scope to it which is extremely impressive. Units automatically turning into boats and setting sail is good, and the agent system may be the best the series has ever done. Spy/assassins, champions and diplomats all work logically.
On the bad side, the new 'legion' system (where you can only add units to a legion, and you're limited by the number of legions depending on your empire's size and power) is fine for encouraging aggressive play but falls apart when it comes to city defence. Your cities are now automatically defended by militia and, although you can affect what militia are trained by the buildings that are present, you can't directly recruit garrison units. If you want to put units in a city, you need to commit a whole legion, which is extremely inefficient.
Diplomacy is also completely useless. It's never been the series' strong point, but it's usually at least halfway competent. In ROME II it's a Herculean struggle even to open a trade deal with another empire, and even that is usually only possible by bribing them. With money very tight and tons of stuff to upgrade and do in the early game, this makes for a lot of hitting 'end turn' without actually achieving very much. City management is also poor, with you having to expand the city to the next size up just to build one more building and being unable to change the tax rate per-city or per-region. You can exempt some cities from tax or you can change tax rates for the whole empire but nothing inbetween. This is bizarre because ROME I - a nine-year-old game - gave you both more control and a lot more feedback on what you were doing. The map is also too big, I think. With ROME II it takes a dozen turns to move even a diplomat from Rome to southern Spain, which feels too long. There's too many factions and the 'end turn' procession of AI moves can last up to 3-4 minutes later on in the game.
Overall: a good game but one that is hamstrung by a number of UI and control oddities. If you could uncouple the battle engine and attach it to the ROME campaign map and UI (with better graphics), you'd have a much stronger game. As it stands, ROME II is a lot of fun but fails to really take the series forwards in any real manner.
I really haven't had time to play much, because I managed to get a pinched lower back nerve yesterday, which has hampered my ability to concentrate quite a bit and (with some Ibuprofen) I also GM'ed my Jade Regent campaign yesterday, too.
But from what I saw today, I can echo Werthead's concerns. City management seems unnecessarily complicated, the encyclopedia managed to get worse since Shogun 2, as did the battle UI (seriously, where the hell are the buttons to move your formation forward or backward a few meters? I got to use Shift+Arrow keys now for that? The hell?).
I'm sure I'll get used to it, but there have been made some decidedly odd choices for this game, compared to the last one.
An interesting bug: I had a general standing right next to an unwalled city. I had 2,000-odd men, they had about 30, no reason to actually fight the battle at all. When I clicked on the city, rather than turning around and attacking, my army decided to jog down the coast, jump in a boat, sail back up and over-dramatically attack in a massed naval landing, swarming ashore like some kind of crazy Roman version of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (except without the machine guns or tanks, or the bad guys being anywhere near the beaches).
Awesome? Yes. Completely unnecessary and, if the city had been much more heavily defended (opposed naval landings are horrendously chancy), possibly decisive? Also yes. I'll have to keep an eye on that.
I'm sure I'll get used to it, but there have been made some decidedly odd choices for this game, compared to the last one.
Agreed, and I'll stress the game is certainly a lot of fun (if a bit rough around the edges), but it's probably not the best thing for a game to be making you think of its predecessor - and I mean ROME I, not just SHOGUN II - because it did a lot of things better.
I attempted to play through the "tutorial" last night, and had incredible difficulty with the graphics bogging down. Admittedly I have a 4 year old system with minimal upgrades, but my system ran Shogun 2 with no difficulty. I mention this only because I read a designer interview that claimed if you could run shogun 2 then Rome 2 would work on your system with minor tweaks.
Oh, just great. I just had something good happen to me in the game, i.e. I had already founded the German Confederation and the Marcomanni tribe was about to join me with their three regions via diplomacy... and the game serially crashes when that happens. I guess I'll have to play a non-German faction until Creative Assembly gets their s%$& together and fixes bugs like that.
There's going to be a big patch tomorrow, apparently, and nVidia will have a new, optimised driver out in the next week or so.
If you are experiencing massive slowdowns try activating the 'INFINITE VIDEO MEMORY' thing in the options menu. If you don't, the game will try to dynamically scale the graphics based on your FPS and basically makes a pig's ear of it. Switching it on should make the game run faster and look better, weirdly.
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An interesting bug: I had a general standing right next to an unwalled city. I had 2,000-odd men, they had about 30, no reason to actually fight the battle at all. When I clicked on the city, rather than turning around and attacking, my army decided to jog down the coast, jump in a boat, sail back up and over-dramatically attack in a massed naval landing, swarming ashore like some kind of crazy Roman version of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (except without the machine guns or tanks, or the bad guys being anywhere near the beaches).
Awesome? Yes. Completely unnecessary and, if the city had been much more heavily defended (opposed naval landings are horrendously chancy), possibly decisive? Also yes. I'll have to keep an eye on that.
I've had some weird pathfinding bugs like that too (like a dignitary deciding that the best way to sail from Italy to Sicily is to walk to Spain instead), so now I save every time before attempting to do anything.
Also had a bug in a naval battle. I attacked a lone Carthaginian general with three of my own ships. I sailed the missile ships up on the enemy's sides to pin it down and then rammed it head on with my admiral's ship with the speed buff on. Naturally the ship sank instantly and I got the victory screen. Then to my surprise the enemy sails away on the map, ship intact, and with more men than he started the engagement with. Wtf?
Yeah, I am at the point where I won't play anymore, because AI turns take five minutes per turn and now even the main map is lagging like hell, when it wasn't at the start of the game. Also, I am simply steamrolling everything with the British Confederation and the AI is too stupid to declare war on me.
Disappointing, very disappointing. I didn't know that I had signed on to an extended beta test.
I'm finding the game to be pretty good. The patches took care of the crashes and spend up the end-of-turn sequence considerably for me. I even explored most of the Med by ship and exposed quite a few factions and the end-of-turn sequence is still only taking about 2 minutes max (60 turns or so in).
The AI just pulled off a startling maneuver: a faction one of my allies was at war with far off near Denmark assembled a large army and fleet, circumnavigated Europe and has invaded Sardinia, taking me completely by surprise. It's going to take a few turns to beat off the invasion. This may be one of the boldest moves I've ever seen the AI pull off in any TOTAL WAR game to date.
Disappointing, very disappointing. I didn't know that I had signed on to an extended beta test.
The game does have 'Creative Assembly' in the credits, so I think that's a given. As with Bethesda, you should always fire up a CA game in the expectation that it's probably going to be a bit wonky until patches and modders fix it up. We were spoiled by SHOGUN 2, which launched in a very good state, but OTOH MEDIEVAL II and EMPIRE launched in considerably worse states than ROME II, and ROME I was pretty weak as well.
They shouldn't do it, no, but it is very much par for the course with this series. One thing to say in their favour is that they are fixing the thing much faster than I've ever seen before. A third patch should be out today in fact.
I still played yesterday and was experiencing the exact same issues I mentioned. And, yes, my computer runs every other game fine.
Are you running an i7? For some reason, ROME II really doesn't like them and actually slows down when being run on them. I have an i5 and it's not too bad.
Do you also have the 'infinite graphics memory' thing in the graphics menu checked? If you have it unchecked the game just slows down massively, which makes no sense (it's supposed to regulate FPS by dynamically varying graphics quality, but it simply doesn't work).
I have an AMD core, so the problem is not there (and core parking doesn't work for them, according to the link you posted, Hama). I checked the infinite graphics memory, I'll see if it helps any. I'll get back to you on that.
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You can input the memory manually in the file preference located in :
C:\Users\USER NAME\AppData\Roaming\The Creative Assembly\Rome2\scripts
open it with note pad and find the line
gfx_video_memory 0; # gfx_video_memory , Override available video memory (bytes) #
Change the 0 with 3221225472
This worked for me.
Err, checking the box for the available video memory override does work from the in-game menu. The "core parking" thingy should not work for AMD cores, according to the link you posted.
The new patch is currently in beta. Several people who've tested it reports that it massively increases speed of the end-of-turn phase. It should go live imminently.
Good. We'll see how it goes. Maybe it'll even help the braindead AI. ;)
The Patch 2 notes are fairly substantial. They do confirm that the end-of-turn delays are addressed and they have also changed the speed of the units in battle.
There isn't much difference between the AI in the two games apart from one of scale. They basically cheated with the AI in SHOGUN II by using the small size of Japan to factor in all of the different routes the AI armies can take and directly programming in a load of contingencies. The AI isn't really smarter, but the much smaller scale of the game allowed them to fudge it that it appeared so.
In ROME II Europe is much more wide-open than Japan and the AI can't cope with the choices quite as well. It had the same problem in most of the pre-SHOGUN II games as well, and the AI in ROME II is certainly better than most of them. For battlefield AI, I'm not really seeing any difference. The AI in SHOGUN 2 was capable of quite insane behaviour as well, such as charging at you in one massive blob for no apparent reason or splitting into five forces to attack a massive settlement, allowing you to use your entire army to destroy each bit of the enemy army one at a time before the rest could reinforce.
Something that really sucks in both games is the thing allowing infantry units to burn down gates, as it removes the need for siege engines. Something I'm glad has gone is the crazy thing in SHOGUN II where all units can rappel over walls at will, as it made siege battles almost completely pointless.
Sorry, but the AI is definitely worse. Just standing there while I destroy one unit after the other with my slingers, while even feeding me one single unit after the other to run Black Ninja Style towards them? Which happens every single siege battle of a non-walled city? Which are 50% of all battles in the game? That alone is deadly to immersion.
The AI never declares war on you. It doesn't have any logic in its diplomacy (grantedly, they managed to make the Shogun 2 AI worse in that regard after patching it).
Shogun 2 sieges were fine. At least the AI was capable of sending in troops at different locations, so that you had to manage your troop deployments more carefully.