Rome Total War 2 looking likely!

Games
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continued…

The Forces tab in Campaign modes is now refreshed / updated faster in response to different actions taking place.
When returning to the campaign from a battle, besieging army’s action points bar no longer doubles in length and extends beyond it’s limit.
When an ally attacks a provincial capital in coop Campaign the other player will no longer be able to add and subtract siege equipment to the construction list during battle deployment.
Removed spaces between building upgrade icons in the Building Information panel to avoid info panel flickering in Campaign modes.
Improved the yellow selection highlighting on selected factions in the Campaign Faction Selection screen.
Added the option to delete key configuration files form the load key configuration dialog in the settings menu.
The “Battle Realism Mode” checkbox now greys out correctly when Legendary difficulty is selected in Campaign mode.
Consecrated Ground buildings in Campaign now show which culture they belongs to.
The “No Equipment Available” message on the pre-battle user interface in Campaign Mode is no longer displayed, if the player is the defender in a siege assault.
Added functionality to post-battle espionage icon so user can now see details about the conquered settlement.
Added missing tooltips to character skills on faction screen.
Fixes to the Campaign user interface to make objectives status text fit correctly within the available space.
When on the Campaign Map, if an Agent has no more action points and tries to perform an action on an enemy settlement, that action will become queued. If on the next turn the player captures that settlement that, upon ending turn the agent will no longer play the animation for the action on that now owned settlement.
When building Construction is paused in Campaign modes, a pause icon is now displayed to represent this.
Additional army names added for Germanic, Nomadic, Greek, Pontic, and Gaulish factions for more variety.
Fixed issue in the Prologue Campaign where the player couldn’t declare war on the Greek States via move options and had to do it via diplomacy.
There is now a chance for Campaign characters to spawn with a wife in their household.
In Campaign, when selecting an opponent’s settlement, then hovering the mouse over buildings in an owned settlement in the same province, the building information panel is now correctly displayed instead of being hidden.
Added an arrow icons to the Public Order entry in province dropdown, to indicate when Public Order is going up or down.
Solved issue that prevented the settlement button from being updated, when the province details panel is shown in the Campaign user interface.
The Conversion option is no longer displayed when the building is damaged on the Campaign map.
Fixed irrelevant attrition immunities being shown for ships in campaign on the Unit Info panel.
Remove misleading tooltips from unit cards in the unit exchange panel if they cannot be exchanged in Campaign modes.
Female character portrait / heads are shown when a “Subject Gains Notoriety” event occurs in Campaign, and the event involves a female character (e.g. the Vicious Words event).
Fixed a bug, where some Campaign Event Messages were automatically marked as read.
Dragging the mouse from a province owned by a certain faction, for instance Rhodes, into a sea region which they do not use, will no longer display their faction icon next to the contested status for the sea region.
Fixed un-openable event messages which sometimes appeared in Campaign modes.
Successful bribe attempt now shows correct family name on the message.
Mission event titles are now consistent between event messages and the event message list panel.
The correct cursor icon is now displayed when an Army at sea is selected and order to attack a garrisoned army in a port settlement.
The “opportune failure” part of agent action event messages will now only display for the faction that the agent belongs to.
After progressing through the Prologue from Chapter 1 to Chapter 3, exiting out of Chapter 3 at the start will no longer cause Chapter 3 to appear locked on the main menu.
Character Rank Up events now display the Character Type and new rank.
Fixed the window size of the games Launcher in certain desktop resolutions.
Fixed bug where placing the mouse over areas of attrition on the campaign map, would make the tooltip look like the area was an enemy.
Tooltips don’t show ambush chance for fleets anymore.
Fixed tooltip height, when tooltips don’t have any text in them.
Tooltip on Campaign map no longer stops showing ambush chance when placing the mouse over an attrition area.
Fix for number of available units is not displaying on mercenary recruitment cards.
Fixed an inconsistency with Silanus’ name between Prologue Chapters. Throughout Prologue 2, Silanus was identified as ‘Gaius Fulvius Silanus’. However during Prologue 3, he was identified as ‘Gaius Silanus’.
Various minor text fixes in Campaign mode.
When the player doesn’t have enough money to perform an agent action, and orders an agent to perform a certain action on an enemy, the list of options to perform will now be greyed out immediately, instead of only when the cursor is moved over the options.
Fix for incorrect hyperlink in the faction panel and incorrect tooltip on damaged buildings.
Battle

Added unit numbers to Unit Cards. These can now be enabled in battle interface options (“Unit Card Man Count” check box).
Added option to game settings menu to enable/disable aide de camp (Battlefield Advisor), so the player can now disable this panel from ever appearing.
Naval units are now grouped together depending on their unit type more often in deployment. This prevents them from colliding into each other so much at the start of a battle with large armies and large varieties of ships.
Fixing for invisible elephants making it appear like elephant riders were floating in the air during battles.
Fixed issue where dragging out units on the battlefield could get stuck on screen after deselecting the unit.
Chat toggle button is no longer greyed out in frontend when players set their state to “Ready” in a Multiplayer Battle or Campaign lobby.
Updated the Carthago radar image to better represent the terrain in the battle.
In a Multiplayer Lobby, when a team leader with one AI army on their team switches to the other side, the players Steam avatar no longer remains attached to AI army.
Fixed checkbox for “Battle Realism Mode”, so it’s no longer greyed out and un-ticked when the player has just quit a Legendary difficulty Campaign.
Fix for “Unit Size” option being reset to last saved setting when going hosting multiplayer battles.
Fixed the “Select All” functionality in battle setup screen ([CTRL]+[A] keyboard shortcut)
Various fixes for the Change Team button being in incorrect state in the battle setup menu.
The Battle HUD with double line Unit Cards will shrink to single line as units are removed.
The Spectator slot in a Multiplayer Lobby can be taken out of team 2 now if there is space there, and not on team 1.
Updated buildings on the radar map during battle for the “Armavir” battle map.
Improved boarding user interface in battles.
Added some user interface to remind player to use deployables during deployment, when they still have deployables un-deployed.
Reduced chance of siege towers moving away and leaving men behind if the user clicks to drop equipment, and orders it to be re-manned as troops are disembarking.
Added tooltips for ability effect icons on Unit Banners in battle, and made these icons larger.
Fixed transport ship icons not disappearing from their Unit Cards once the units disembarks
Fixed a large number of floating objects and clipping issues across a variety of siege maps.
Fixed floating buildings and battlefield props in an Egyptian Port battlefield.
Visually improved Greek Port battle map.
Removed some rocks from a port in the Antioch battle map to prevent ships passing through them when disembarking.
Changes made to the disembarkation areas in the large Carthago battle map to prevent ships from passing through the naval port buildings.
Adjusted beach landing / disembarkation areas in the Athenia battle map, to prevent ships going too far onto the land.
Adjusted beach landing / disembarkation areas in the Greek minor port battle map, to prevent ships going too far onto the land.

Known Issues

Changing the game’s Texture Quality option during a campaign or a battle may cause the terrain to appear black. This can be avoided by changing this option with the Game Settings in the main menu, and will usually stop happening after starting the next battle or re-loading your campaign. This will be hotfixed in the near future.
The Mod Manager is currently only partially localised, so most compatible with English. We aim to localise this fully in the near future.

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Ooh Seleucids! Oh wait, it’s Rome 2.

Jpinard, you should check out Europa Universalis: Rome.

643

How was EU:Rome? I’ve thought about buying it myself, but never fell in love with the Paradox engine. Or more specifically: I never liked armies retreating deep into MY territory.

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How is Steam Workshop integration?

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I have some basic mods. They work outside of Steam workshop via movie format (my preferred method was mod manager pre v5), yet no matter what I do I can’t make them function via Steam Workshop and I can’t figure out why (I’m not alone). They’re simple, formatted correctly… they just don’t work.

646

I win this game when I play hardest, without even trying, this is just going boring :(

647

And the massive blobs are pretty annoying as well. I wish my soldiers would keep formation for just LITTLE while while figthing.

648

Sorry for going against all the negativity here, but I just noticed they are releasing the first piece of DLC for free for a week.

In all honesty, it’s the least they can do until the game is fully fixed, but when I played it (patch 2 and 3) I hugely enjoyed it, and I’m looking forward to dive in again… If only I had any free time at all…

649

I think the new patches have improved the game a lot. The AI is more aggressive on the strategic map and my allies are quick to help me now. One of the most noticeable improvements is how much longer tactical battles last! On normal difficulty I lost a battle and managed to squeak by another simply because the battle lasted longer than two seconds after contact. I really had to manage my men’s formations and morale, and I was even able to rally and regroup a bunch of cowardly mercenaries during my last battle (who were promptly fired immediately after). One thing that that weirded me out was when going up against a group of mercenary elephants, I used some cavalry to throw some flaming javelins. The entire group of 10 elephants reared up on their hind legs and died. I don’t think one volley of javelins would do that, even if they were flaming javelins.

650

How is the ridiculously unoptimized campaign map? Does it still drop to 10fps when you select a unit and it draws an overlay of where you can move it?

651

It’s not as bad, but it’s still like wading through molasses when several units are viewable.

652

Good for you I guess, but I certainly can’t say the same myself. Playing the somewhat overpowered Romans and using ballistas does help my chances, but especially playing barbarian tribes I still get my ass kicked in battles every now and then. Perhaps this is because I tend to send just one army to a town I want to conquer, and there’s usually more then one army defending. But even with comparable armies I find the battles aren’t complete walkovers. And yes, this is using the normal flanking tactics etc.

Now I’m certainly no master general or anything, but I don’t suck at this game either. So I guess you are either exploiting the AI with unbalanced armies, or you are simply a genious general. In the last case, I guess you’ll have to wait a few more years for an AI that can compete with your superior intelligence…

653

Seriously MJ- Upn’till recently the game was a cakewalk. I’m no supergeneral either, but I’m walking all over the rest of the world without any issues. If I have to make smaller armies, don’t use siege engines, and stop using agents in order to improve the AI’s chances, then why bother playing the game? Its broken, and CA has as much as admitted it with their recent posts over at the CA forums.

They do seem to have some ideas as to how to fix the game though, even though they’ve said that they are probably not going to touch the senate part or civil war, both of which are (Again, admitted by CA) not working as they wanted to say the least. I’m waiting for a year or so by now, and then I’ll see how the game shapes up.

654

No no no, not at all. I hate diplomacy, never do it, I don’t use much agents except the ones I put in armies. However I do attack cities with 2 stacks, as you can be overwhelmed, atleast early on with just one stack. I can have many problems early on as the units aren’t that good, but once I get some good cav and heavy troops I can deal with almost anything. The battles sometimes are like 4000 enemies killed, 300 for me…

Notice, there is a WAST difference between playing Rome VS Greek and Rome Vs Germanic, you get beaten up a lot more by the latter.

Problem comes when i’ve sort of established myself, I have all of Italy for example, and the enemies I face in later game are WEAKER and less numerous than earlier, thusly the game is the -most- difficult immediately and less so later on. Didn’t Tom Chick have a name for this condition…

I got a good game going on multiplayer versus mode though, as we play without AI, the grand campaign on HARD can be an absolute bitch, there is nothing more fun than wiping a good army of my opponent, slowing down his conquest of the map…particularly once when he had crack troops , full army, but met 2 stacks of angry dudes, of which half was slingers…they put the H in hurt.

655

Thanks for that elaborate explanation, and my apologies for my somewhat sarcastic earlier reaction, mainly caused by me mistaking the shortness of your earlier statement. I see now why my experiences are different from yours and Razgon’s sofar: even though I’ve played quite a bit, I’ve also started over quite a few times (a bad habit I have with many games: I want to know what that other country/class/car/spec/etc… does…). So I’ve probably simply not reached that established state yet, where I can beat anything that’s thrown at me…

656

oh - that makes perfect sense. I agree its not instant win in the early game at all, at least with the last few patches but as time goes on, it becomes a bit of a slog I’m afraid.

657

Problem is that the other factions rarely do very well, so once you reach a certain size victory is more or less assured it’s just a question of how quickly you can do it. Shogun 2 did a better job of maintaining pressure into the late game with the realm divide mechanic, in Rome 2 you enemies will simply continue to fight each other even as you steamroll them. The should have included a similar mechanic to shogun 2, maybe have factions progressively ally or voluntarily vassal themselves to one of the stronger factions to counterbalance your expansion.

658

Personally I wish if I don’t play Rome myself, then Rome could have an option to get boosted extra, so the game will eventually see me squaring off against Rome, instead of when I finally get there, notice they are long replaced by Libya or something.

All the major powers get ripped apart in my SP games mostly, they are just too weak compared, which is maybe okay if a human player takes the helm, but the AI …no.

659

This is a major design failure in the game. We can mod it, but shouldn’t have to.

660

Why is it a failure? I don’t think the game is supposed to faithfully (and artificially) maintain historical borders between various (or even just major) states as you play it. What’s the point then? You get a historical starting point but after that who knows how the things will turn out. After all, Rome didn’t have some magic power that allowed it to dominate back then and conquer all their enemies, it happened due to a combination of things, pure luck (or what seems like it :)) among others. If in your “alternative history” game Carthage (or some other state) managed to beat Rome, why is that a major design failure? I say, they had it coming! :)

All the major powers get ripped apart in my SP games mostly

IIRC there are no inherently “major” powers in the beginning of the game. All states have 3-4 regions at max, no overpowered unique troops or anything else that would give them a huge advantage (except for maybe some regions bringing in more money than others). It doesn’t really surprise me to see some “historically major” state get reduced down to nothing in a game. Or vice versa - seeing Aztecs conquer the world in a Civ game. :)