Eurogamer re-reviewed the game.
It’s so refreshing to see Total War: Rome 2 smoothed over and playing smarter. It’s a noticeably better game. Unfortunately, it’s not always that much better and I can’t help viewing it as a charming toddler: as something that sometimes surprises me with its smarts, sometimes walks just fine by itself and sometimes pukes in my lap with nary a moment’s warning.
Anyone willing to pay $15 for the Sparta campaign?
Didn’t think so.
I am, actually. The game has become rather good by now and I’ve been having a ton of fun with it. This is an entirely new campaign on an entirely new map, about the Greece lands and the wars there.
All the campaign DLCs are $14.99 when released. They’re also all quite good (though I don’t know about $15 good). I doubt Sparta will go on sale in the Steam Holiday Sale starting this week, but all the other DLC will, including the campaigns. If they do 75% off again like they did last sale, $3.74 is a STEAL for Caesar in Gaul and Hannibal at the Gates. $1.99 for the culture packs is about the right price to make them worth picking up as well.
I’ve been playing Rome II since the start of December. I figured this was a good time to dive in with all the major patching being done and since almost all the DLC was cheap during the Fall sale.
As far as I can tell, most of the issues that plagued the game at launch have been addressed. The game still does the odd boneheaded Total War things, but it’s no longer completely stupid. The game is stable and hasn’t crashed on me yet, and the framerate is good with almost everything cranked up.
I’m still a little miffed to see that MP is so bare-bones even after the patching. What happened to the neat avatar map stuff in Shogun 2? Shame.
I’m not going to pay full price for this expansion, but I’ll be happy to pick it up in a sale.
If you havent played Ceasar in Gaul and get the chance - do it. Its so much fun and great, focused experience.
This. I LOVED Shogun 2’s multiplayer.
The new Total War Arena also sounds good, but 2v2 Shogun 2 before they merged the expansions into MP was bliss. With the expansions it became weird (units from different periods together) and some units lost a lot of utility.
I used to play with a friend that went mostly Katana + matchlock ashigaru, and I had a full cavalry veteran Army. Strategy was for him to charge forward fast while I obliterated enemy cavalry. At the time he started engaging I normally had dispatched all enemy cavalry and I was able to, on one hand interfer with the second enemy deployment/pick units off, and on the other hand charge the backside of the engaged player (who was on melee disadvantege anyways). We had no archers nor spears, yet we where competitive (we reached top 100 I think).
Those were the times…
See I never have played a single MP match of any TW game, and I’ve got somewhere in the 600+ hour range for the series. So if this is able to match what the quality is for single player campaigns that’s all that matters. From what I hear it’s finally done that. Still I’ve got original Rome, and I’m not sure I see enough reason to get this one, though the different campaigns may be enough to sway me.
Wait until xmas sales, but Rome 2 now is better than the original, and there are some beefy mods to it aswell.
Sunk about 5 hours into a game tonight, playing as Rome for the first time since I bought this last year.
It is really a gigantic leap in terms of load and turn times. Also combat AI isn’t as horrible as I remember, and I could swear I was seeing the enemy try to flank me at times.
Ship battles are still giant blobs, but they look good till they blob up!
Regarding ship battles, while they still suck, a major change has been implemented which is pretty good - Transport ships no longer have the ability to ram! That means, yes, you have to protect your transports now, instead of them being your strongest weapon.
Them’s fightin’ words! There are people out there who love Rome 1…
Yeah I don’t think Rome 2 is better. I’ll play 2 over Rome 1 because it is prettier and I don’t feel like hunting down a fan patch that’ll make Rome 1 look good on my widescreen monitor, but I’d much prefer a prettier Rome 1 over Rome 2.
Before I further explain myself, I want to make it clear that I like Rome 2 and it is easy to now recommend to people who like Total War games.
That being said, these games ARE called TOTAL WAR for a reason, and Rome 2 has too many… “features” that get in the way of quickly and easily engaging in battles. The settlement management seems unnecessarily convoluted, the politics system seems completely pointless, and the army upgrades (while theoretically cool) don’t seem to be meaningful. And the melee combat isn’t as good as pre-Empire games because it suffers from this odd quirk where only one individual unit will fight another individual unit at a time. So if I had a unit of a hundred warriors ready to fight your single warrior, they’d essentially line up and wait for the guy in front of them to die before they took a swing.
Rome 1’s settlement management might not have been deep enough, but it was easy to understand and it didn’t get in the way of you pumping out some armies to go do some killing. Generals would gain traits, individual units would level up, and melee combat made sense. And I autoresolve the same number of sea battles in Rome 2 as I did in Rome 1. :p
Go me.
Total War: Warhammer, a new entry in Creative Assembly’s long-running Total War series, was announced accidentally following the release of a new official art book covering the history of the Total War series.
This may be the first Warhammer game I play.
Scratch that. It almost certainly will. I’m a Total War junkie, there isn’t much chance I skip the game long term. I may wait a bit, as I did with Rome 2, but ultimately I wind up picking it up.
First(?) reviews of Total War: Attila.
http://www.pcgamer.com/total-war-attila-review/
The game doesn’t come out until the 17th. Seems early.
I’ve had this purchased since it was on sale months ago, and sitting on my hard drive. I should really fire it up and give it a spin. Stupid Elite, eating up all my free gaming time!
There is no way I’m going near another Total War game on PC for at least a few months after release. Every Total War release since Empire has been total shit at release. By the time it’s playable its price will have dropped significantly.
I’m frustrated by the bugs and performance issues as much as everyone else but how the hell does he know that? Is he a programmer now? Does he have access to the code? Did he diagnose that just by playing? Reviewers should stick to reviewing.
Here’s the full quote.
Attila mostly runs as smoothly as a Hunnish horse. Yet, though battles and the main map are often solid (and indeed beautiful, if you turn all the HUD off with ‘k’) as soon as it gets to the end of turn phase, the game chugs badly as it simulates the AI turns, with the framerate dropping from high 40s straight to 0. This has been a problem with Total War for years and one which only seems to be getting worse - we suspect its core to the engine and insoluble.
It’s an easy assumption to make. It may not be technically true that it’s “core to the engine,” but it’s obviously something that CA hasn’t been able to address effectively throughout their games. Maybe they’re purposely not fixing the issue, but then you’d have to ask why.
Cough. Gifted by your best pal. Cough.