Rome II General Info Thread

[Lizard_man]

Interesting thread...

http://forums.totalwar.com/showthread.php/97370-TotalBiscuit-calling-out-CA-leadership-over-Metacritic-design-focus.

Moderators keep removing, moving, or closing threads on the matter, it's fucking ridiculous...

[Tibe]

Well I am having quite an odd experience in my recent Athenian campaign. You dont have to read this shit, if you dont want to, nothing completely new and spectacular I assure you:

 Basically I noticed that from the persian side of the planet one faction was relatively kicking a lot of arse (Media). So I decided to make the biggest armies ive ever made so far in this game and quickly wipe it out. I took 3 towns in 1 turn, what I didnt notice however, was that one of its toughest armies was still exsistent and I didnt have the chance to confront it. So what the Median army did was relatively steamroll over 10 different AI towns with ease, with my army behind it on pursuit, reclaiming every AI town they claimed and that happened for quite some time cause the towngarrisons didnt lessen both of our armies numbers even the slightest. With every next turn, they took 1 town, and I took the town they conqured the last turn. At some point Medias steamrollingtactic came to a standstill. One of Ai factions im pretty sure it wanted to steamroll had camped a gigantic army infront of them on the road and they were stuck, cause my army was camped out in the town behind em. So they went balls to the walls next turn and attacked my army. I won, they scattered, now im stuck with atleast 10 towns that hate the shit out of me and are all gonna rebel. But I have to keep these lands somehow thou. If I dont the other factions nearby are gonna get the dibs on em. They wont fuck with me but they will definately grab a rebeling settlement at any chance they get.

[Butan]

I have to keep these lands somehow thou. If I dont the other factions nearby are gonna get the dibs on em.

Its really not a good idea to "capture" a settlement you wont be able to keep (public order or military challenged wise); in your case I would probably have pillaged 80% of them, 10% captured 10% razed, depending on each fiefs local situation.

Its not too problematic if the AI/rebels gets them back, its better to have gold and a few fiefs than a lot of fiefs and not enough gold.

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Interesting story btw

[Tibe]

I was seriuslly frightened of the thought of Media having a giant bunch of lands, so I had to act fast. Looking back thou, it would have been wiser to let them keep 2 lands, they wanted to keep and sue for peace and plan ahead few turns. Mybe if I hadnt pushed them so hard like I did, they wouldnt have roamed so far to avoid extinction.

[Fips]

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[Tibe]

"I bought, I played, I patched"
                                                   - Typical Total war costumer

[Molly]

"I bought, I played, I patched, I modded"
                                                   - Typical Total war costumer

Slightly altered

[okiN]

Costumer? Is that like cosplayer?

[Xant]

Costumer? Is that like cosplayer?

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[Ninja_Khorin]

I just love how Stonehenge is depicted in the game.

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http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?620670-Quest-to-see-the-Wonders-%28quest-canceled-wonders-are-bugged%29

Shame about that.

EDIT: While I'm at it.

Why is the Carthage in the campaign map so lame compared to the historical battle one?

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Strategy map, notice the size difference.

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Historical:
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Campaign:
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Square. Where's the statue gone?

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Historical:
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Campaign:
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Port. Or rather, lack of it.

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Historical:
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Campaign:
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I admit the city does grow if you upgrade it more in the campaign map, but Carthage is one of Rome's first enemies. They'll never get to fight Carthage in actual Carthage.

And while I'm at it. Where did the 32 000 troops per battle claim go?

Source for the 32 000 troops per battle claim: http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/08/...al-war-rome-ii

"Meanwhile, owners of Skynet-like hardware can get even more out of the game. A high-spec machine can enjoy up to 32,000 units on the battlefield during a single real-time encounter. If you’re seeking further glory and are willing to push your PC harder than your legionaries, Jamie casually mentioned you can tweak the preference files to double that number to 64,000."

Now, I've played Napoleon with Darthmod, and I regurarly get 10 000 vs 10 000 battles (that run so smooth it's amazing), but I don't see a way to reach those figures in Rome 2 without modding it in, and I'm not even sure of that. First of all the maps are too small for such a force. Even if you assume a 32 000 troop army in to 80 units that's still 400 per unit, you'd have to have a 160 units at least with max unit size to get 32 000 troops on the battlefield.

Several ships per unit? Remember that?

"A naval unit will also consist of multiple ships instead of just one. 'Because ancient world battles weren’t fought with eight ships, they were fought with larger fleets, so you’re going to have several ships in each unit. That really changes the gameplay.'"

[Butan]

Wonders and some city details bugs or doesnt appear as they should (dont know if just not implemented or just not appearing/displaying as it should).


But Carthage fully upgraded looks exactly like Carthage in historical battle (minus the aforementioned implementation/display bug). And this is the same for every "special" settlements. I admit a fully upgraded settlement is hard to reach so, most of the time you will take down important fiefs while they are still relatively unimpressive 



Atm on Ultra army size, even with 40 units vs 40 units of pure infantry (160 men), you get only 12,800 men (80x160), so I dont know how they reached this 64,000 conclusion (4 times higher than what you can possible have without modding the game!!!).

Then there is some mods or easy-to-do-yourself modifications where you can double each group size (320 men for infantry), but it still only reaches 25,600 men with 40 vs 40 infantry.

You can probably push the boundaries to TRIPLE or QUADRUPLE the amount of soldiers per squad but I'm not sure even 1% of the computers on earth could handle it.

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Several ships per unit appears when you 2x/3x/4x the unit size I just said (2 ships per unit on sea if you double, 3 ships if you triple, etc...) but it brings more pain than joy because when you want to ram/board a 2 ship unit at sea it only targets one of the 2 ships... So its not really a good thing. Some mods even increase the number of men you can put on ONE SHIP so even if you 2x the unit size you will have one ship at sea.

[Fips]

I tried Magnars mod with double unit size and larger battles quickly turned into Diashows. I mean, my fps were good and i could move the camera around just fine without any laggs, but the troops were just moving frame per frame, so yeah. For mods like this we will probably have to wait some more time for CA and modders to optimize the game =/

[Ninja_Khorin]

Advanced AI Pikemen tactics:

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Also, that other unit is showing some advanced improved AI right there.

[Leesin]

Well I put an AMD FX 8350  ( 8 core 4ghz cpu, but overclocked to 4.4ghz right now ) into my pc a long with a Gainward GTX 660 golden sample 2gb GPU, not exactly top of the line but both juicy enough to squeeze something out of any modern game.

 I've messed about with some settings in and out of game and my game is running with most settings maxed without any lag whatsoever and without that lame unit stuttering. When your units stutter and you don't have an fps issue it means your cpu is being bottlenecked by this piss poor optimized engine. I had it at first until I turned Unit Details down and turned shadows down too, both of these are cpu bound thus these are huge culprits when it comes to bottlenecking your cpu in huge battles.

Unit Details setting gives you more varied soldiers the higher the setting, which according to other peoples and my own experience is most definitely CPU bound, making double, triple or even more work for the cpu when it has to deal with multiple variations of soldiers in each unit.  Shadows also, I knocked these down to one of the lower settings and noticed I could have way more soldiers on the battlefield without that lame unit stuttering whilst the FPS remains smooth and high, meaning my CPU isn't being bottlenecked by this piece of shit.

Last but not least I am using the SweetFX GEM shader mod from the TWC forum, I think the guys name is lucifer something but I downloaded his shaders etc, tweaked them a bit and my game looks A LOT better, it includes methods to add AA ( the games AA is broken as fuck turn it off ) and also gaussian blur, which if tweaked right makes the game a lot softer on the eyes and all the colours look a lot nicer IMO.

I don't use any of the tick box options like SSAO and distortion etc atm but I'll be testing with them soon.

EDIT: Also in Task manager ( ctrl alt delete ) in processes tab, right click Rome2.exe, go to priority and set it to high, for those that dont already know.

EDIT 2: This is a screenshot from my game just to show how it looks, I've already tweaked more since this picture as the gaussian blur was too strong for my liking and I've also made the colours nicer ( imo ) and sharpened the picture up a bit, though seemingly a screenshot doesn't do it justice still, looks better as I'm playing it, maybe the movement covers up the small crappy parts I can pick up on in a screenshot lol. Still, it looks a lot better than what the game did without using this SweetFX GEM shader.

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[Molly]

New patch and new playable faction! And Steam Workshop access...

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Technical and Performance

Campaign

Improved Campaign AI decision-making speed when considering local forces prior to settlement attack
Fix to problem the AI interface received stances that were not up to date, when called to accepting a war declaration help request, or deciding whether to invite allies to a war.
Improved responsiveness of tabs in the Trade and Finance panel in Campaign mode.
Fixed a crash when loading an auto-save game.
Various campaign optimisations including: Fog-of-war update (improves frame rate when moving units, improves end turn times in games where the player has many allies) and Improved frame rate when lots of units are on screen.
Fix for rare crash when loading a Campaign save game.
Fixed various rare crashes during battles caused by unit card sorting.

Battle

The video memory footprint of battles has been reduced by up to 250MB.
Left-click and dragging units during battles is now more responsive.
Fix for slow down / performance hit when selecting AI siege equipment in the battle setup menu.


Gameplay Improvements

Campaign

Campaign AI now encourages factions to form allegiances more over time based on personality, perceived threat and existing balance of relationships the faction holds.
A new function has been added to the diplomacy screen, which allows the user to select AI factions, and then mouse over other faction icons on the map to display their relationships.
The chances of the AI betraying their allies has been increased, since it used to help them too often when a betrayal was a more appropriate action.
Allies that have made a decision to join a war, have that decision enforced at the Campaign AI to ensure consistency. E.g. To prevent Satrapies from joining a war and betraying their overlord at the same time.
Improved the AI’s consideration and use of payments in diplomacy
Garrisoned armed citizenry now reinforcing their army standing just next to the settlement they are Garrisoned in.
Fixed satrapies not recognising that they no longer have an overlord in some cases when they cease to be a satrapy.
Fixed a pathfinding data error that allowed paths to cross directly from beach to river on the Campaign map.
When a settlement is blockaded on the campaign map, a fix has been made to prevent the player from queuing more siege equipment in the construction queue than you are allowed.
Reduced the chance of AI armies standing close to the players army on the Campaign map in Forced March stance, allowing the player to ambush them.
Armies can no longer be garrisoned in a settlement and in Forced March stance at the same time, which led to an ambush battle outside of the settlement when it was attacked, and the winner not capturing the settlement.
When handing over a region in civil war, the armed citizenry in that region are now refreshed immediately, to prevent the player from recapture the settlement with no resistance from within.
During a multiplayer coop campaign, the client and host could both make decisions when attacked by the AI. However the user interface did not always display the correct choice. This is now fixed.
Rebels, Greeks and Gauls are now unable to capture the Bovianum settlement from the Samnites during the Prologue Campaign.
Objectives are now listed in The Invasion of Samnium chapter of the Prologue Campaign.
Converting an army in a port settlement to the port docks will no longer break it out of muster stance allowing it to recruit while moving .
Fix for Lode Stone technology not applying correct speed bonus to ships.

Battle

Improved gates so they don't open so prematurely for routers during battles.
Fix for Cavalry units not able to perform flaming arrow attacks on buildings.
Autonomous siege engines now have an ammunition limit during battles.
Fixed bug where routers appeared to walk in battles.
Added display of phase timers to Ability buttons in battles.
A unit tooltip will now display to indicate when units are withdrawing during battles.
Added a new Persian minor city battle map variation to the game.
Improved the in-battle AI's interactions with a Greek City battlefield.
Improved AI interactions with the walls in Hecatompylos (small) battle map.
Adjusted deployment zones in Greek Port (Antioch) map, to stop the defender from being able to deploy outside of the city.
Fixed a bug in the Antioch (large) battle map, that made traversable areas of the map untraversable to units.
Adjusted deployment zones in Carthago city map to stop the defender from being able to deploy outside of the city.
In Multiplayer, spectators can now see both the attackers and defenders units regardless of whether they're within line of sight (both in the battle itself and on the battle radar.)
Improvement for the timing in when pike men switch between pikes and swords during combat.
Re-jigged pike attacks slightly so that they don't end when the enemy run away, but instead, re-intercept.
Fixed bug in Ambush visibility which made unleashing war dogs invisible while the handler unit is hidden, causing the dogs not to be seen by the enemy.
Fixed certain capture points that were not assigned to the correct buildings in various siege maps
Smoothed out the deployment zones across all siege maps.
Fixed disembarking points in minor Barbarian port battle map, allowing units to disembark from ships correctly.
A wall piece that is partially underground in the small Barbarian City battle map has now been made to be un-dockable for siege equipment.
Fixed the collision on some large rocks in the Carthage battle map to prevent units from passing through them.


Balancing Changes

Campaign

Barbarians and Easterners can now also build military ports in minor settlements.
Increased campaign cap for the limited naval units, so more of them can be recruited.

Battle

Added new missile block chance for shields, and some new shield types added to enable better balancing.
Adjustments made to the Carthage chapter 6 difficulty.
Rebalanced the ranged damage effects for the Numidian Technology Tree.


Usability Improvements

Campaign

Agent success changes now reflects the fact that some actions (for example Assasination) require critical success to eliminate the character. A tooltip has been added to showing the sucees/failure precentage breakdown.
Fixed a bug in Multiplayer Campaign mode, where the player couldn't move their camera on the campaign map after spectating in another players' battle, if the player had the Overview Map opened before the battle.
Added faction icons to attitude / factors tooltip in Diplomacy to make it clearer whose relationship is being shown.
Added message events when a satrapy declares war on its overlord in Campaign modes.
Fix for Legendary difficulty auto-save occurring before dilemmas are decided in Campaign mode.
Fixed the cancel vassal diplomatic action which was not working correctly.
Fix for menus "sticking" when moving the mouse from a submenu button to the Encyclopaedia.
Fixed a number of formatting issues in the Multiplayer Campaign faction list user interface.
Durations are now displayed on effects in regions / factions where applicable.
Added experience and bonus icons to queued unit cards, so they are more consistent with recruitment and recruited units.
Fixed hull upgrade bonus icon not showing on recruitment cards.
When ordering an agent to perform an action against the enemy, if the player left clicks and holds on one of the action boxes, and then moves the cursor the action box will no longer disappear.
In Campaign modes, if the keyboard shortcut to end the turn is replaced by any other key, other than then default [ENTER], the new key will now end turn as expected.
Passive abilities are now coloured differently on the Unit Info Panel in Campaign modes to make them clearer.
Fixed duplicate faction icons appearing in Diplomacy, when war declared with satrapies.
Solved an issue that prevented the settlement looting panel from appearing, when Campaign Overview / Tactical Map was open.
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.


Post on forums, we're getting the Seleucids, too: http://bit.ly/H7WuxK

Originally posted by CraigTW:
Hi everyone,

We’re delighted to share with you news of the next free content drop for Total War: ROME II, which is available today in an automatic update. The Seleucid Empire is now a playable faction in single-player campaign and multiplayer games.

Renowned for their civil engineering and city-building feats, the kings of the vast Seleucid Empire rely on expert cavalry regiments to enforce and expand their borders. This content update includes new unique Seleucid units, building and technology trees, Campaign Objectives and the Paradise of Daphne; a unique new wonder. For more details on this faction, please visit this link.

We’re also releasing Patch 5 today, which delivers a huge number of fixes, tweaks and upgrades to the ROME II experience.

This patch contains a large number of improvements across pretty much every part of the game. Among these are a number of optimisations to Campaign Map performance, which improve framerates with the fog-of-war and when there are many armies, navies and agents on-screen. We’ve also sped up end-turn times in situations where the player has multiple allies.

There have been further improvements to diplomacy as well. The campaign AI now encourages factions to form allegiances based on personality, perceived threat and the existing balance of relationships the faction holds. Players can also see relationship information by hovering the cursor over factions on the map in the diplomacy screen.

We’ve also reduced the chance of AI armies standing close to the player in Forced March mode – thereby reducing their chances of being ambushed – and any garrison of armed citizenry will now reinforce friendly armies in battle outside their settlement.

Finally, we’ve added tooltips to Agent Actions, which reveal their normal and critical success and failure chances. This gives you a much clearer picture of the potential outcomes.

As always, please note that some changes take much longer to effect than others – particularly gameplay and battle AI changes – so don’t worry if the improvement you’re looking for isn’t here yet. Chances are we’re working on it!

You can see full patch notes here on the Total War Wiki.

We also updated you yesterday with news from Creative Director Mike Simpson on the patching process in general and our plans for the future. In case you missed it, you can read that post here.

As well as this free content and patch, we’re also delighted to announce Steam Workshop and Mod Manager support for Total War: ROME II, making the sharing and loading of user mods a breeze.

We’ve been working closely with some key names on the modding scene to offer original Workshop content from day one, such as the incredibly talented Radious, who has crafted some of the finest mods available for Total War.

That’s not all for modding support, though – we’re consulting closely with the community and are looking to host another Mod Summit soon to gather opinions on what we can do next for Total War: ROME II to further unlock its modding potential.

Enjoy,

The Creative Assembly