Rome II General Info Thread

[Oberyn]

They're probably going to heavily restrict moddability so they can make more money off of DLC's.

[Oberyn]

You know Total War does not have realistic battles to the extent that you can pull these 'in real life' arguments off right?

There was an RTW mod that was pretty interesting...I forget what it was called. There were no artificial symbol banners, minimap and the entire battle had to be commanded from the restricted viewpoint of your general's unit. It was pretty interesting but it needed some type of individual AI or general initial battle plan for your units to follow. It was fun playing barbarian factions with units that had the "impetuous" trait or whatever it was called, when undisciplined units would randomely charge the nearest enemy. It was actually an important strategic consideration and not just a stpid gimmick. It definetely makes it harder to command battles in general when you aren't an omnipresent floating helicopter.

[Tovi]

Only if AI has the same limitation.

[Oberyn]

Only if AI has the same limitation.

It was more for multiplayer than single tbh. Things like hidden units, wide flanks with cav, using the terrain like forests or hills to disguise thrusts, a lot of the "tricks" that a general would've used in a realistic situation. They aren't a part of a vanilla TW battle at all, because as people pointed out you have instant control regardless of distance and a bird's eye view of the battlefield, not to mention a magic map that shows topography and all movements on it. They are ridiculously useful. Even the most incompetent general in those days, had he had those tools, would've been practically unstoppable.

[Smoothrich]

Has there been info on the ranked multiplayer of this game?  Like about an expanded Avatar Conquest mode.  I don't really care about the campaign and spergin over factions at all.  I just want to stomp kids with vet4 stacks of attack+charge legionnaires while I rout the scrub flanks with Numidian thrower cav

[okiN]

I just want to stomp kids with vet4 stacks of attack+charge legionnaires while I rout the scrub flanks with Numidian thrower cav

You just described everything that made Shogun 2 multiplayer so shitty. The grind required to unlock and level up your army was disgusting.

[Chagan_Arslan]

You just described everything that made Shogun 2 multiplayer so shitty. The grind required to unlock and level up your army was disgusting.

vet system was ok, some of the skills like the hold firm were a little too good but in the end you didnt need all vet army to win, i know i didnt

and like Smoothrich im looking forward more to the multiplayer part, as i doubt they will improve anything in the AI department

p.s. i hope Scythians will be in :]

[okiN]

I'm sure you did great against fully tricked-out armies when you had a level one general, no ancillaries and access to no units but ashigaru, and had loads of fun to boot.

Point being, it's retarded that you have to start from nothing. The army customization options are great, but I'd much prefer if everyone had access to them from the get-go instead of having to grind a shitload of lame battles with severely restricted unit rosters.

[Chagan_Arslan]

i get your point i thought you were talking about getting xp on the vets ;] though i remember it was a matter of winning a few battles to get what you wanted(useful), you also started with one samurai unit and the cheapest cav so it wasnt an all ashigaru army ;] low budget games many times favored the cheaper general especially when the enemy had leadership general

and you always had the option to play the classic mode if you wished for 100% equal rosters

[Smoothrich]

I'm sure you did great against fully tricked-out armies when you had a level one general, no ancillaries and access to no units but ashigaru, and had loads of fun to boot.

Point being, it's retarded that you have to start from nothing. The army customization options are great, but I'd much prefer if everyone had access to them from the get-go instead of having to grind a shitload of lame battles with severely restricted unit rosters.

Most good players use a majority of non-vetted units, because of the raising cost.  Its almost always better to have more units then fewer, more expensive ones, as long as you know how to use morale shocks.

Regardless, Vet 4 was usually the highest people got to find a nice balance between cost and power.  That takes a couple hours at most to get on most units as long as you use them effectively.

I think the vet and general system added lots to the game and actually made it better and deeper.  Sure some things were imbalanced but I'm hoping Rome 2 is better and more interesting all around.

I played with "rush armies" which hardly required a ton of units anyways.  Katanas, naginatas, and some yari and heavy cav.  With some shit peasants in loose formation to be a meatshield for arrows that noobs would auto-fire on when I approached their lines.  I had all the units I needed for this playstyle within 5 wins.  Within a few days of figuring out my playstyle I had the entire map unlocked anyways

[okiN]

Yeah, it's not as awful as the grind in many other games, like BF3 for example, but the first few battles are just retarded, and even after you get all your army's basic building blocks together, the ones who have been at it longer will still have an edge over you in terms of general abilities and ancillaries. It takes quite a few games until it finally stops being a game of catch-up. I'm still pretty far from getting there, even though I've managed to turn my W/L clearly positive. Just CBA grinding ranks. I also noticed that buying DLC gives you immediate access to a whole bunch of great units. Bit unfair, really.

Anyway, to get things back to RTW2, here's a few posts from the Games Workshop collab thread:

Fuck the new engine, the most important gameplay enhancement that they've neglected in practically every iteration of TW games is the AI. If anything it gets worse. Darthmod tries to make it at least slightly better every time but there's only so much he can do.

I wouldn't say it's gotten worse, I've been playing RTW (well, EB) recently and the AI does all kinds of really retarded shit. But yeah, it hasn't exactly gotten better either. They've made promises again, I'll believe it when I see it.

What has gotten better in leaps and bounds is the campaign game. They've done some great stuff in streamlining it without really losing anything compared to the old ones except unnecessary hassles, and actually adding a lot of good things. Removing governors, automated unit replenishment, automated garrisons based on buildings present, proper tech trees, removing diplomats, removing agent spam (and agent action spam as the only training method), multiple recruitment slots with variable training times for units, simplified building (some might not like this one but TBH I prefer it)... loads of great improvements.

There are some nice new bits to add flavor to battles as well, like unit special abilities. There was a lot less variety in those in the past. Nothing as groundbreaking as with the campaign side of things, though. Hopefully with RTW2 they'll bring it all together in an awesome setting. Some of the new stuff we've heard so far has seemed pretty interesting, but battle gameplay will be the main decider.

Yeah, i do like most of the changes to campaign as well, though i personally preferred the old style of buildings (because more is better )

The changes to unit replenishment are truly excellent, i totally hated that part in R:TW and M2:TW, that made getting elite units pretty much just a gold sink, since using them in actual war and conquest would mean that they would quickly deplete, with no chance of replenishment (unless you either captured an uber advanced city or went all the way back to retrain them)

Yep, that was truly horribad. Playing Europa Barbarorum, as much as I love the mod, makes it even worse because you have so many hoops to jump through to get your own units recruitable in conquered territory.

As for the buildings, the old system had its charm, but it doesn't quite work with the introduction of the separate research tech tree, which I think is a great addition. I think my favourite building system was in Napoleon, because you could actually swap the buildings to different types instead of having to tear down a max-level structure to replace it with something else. I also liked having more different things available to build in different provinces, gave them some nice variety, whereas in RTW and MTW2 I would always build exactly the same things in exactly the same order in every province for maximum efficiency.

RTW2 will probably have a different system again, from the sound of the whole gradual conquering of provinces thing that they said would replace the "capture capital, own province" mechanic. Hopefully they'll preserve the good ideas from the latest games as well.

I thought the AI was a lot better in STW2. I mean it still does some dumb shit but plays a decently conventional game now while if you go back to MTw2 or RTW it was pretty bananas some of the stuff in did on campaign map.

I think we were talking more about battle AI than campaign AI. When it comes to the campaign the AI has maybe become a little bit smarter, but more importantly it's now a lot more pleasant to deal with in terms of diplomacy. In the past games the campaign AI's diplomatic decision-making process could be incredibly crude and irrational. I kept having to wipe out factions that I didn't really want to because they just wouldn't sign a ceasefire no matter how badly I destroyed them. They've promised further improvements to that as well in RTW2, here's hoping.

[Havoco]

Didnt really like STW2 multiplayer. Mainly because of the lack of unit diversity. I know they tried to improve that with hero units and the better militia units, but it just needs more weapons, plain and simple. Which is definitely something that will be a lot easier to achieve in RTW2 than in STW.

Also forgot about all the bugs for the matchmaking system they had in STW. It was ok for 1v1, but for anything more than that it was near impossible to rely on getting a good game in.


Also looking forward to a better customization for generals in RTW2. I Would love to have a hoplite generals unit.

[okiN]

Yeah, speaking of weapon diversity, I'm actually really curious about how they'll do MP with RTW2. If they have a similar sort of thing as in STW2, an avatar campaign or whatever kind of system where you unlock units and level up your army, it's a really big question how they'll do that with the vastly different factions. Unlike in STW2 where everyone has pretty much the same stuff, it would be really weird in RTW2 if you could mix and match units across factions in MP. Could it be they'll require you to make an avatar for each faction separately, or what?

[[ptx]]

I wouldn't say that campaign AI has improved in later TW games. Diplomacy, yes, somewhat, but anything else is still quite dumb. The difference now is that the AI just cheats more, spawning full stack armies out of nowhere.

[okiN]

I feel like it's not quite as easy to divide and conquer the campaign AI as it was in the past, it uses its armies a bit more rationally. That's not to say it's not still dumb, just does a little less truly retarded shit. Playing EB it keeps sending tiny armies at me to die piecemeal instead of gathering them together for a proper strike.

Also, in the newer games it's good that they finally made autocalc actually work. RTW is a nightmare because the autocalc is so incredibly unfair in favor of the AI that you have to fight pretty much every single chickenshit battle just to avoid taking huge casualties for no reason and having half the enemy get away alive. With the new games when the enemy hasn't got a snowball's chance in hell of surviving, or even hurting you, you can actually hit the autocalc and get the expected result.