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Total War: Rome 2 |OT| I Came, I Saw, I Came

Omiee

Member
I dont get this game. I have a 7950 cf setup but cant use it because the screen keeps actign weird.

when i use one i barely get 30 fps on extreme. wtf?
 

Azulsky

Member
I dont get this game. I have a 7950 cf setup but cant use it because the screen keeps actign weird.

when i use one i barely get 30 fps on extreme. wtf?

Step 1 : This game doesnt know how to use both your video cards

Step 2 : Let us know how it looks after you turn CF off

No one gets to play on extreme.
 
First impression of hard mode infantry AI seems to be better in this game in that it is not suicide units or camping as much.

Not sure about the infantry unit balance though.

Rome infantry units are good as expected but they may be a little too good.

Phalanx formation is working but it has to be understood that there is no "charge" in phalanx formation. All it is supposed to do is move forward and kill things it runs into. But Macedonian phalanx does seem a bit weak with standard hoplites.

Couple of times I have found it hard to issue move orders in combat and this is a long standing issue with total war battles. Once you are in combat the units are glued together so you better get the initial engagement right. Because of this, from first impressions, cavalry seems bad in this game which is a shame. You send cav into fight units that you know they can beat like slingers or just use them as a fire and forget missile. Hopefully cav tactics open up with more play.

And from watching joe I can tell that his problem with naval is that he is just not understanding how you have to micro individual ship on ship engagements. Although it is a bit fiddly.
 

TheTrain

Member
I don't know, maybe i've another build of this game. ...or maybe people play on easy and complain how easy is the game or worst the ai. :eek:
Really, after 18 hours I never see catastrofic situation from the ai...carthage campaign, hard difficulty. If i don't pay attention is really easy to lose 2-3 city or an entire army.
One example, Turdetani try to go in battle every single time with all 3 general. Main army + 2 reinforcement. This isn't a so bad ai.

This game looks fucking awful at the moment. Such a shame.

Nope
 

Herne

Member
People want to go in space with a bike?
Oh, shame on me.

Clearly you are not aware of the many people with monster machines having trouble getting the game to run well or even look anywhere close to the visual fidelity seen in the screenshots and videos released by CA and Sega.
 

Pinktaco

Member
Clearly you are not aware of the many people with monster machines having trouble getting the game to run well or even look anywhere close to the visual fidelity seen in the screenshots and videos released by CA and Sega.

What was originale written was that the game pretty much looked like ass. He didn't specifically mention that it was on his machine, but a general statement.
 

DrTeflon

Member
I really, really want to like this game, since Shogun 2 was kind of a letdown to me (not a huge fan of the japanese settings). Everytime I boot it up, though, i find another bug, or slowdown during battles ):
 

Hari Seldon

Member
Can't wait to play this game on Friday. Tried it on Tuesday but my PC hard locked early in the prologue. Lowered the graphics settings and had 60 FPS but got the lock up in the same spot. Hopefully this is one of the known "lockups" that the Friday patch fixes. I also realized that I had a year old graphics drivers for my 7970 but I haven't tried it again with the new drivers.

I'm afraid it is an overheating problem, as I am just using the stock cooler for my i5 and not a fancy 3rd party one and I haven't cleaned out my PC in a while haha.

So back to EU4 until they fix this.
 

valouris

Member
Can't wait to play this game on Friday. Tried it on Tuesday but my PC hard locked early in the prologue. Lowered the graphics settings and had 60 FPS but got the lock up in the same spot. Hopefully this is one of the known "lockups" that the Friday patch fixes. I also realized that I had a year old graphics drivers for my 7970 but I haven't tried it again with the new drivers.

I'm afraid it is an overheating problem, as I am just using the stock cooler for my i5 and not a fancy 3rd party one and I haven't cleaned out my PC in a while haha.

So back to EU4 until they fix this.

Prologue is very bugged atm, normal campaigns work much better. But yeah, you will have a better time if you wait for the patches anyway.
 

web01

Member
People are not exaggerating when the say this game is bad.
It looks and runs like shit for me compared to Shogun 2.
Disgraceful the game was released in this state. Lets not even start talking about the interface regression, removed game play options and broken AI.
 

Pinktaco

Member
So I'm making this post based on some of my previous posts. It's not a post about bugs, the graphics, the AI or anything related to that.

This is about what I've observed with some of the new features implemented in the game, some of which bothers some of you.

Simplified cities

Good, bad? Mmh this is up to the individual of us to decide. Personally I like it. You will now have to determine what your city will focus on and plan accordingly. For now I haven't bothered to much to go all out on which city exactly that would for instance profit more from agriculture than others. I'm sure, if you care, it can result in much more optimized cities if you're careful. At any point I don't mind having specialized cities. For now, however, my main focus is learning to deal with squalor, which brings me to the next subject:

Public order vs squalor

This isn't exactly new to the franchise. I cannot remember whether Empire and/or shogun 2 had it, but I'm fairly certain it was there in Rome 1.

Squalor is the the opposite of Public Order and is a way to balance city building. Some of you will consider it too extreme once you see the amount of -12 public order buildings, however there are things that much be considered:

- Public Order/Squalor is region wide and not for the individual city.

- PO/S can be countered by buildings that'll produce more PO than S. There's a specific religious building that give you +16 PO alone. A city center building that can generate up to 20 PO. Other buildings doesn't generate any PO or S. Obviously this depends on your faction.

- Agents and generals have influence on PO. If you hire the right Dignitary you can get someone with +2 PO and be lucky with the traits. Your general can also receive PO bonuses and lastly you can have an edict that grants you +2 PO. Combine all that you can very quickly get a bunch of extra PO to counter squalor.

- Remember the first points - PO and S is region wide. Now if you haven't understood why this is important to consider re-read what my other points. Once you have that dignitary, general, edict and a +16 PO building you start to generate quite some PO for ALL you cities in one region. This will make it easier building those -12 PO buildings.

HOWEVER, I still haven't reached end-game yet, so this might not work out as I make it seem once a lot of those -12 PO buildings starts to pop up. Just be careful and plan ahead.

* An easy way to check out all the buildings you can build is if you have an empty build spot in one of your cities you can right-click on the buildings you can place and get a quick overview of them. For whatever reason this is the quickest way to get a good look at what you want to build.

In this game you can't just mindlessly place whatever you want without consequence. This is something I like because it gives another layer of gameplay. Not all of you are going to like it, but this is how CA have decided to create their game. They want YOU to THINK, which I'm okay with.

Agents

With the first trailer they showed us they had a clear focus. Agents would be more important than in previous games. It wasn't until last night I figured out how important they can be.

Agents have always been able to join the army, but previously we didn't really get any clue what they did, except maybe to counter the enemy assassins. Now they're much more important and let me give you an example:

So my main general died in a battle. He was 66 years-old anyway so fine. I hired a fresh new one to lead my old army and placed the same agent, as I had used with the previous general, only to be surprised. I had taken a lot of zeal skills with her and she passed the zeal over to him. He suddenly had the following stats 2/3/18. 18 zeal! According to the ingame describtion zeal adds to your generals combat prowess. As a result he now comes with a damage worth 103 points compared to regular units (of the same type) who comes with 60. That as damn big difference! He also now have a shit-ton of abilities to choose from along with whatever bonus my agent comes with (+22% campaing movement etc).

I'm not sure if this is working as intended since you can have incredible powerful generals. They can obviously still die, but they'll make sure to make a damn good mess out of it before they go down.

Personally I also have a dignitary with administration and +tax in my main region along with a general. I haven't quite learned all aspects of the game, but if it's anything like the old Rome TW you could have combat generals and administrative generals and I'm sort of hoping that having a general in you capitol along with a dignitary (with the right skills) will sort of push the general in the direction I want.

As you might've figured out I'm happy about this because now there's an actual reason to hire your agents. The succesrate of assassinations and other things like that is still sort of hit and miss although tbh I've used mine quite a lot AND have had great success with it.

*BTW the bonuses from your agent (who's tagged along your general) can be see in your generals window when you click on him - i'ts one of those small icons beneath his attributes.

All of the above mentioned is also some of the things that makes me like that game. Again, this is just my opinion and what I have observed. Hopefully some of you will make good use of it, unless of course you already knew about this. :)
 

valouris

Member
You can beta download tomorrow's patch: http://forums.totalwar.com/showthread.php/80662-PLEASE-READ-BEFORE-POSTING-Information-on-Patch-1-Beta-Testing?

Hi all,

This is the beta of the patch due to go live tomorrow. If you’d like to test it to see if it solves some problems for you please follow the installation procedure:

In your steam game library, right click Total War: Rome II. Then choose Properties and select the BETAS tab. Finally select “patch1beta” from drop down list.

Please do be aware that this may not work or solve your specific issue and you take part in any beta tests at your own risk. If you do not wish to assume that risk please wait for the official live update tomorrow.

We are continually working to improve ROME II for all players; the next update after this one will be next week.

Thanks

Matthias




Here are the patch notes for Total War: ROME II Patch 1 (due for release on 06/09/2013):
For additional information on improving graphical performance visit this thread.

• Higher average frame rates with out-of-the-box settings (more conservative settings)
• Fix for DirectX 10.0 Lighting issue reported - environment map wasn't being created leading to black reflections.
• Fixed a sunken Samothrace temple complex world wonder on the Campaign map.
• Fixed defender being able to create encampments when involved in a combined battle.
• Added some localisation fixes to audio packs in French, Russian, Italian, German and Spanish.
• Fixed lock up in Multiplayer Campaign battles when a desynchronisation occurs. Players are now notified of the desynchronisation, and the battle ends.
• Fixed Multiplayer Campaign battle "overrun" prompt, which was not being shown to a player if they were a reinforcement and the other player was spectating.
• Fixed corrupt loading screen when changing to fullscreen / windowed mode after a battle, and then going into another battle.
• Fix for Multiplayer Campaign host being unable to move the camera in campaign, after reloading a save game on some rare occasions.
• Safe guards added to prevent a very rare crash in coastal assault battles.
• Fix for game lock up during end turn sequence / Celtic AI faction turn in single player campaign.
• Improved AI use of walls on Athens large settlement battle map.
• Improvements to Auto-resolve balancing in Single Player and Multiplayer Campaign modes.
• Aligned ship unit upkeep costs with land units - made mercenary ships more expensive and non-mercenary ships cheaper.
• Fixed slow turning rates for transport ships.
• Improved civil war balancing in relation to campaign difficulty.
• Fixed vehicle ground pipes, to prevent Siege Towers becoming immovable when they are left empty during the Deployment Phase of a Siege Battle, then units were moved into the Siege Tower when the battle has started.
• Fixed bug when ramming sideways into moving ship, which caused the ramming ship stick to target and strafe along with it in battles.
• Reduced the chance of Naval units sometimes clipping through the ground or harbours / ports during Port Assault battles when attempting to disembark.
• Fixed issue where armies would be stuck in Muster stance and could not exit that stance in Campaign modes.
• Fixed case where spies could get stuck on top of fleets in Campaign modes.
• Fixed rare post battle lockup in Campaign modes.
• Improved unit pathfinding in Barbarian village battle maps (fixed no go zones).
• Fix for Multiplayer Campaign lock up when the player was reinforcing an AI ally who was victorious in battle, causing the player to become stuck with no victory / continue / exit battle user interface functionality.
• Fix for cultural influence bonus from the Shrine of Neptune building
• Fix for “Zone of Controls” of hidden armies being visible to both players in head to head Multiplayer Campaign mode on mouse-over.
• Assorted minor fixes to city battle maps.
• Fix for "Rome Wasn't Built in a Day" achievement failing to unlock when its requirements were met in some situations.
 

Lingitiz

Member
Thanks for posting that. I'm not having horrible performance issues anymore, but I'll give that a shot and see if anything changes.
 

huxley00

Member
Glad to see a patch coming out, I almost wish I didn't know about this game until three months from now when they have a lot of the minor issues worked out. Still going to play off and on and come back later when its more polished. TW modding community is also pretty great, I'm sure this game will be salvaged.
 

Lingitiz

Member
Glad to see a patch coming out, I almost wish I didn't know about this game until three months from now when they have a lot of the minor issues worked out. Still going to play off and on and come back later when its more polished. TW modding community is also pretty great, I'm sure this game will be salvaged.

CA announced weekly patching, so hopefully they can tweak a bunch of things to where they need to be soon. There's a great game here, it's just unacceptable that these issues were not sorted out with a beta.
 

Martian

Member
CA announced weekly patching, so hopefully they can tweak a bunch of things to where they need to be soon. There's a great game here, it's just unacceptable that these issues were not sorted out with a beta.

Agreed, I have no idea why CA didn't do a closed beta. Chances are they mostly played on high end pc's and didn't have a huge array of playtests (or at least not the amount you would have with a closed beta)
 

huxley00

Member
CA announced weekly patching, so hopefully they can tweak a bunch of things to where they need to be soon. There's a great game here, it's just unacceptable that these issues were not sorted out with a beta.

It is pretty bad...from memory, its always like this though. Empire Total War was insanely buggy, even worse than this if I remember right. I do wonder why they don't alpha the game though. Maybe because people would be scared away due to the amount of bugs? Even in internal QA, I'm sure these are obvious.

They have a play through post by their community manager. It has screen shots of the game but no battle screen shots or footage, it seems pretty obvious that they knew about the issues.

I've been happy with how they've fixed up the other games though. Medieval 2, Shogun 2, Empire all got a lot better as time went on. Just have to be patient I guess, even though I certainly don't want to be!
 

Lingitiz

Member
Agreed, I have no idea why CA didn't do a closed beta. Chances are they mostly played on high end pc's and didn't have a huge array of playtests (or at least not the amount you would have with a closed beta)

The prologue seemed like the absolute best way to release a limited beta. I have no idea what they just didn't go with that.

This launch is nowhere near on the level of Simcity or Diablo 3, both of which were essentially broken, but it's nonetheless unfortunate and could have been avoided.
 

isual

Member
It is pretty bad...from memory, its always like this though. Empire Total War was insanely buggy, even worse than this if I remember right. I do wonder why they don't alpha the game though. Maybe because people would be scared away due to the amount of bugs? Even in internal QA, I'm sure these are obvious.

They have a play through post by their community manager. It has screen shots of the game but no battle screen shots or footage, it seems pretty obvious that they knew about the issues.

I've been happy with how they've fixed up the other games though. Medieval 2, Shogun 2, Empire all got a lot better as time went on. Just have to be patient I guess, even though I certainly don't want to be!

I'd like to say that even with all the mediocre textures on extreme graphics, Rome 2 is probably their best launch yet. Other than my 'incorrect time played' bug, everything is smooth.
 

KorrZ

Member
I got into a pretty good groove last night and played for about 3 hours and really enjoyed myself. I've got a good grip on all the systems now, and I've learned how to navigate their awful UI.

One thing I'm really disliking though is the line of sight system. I've gotten into a battle on more than one occasion now where I have absolutely no idea where the enemy is and I spend a good 5 minutes just running around on fast forward trying to find where the fuck they are.
 

Desaan

Member
Anyone else having their GPU fried playing this? My 7970 hits 80c just sitting on the main menu and peaked at 102c, fuck that shit. No game has every pushed my GPU beyond 70c except this fucking broken excuse of a game.
 
I should consider myself lucky that I've had no real issues and that I am able to exercise common sense when it comes to the settings.

Pro tip: don't place everything on the absolute highest settings.

I really liked Shogun 2 and am thankful they fixed the god awful loading. I only hope they can someday revisit that game and employ loading optimizations -- it's very fast on this! Makes the pace much more enjoyable
 

Herne

Member
Anyone else having their GPU fried playing this? My 7970 hits 80c just sitting on the main menu and peaked at 102c, fuck that shit. No game has every pushed my GPU beyond 70c except this fucking broken excuse of a game.

Strange, I'm seeing the opposite really. My 6870 isn't ramping up to much of a heat at all. In fact, in even older games like Mafia II, with the fan on full, it brings it up to about 72 degrees. For Rome though, I've only seen it go as high as 56 degrees, which really surprised me. So very odd the different experiences we're all having with it...
 

Enosh

Member
People want to go in space with a bike?
Oh, shame on me.
I have a 3ghz old dual core and a 6870, I'm not expecting it to run on max (or hell even high or normal only without some low) but when it looks worse than shogun 2 and runs worse at the same time there has to be some issue with something
 

Mattdaddy

Gold Member
I've been fortunate and haven't had any technical issues, performance has been about what I expected on my mediocre system. My only real gripe is how long the AI campaign turns take. Holy shit how many factions are there? Dozens? Unless I go into battle I spend more time waiting around than I do actually playing. Still a fun game though I just hope they can cut that end turn wait time down. Would a faster processor speed this up? I have a phenom 955 right now.... pretty aged.
 

Lach

Member
Some cool thing happened to me today.

I conquered all the Etruscan Settlements and their last army went all desperate and attacked rome. I thought I encountered my first bug, their army attacking without any siege weapons. They charged the city gate.....and then they started throwing torches against it. It slowly started catching fire and actually broke after some time. Of course I had decimated their army with leves from the wall too a point where they only had one unit left but I thought it was cool that they would do that.

I do really start to hate the victory points on field battles though. If I can position myself on the field I don't want to have to consider the victory point!
 

demolitio

Member
Back to Shogun 2 until this game gets fixed. Now's the chance for me to play through Fall of the Samurai.

On a positive note, that's definitely worth it. Some of the most fun I've had in the TW series thanks to all the improvements they made and it actually convinced me that CA could pull of a WWI game quite well after thinking it'd be impossible.

I actually miss FOTS's MP mode. I think the avatar mode could have been quite awesome in this one considering how many units there are to choose from.
 
On a positive note, that's definitely worth it. Some of the most fun I've had in the TW series thanks to all the improvements they made and it actually convinced me that CA could pull of a WWI game quite well after thinking it'd be impossible.

I actually miss FOTS's MP mode. I think the avatar mode could have been quite awesome in this one considering how many units there are to choose from.

I'm actually glad they removed avatar conquest. Beating people just because my army had better morale and stats because I played more was as cheap as hell. Miss the polish and personalisation options a bit as that was fun.
 

Hari Seldon

Member
Anyone else having their GPU fried playing this? My 7970 hits 80c just sitting on the main menu and peaked at 102c, fuck that shit. No game has every pushed my GPU beyond 70c except this fucking broken excuse of a game.

I have the same GPU and the game was locking up on me, so I suspect it was the heat somewhere, but I don't know how to check it. Are you running the latest drivers? I was using the Steam Update Drivers thing and it said up to date but it turns out I was a year behind on the drivers when I manually checked lol. I haven't tried it yet with the latest drivers.

But yeah, this is some seriously shit tier engine coding going on in this game.
 

Facism

Member
at this point i just want a refund rather than wait for patches that may or may not fix anything.

Last TW game i buy day one.
 
at this point i just want a refund rather than wait for patches that may or may not fix anything.

Last TW game i buy day one.

I hate to sound like an apologist, but you really should have expected this from a TW game on day one. That being said, this has Empire beat on the sheer number of launch day issues, which makes me think it needed more time in the oven.
 

Facism

Member
I hate to sound like an apologist, but you really should have expected this from a TW game on day one. That being said, this has Empire beat on the sheer number of launch day issues, which makes me think it needed more time in the oven.

empire and shogun 2 ran in an acceptable manner when i bought both day 1. I expected some jank, as i'd expect most total war vets did :p Rome 2 takes the biscuit, not only does it need more time in the oven, it's like it's missing some ingredients too.

Hey you don't sound like an apologist, you're correct in everything you say.
 

demolitio

Member
I'm actually glad they removed avatar conquest. Beating people just because my army had better morale and stats because I played more was as cheap as hell. Miss the polish and personalisation options a bit as that was fun.

I think if they changed the retainers and didn't give you elite units so easily, it wouldn't be so bad along with some decent matchmaking or at least letting you know what rank someone else is before joining a game.

I just think in a game with this much variety, it could have been done properly where you start your own ruling family, pick a side of the map to start on with some unique regional differences in units (elephants coming from the east/south-est, going into Greece to get Spartan units, etc.) and make it so retainers don't drastically improve your army, it could have been fun. It could have just been about good unit variety instead of making them absolutely unstoppable. That way, you could truly build your own dynasty but it wouldn't be about making them absolutely better than everyone else since there's enough unit variety in this game to focus on that instead of elite bullshit.
 
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