My Rome: Total War 2 review

[Leferd]

Played the game after a 4 week break and tried patch 4. Huzzah! -I can now make trade agreements!

[Leferd]

Played again for about 6 or 7 hours. Improvements to the campaign and tactical AI. But I'm still pretty much playing Siegecraft: Total War - except for one battle in the Sahara. I did actually have a 14 minute battle though (previous record was 6 minutes), but that's because I purposely waited for my allies' army to march in and opted to not take holding area and slaughter every last man.

[Calax]

Selucids are now playable in todays free update! (along with various bug fixes)

[Bartimaeus]

Selucids are now playable in todays free update! (along with various bug fixes)

 

Having not played it, but previous Total War games...can't you manually enable most/all factions anyways? Though I'm sure they probably created at least some minor new content to make it work better, (e.g. the difference between playing the Papal States in default Medieval 2 and playing a mod that actually builds them as a real faction).

[Walsingham]

I can't hear you over the sound of Novgorod burning at Ivan's order.

 

And I can't hear him over the sound of the estimate of Cromwell killing 80% of the Irish coming from a book written in 1868. You can judge the academic quality for yourselves.

 

http://books.google.com/books?id=Yh8HAAAAQAAJ&pg=177

 

Or you could, you know, just ignore the whole question.

[Calax]

 

Selucids are now playable in todays free update! (along with various bug fixes)

 

Having not played it, but previous Total War games...can't you manually enable most/all factions anyways? Though I'm sure they probably created at least some minor new content to make it work better, (e.g. the difference between playing the Papal States in default Medieval 2 and playing a mod that actually builds them as a real faction).

 

Yes and no. One of the things for most of the minor factions is that they don't have enough money or unit diversity to be a faction worth playing. At the same time they wouldn't have many of the "objectives" that are available (which provide injections of money for completing tasks)

[Leferd]

Latest state of the game update from Mike Simpson:

 

http://forums.totalwar.com/showthread.php/104317-Latest-update-from-Mike-Simpson-and-CA-(17.10.2013)

 

---

 

Hi everyone,

 

Thank you for playing our patches and reporting issues you find on the forum. Without that help we wouldn’t be able to turn around the patches as fast as we have been doing. We’re achieving in weeks what, on previous projects, took months.

 

Over the next few weeks there’s going to be a shift from dealing with stability and config to working on gameplay and features, while performance and AI remain high priorities. I expect the pace of patching to slow a little as gameplay and deeper AI changes need longer to test and tune. It’ll still be weeks rather than months between patches though, and we're going to continue to patch the game regularly for the foreseeable future.

 

Gameplay and AI fixes take a long time to test, and we have to play a lot of 200+ turn games to be sure a change has worked as intended. To make the regular patches possible we have to overlap them, so while patch 5 will go live tomorrow, we've already started work on patch 7. This does mean it takes a while for your feedback to manifest as changes in the game, so please don’t be too disappointed if your top issue isn’t fixed in the latest patch. We are listening to you, and we will get there.

 

Our long-term plan from here is to get as fast as possible to a point where everyone is broadly happy with the state of the gameplay and AI. After that we’ll shift modes again to long-term support – something which is new for TW and was very much our plan for the title all along. Our games already have a long lifetime, but by releasing occasional DLC packs and free content updates we keep working on them for much longer. This means upgrades in a number of areas which help the game evolve, and stop it becoming obsolete.

 

I’m not going make any detailed claims about what we’re going to do in the short term. The best way – the only really credible way - we can let you know what we’re doing is by delivering it in the game. But rest assured that we’re constantly reading the TW forums and a variety of others, and the feedback you’re giving helps us to prioritise the issues we deal with, as well as getting a sense of which features work well, which are not liked, and which features from previous Total War games which weren’t designed into Rome II are missed. This is an interesting topic actually, as a lot of people think that we’ve ‘cut’ features to make Rome II and it isn’t as simplistic as that assumption.

 

A lot of the game is designed from the ground up. We develop many features in parallel, some of which work differently to how they did in previous games: we aim to create a different experience every time, and that’s very important to us. New features are added, and certain features from previous games are therefore not included as they must naturally make way for different features. What’s been interesting – and very useful for us – is listening to you telling us about which features you like and don’t like, and what you miss from previous titles. We take your views seriously, and we’ll take them with us in the future.

 

For now, we’re about to roll out our largest patch yet, which contains a number of key fixes and changes. The next update will also bring you new, free game content which we’ve been talking about for a while… we hope you like it. Alongside this, you’ll see our next major step towards mod support for ROME II.

 

Enjoy the update, enjoy the game, and thanks again for your ongoing feedback.

 

Mike Simpson

Edited October 19, 2013 by Leferd

[Calax]

As much as I want to hate CA for their constant "release mildly broken game>Patch" cycles... I can't. They're dealing with it exactly how they should in their "totally our fault, sorry guys" and quick patching while obviously listening to their customers. Maybe because there isn't six layers of BS marketing to go through.

[JFSOCC]

except that they should have released a Quality Assured product in the first place.

[Humanoid]

Protected species. When you have the clout that comes from being Sega's golden goose, you can get away with it. Not so the developers of a certain espionage thriller RPG.

[Calax]

Eh, it's more the fact that they're saying "yeah, we messed up!" and openly acknowledging an issue. Other devs will either say "it's the way you play!" or don't even acknowledge or fix the issue. It's the fact that they recognize the issues and work with them and explain it to the players that makes it "ok" in my book.

[Monte Carlo]

I just opened Steam and this patch the size of Norway initiated. Is the game actually finished yet?

[Walsingham]

I just opened Steam and this patch the size of Norway initiated. Is the game actually finished yet?

 

Please confirm: are you downloading Norway itself? If so this could alter weather patterns. Sing back.

[Monte Carlo]

Nah, I aborted when Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark were spat out into my study. I think those were the preceding patches. I think mod support will involve Finland and the Baltic States.

[Lexx]

Total War: Rome II - Nomadic Tribes Culture Pack, all new content for Total War™: ROME II is Now Available on Steam and is FREE if you download it before October 29th!

Check it out as fast as ye can. I activated the dlc already.

[Gorth]

 

I just opened Steam and this patch the size of Norway initiated. Is the game actually finished yet?

 

Please confirm: are you downloading Norway itself? If so this could alter weather patterns. Sing back.

 

"Look at me - I design coastlines. I got an award for Norway... I've been doing fjords all my life...for a fleeting moment they become fashionable and I get a major award"

[Monte Carlo]

Ha ha Hitch-hiker's Guide

[Monte Carlo]

http://store.steampowered.com/app/259800

 

I can say, as someone who has no reflexive loathing of DLC, that this is cheap. Really, really cheap. UK£1.99 for blood effects?

 

Stay classy, Sega!

[Lexx]

Haha, oh wow. And people buy this, as they did with the same dlc for shogun 2. Such a ripoff.

[Leferd]

No words...

[Bartimaeus]

Haha, oh wow. And people buy this, as they did with the same dlc for shogun 2. Such a ripoff.

 

Didn't Shogun 2's expansion have *another* similar DLC, too?

[Bos_hybrid]

http://store.steampowered.com/app/259800

 

I can say, as someone who has no reflexive loathing of DLC, that this is cheap. Really, really cheap. UK£1.99 for blood effects?

 

Stay classy, Sega!

 

Bloody Hell.

[Guest Slinky]

Don't blame Sega, blame the idiots who buy that crap giving publishers a reason to do that.

[Calax]

Actually it's to get around censorship laws. You release it without which gets it through censors, then you don't have to release this cheap piece through in the nations that allow it. Or so I have heard

[Jarmo]

http://store.steampowered.com/app/259800

 

I can say, as someone who has no reflexive loathing of DLC, that this is cheap. Really, really cheap. UK£1.99 for blood effects?

 

Stay classy, Sega!

 

.... just wow.

Decided to wait for a sale for this one, but now.. -25% isn't going to cut it.