Rome 2 - A casualty of the casual? [Best review ever]

[Paddy Irishman]

This is a repost of a very popular review from Raye on totalwar.com. I thought I'd post it here too as it's the best review I've seen so far for the game and it strongly represents my own [and others] opinons, especially in relation to the boring, unstrategic arcade-like battles.
***


I've played Total War for over 10 years now and I can honestly say that this release is just as bad as Empire, if not worse. They have slowly taken the winning formula for Total War and dumbed it down for the masses. 'Casual gamers', the console and phone game generation have been the downfall of many a great PC game series. From top to bottom this game is purely sacrilegious to any Total War fan who values depth and tactical battles. They have taken away all of our control and implemented gimmicks to please the casual gamer. I will provide some insight into the fundamental flaws at the core of the games design rather than elaborate on the myriad of optimization problems and bugs the game suffers from at this time. Just to clarify, I want the game to be a success! I am a rabid fan. I built a $3,000 Xfire machine just for the game early this year.

GAMEPLAY:

A huge number of features that were available even in Total War: Rome are missing or broken both conceptually and mechanically. I will try and break down the problems point by point as they relate to gameplay.

-No family tree.

-No 'Loose' or 'Tight' generic formation commands. Can't spread to avoid enemy fire?!

-No 'Guard' command, your units cannot be instructed to maintain their position and formation at all costs.Even the most disciplined melee troops devolve into a blob during melee combat.

-You cannot toggle fire at will on infantry with javelins, they only fire when they charge. Some unfortunate tactical consequences are that they cannot throw javelins to break an enemy charge and then receive the broken charge, they cannot fire on skirmishers and cavalry harassing them, and if you move reserves to reinforce a battle line they will AUTOMATICALLY throw their javelins into the backs of your own men who are already engaged. WTF CA?

-Troops have inappropriate context based behavior or a complete lack thereof. IE. They will stand in position and take arrows to the face from archers ten feet away (as if instructed to guard, but still lose unit cohesion in melee) and will not chase routing enemies. During a melee blob if a unit of men destroy their immediate foe (target) they will not engage nearby enemies. They will stand there watching their comrades get hacked apart five feet away.

-Auto run breaks unit cohesion.

-BATTLES ARE WAY TOO FAST! The battles last a few minutes generally. You spend three minutes walking to the enemy force. Your lines meet and devolve into a chaotic blob and the melee is typically over in about 30-50 seconds as one side routes. If you were inclined to flank the blob you typically don't even have time to move a single flanking unit around into position before the melee is decided. You're far better served simply committing the unit into the blob of doom right away and spamming the 'magic' combat buffs/abilities your men have. Speaking of..

-MAGIC COMBAT ABILITIES! You can hit a button and suddenly your men charge with more force than usual or you can magically remove all fatigue? Get your voodoo out of my Total War. Abilities should have a justifiable function that makes sense.

-Units run entirely too fast, especially with tactical map speed buffs on roads for certain units and while charging. I would seriously estimate that your men can charge at nearly 30mph.. Again, wtf?

-Victory Flags. What is strategic or tactical about standing next to a flag in a location that is strategically irrelevant? Nothing. Artificial victory devices and logical strategy are mutually exclusive. Are we aiming for an arcade style console port or a deep, tactical, and engaging strategy game that rewards intelligent play?

-Diplomacy has improved so far as the campaign AI actually interacting with you in ways beyond declaring war but it is almost always on their terms. If you prefer passive diplomacy you wont notice the problem but if you want to proactively cultivate an environment of success with your neighbors you will fail. The AI refuses to accept logical treaties of any kind without bribes, very unfortunate.

-Magic boats appear when you move an army into the ocean... Magic.... Boats.... These transport ships are free and can be used to great effect in naval battles. Building and maintaining an incredibly expensive navy is rendered void of strategic value and ineffective. You can recruit a bunch of militia and march them into the sea and ram your enemies navy to death without much difficulty. Horrid.

-The campaign AI is atrocious even on the highest difficulty setting. The AI nations will maintain small armies and play passively. If they do field large armies the majority of the time they will consist of almost all slingers or other skirmishers. This causes most battles to involve a 10 second melee blob of doom then 10 minutes of you chasing down skirmishers at random. Epic disciplined and mechanized meat grinding battles? I bought the wrong game.

-Unit multiplier is locked. Why am I limited to smaller unit sizes than the original decade old game?

-One turn per year. Good luck utilizing the fresh general development ideas cause all your generals will die of old age very quickly, assuming they survive even one blob of death thanks to the extremely high kill rates.

-The UI is beyond inconvenient. It is a mess of sub menus and obscure iconography. You play the game through a figurative maze, not a streamlined UI for 2013.

-The awesome in game encyclopedia of information that the legacy Total War games featured? Still gone. Sure, a cohesive encyclopedia is a great idea, if it is navigable and intuitive enough to provide information in a timely manner.

Edit: I may expand on this as I discover more about the game, both good and bad.

[Dylanface]

If they had have replaced the flag in the open field with something more important like Zelda it would have been okay, atm we're playing capture the flag with legions.

[Spadey]

i believe this game is being judged way too harshly. its ealry in the release and still has decent amount of bugs yes but its a major release and it will have issues just like any other game would. yes it is sad the way games have deteriorated into semi foundation/alpha releases bt thats how it is. ive read qquite a few reviews so far about this game and it seems many of those whom write these reviews have not played the game enough yet to fully comprehend what they are saying. the battles are extremely fast. units die extremely fast and i feel as if there is no real strategy somtimes other than telling my units to run into the enemy, but still many times where i have employed actually strategy and needed to in order to come out victorious. and i have also seen the AI use smart tacticts and strategy that actually makes sense on a good amount of occasions. i have also seen plenty of of AI armies where the unit compliment is very diverse and consists of alot more than just slingers and other skirmishers. it does seem to be the norm for facing celtic factions though. fighting a war with the nations to the north of macedon and in germania seemed to be made up of nothing but levy freemen and slingers. overall the game is still pretty solid. i enjoy the look of it and love the way there are now limitations on agents and armies. it gives me a real feeling that losing an army is a big hinderance and more strategic because now i play almost a chess game with my armies moving and counter moving in accordance with the enemy armies. the navy system kind of seems odd now though. but stilll good feel

[Dylanface]

I find it upsetting how op the barbarian navies are, their ships are made of magic. I ram them and my ships that're twice the size seem to break like twigs. :/

[Langkard]

As a fan of TW since Shogun, it has been obvious to me that CA (or perhaps we can give CA some slack and say SEGA instead) is willing to give the shaft to the modding community which kept the TW brand alive in many ways. Instead the bean counters at SEGA think they are going to make bundles of money porting these games over to consoles. So each release since M2TW has been more dumbed down than the last. Empire, even Shogun 2, now Rome 2 are all designed with consoles in mind, even if just catering to the ADHD console mentality of shiny is good, screw the content.

Luckily, the modders like those over at twcenter.net are stubborn buggers. In spite of CA lying to us (like claiming that unlocking factions causing crashes was unintended in Shogun 2 and then the same exact unlocking factions causing crashes magically appears in Rome 2), the modders have been hard at work for the last few days.

We still can't unlock all of the factions, but some enterprising modders have managed so far to unlock the Seleucids and the Etruscans. Another modder figured out how to reduce the squalor effects and released it. The Rome II Total Realism guys are up and running and look likely to fix many other things as well as bringing the wonders of Rome 1 Realism to Rome 2, if they can get past the crap CA handed us.

All in all, I expect that the modding community will be able to fix some, maybe even most of the problems CA saddled us with in this release. I expect it won't be long before someone figures out how to fix the ridiculous insta-navies and the AI imbecilism. A hack of all of the factions should be forthcoming too.

Meanwhile CA needs to get down on bended knee and beg forgiveness from the modders. What they did with Rome 2 is almost unforgivable; but they can still make things right. They can start by fixing the roadblocks they put up to modding. If they don't, they can expect to lose their ONLY loyal customers, the modders, and end up with just the fickle ADHD console kiddies who will quickly move on to the next shiny object and leave CA wondering what happened to their customers.

[RocknRolla]

Played total war games since shogun 1 and 100% agree. Bugs, graphic glitches and even poor ai I can forgive at launch, but these poor design decisions are so far removed from what i have enjoyed in previous total war games that i dont think any number of patches can turn this game into what it should have been. Already uninstalled.

[JamKam]

Originalmente postado por clairbear_ski:

This is a bad game what were they thinking I have enjoyed every other TW game including Empire This one is a 60 buck ripoff Note to UNCreative Assemly I want my money back
Oh BTW another bullet point for you over looked there seems to be a limit of only 3 land armies,2 navies and one agent I wish I had read you review before my purchase
Well back to Shogun 2 and my PS3 games

If you conquer enough land, you're able to have more generals, more fleets, and more agents. they all double. i.e. 6 generals, 4 navies. 2 spies. And I do believe it multiplies after you conquer enough land that edictible.
That being said, i feel like this game was rushed, and I do agree with the depth of the game is being dumbed.
One thing I do like though is the MAGIC BOATS. Lets be honest, I hated naval battles, and I hated the extra time it took to build a ship for my troops. That's something I won't complain about. Plus if you auto resolve your navies will DESTROY the transport ships. Even in battle ones, if you have a big ship just ram them all. Duh.

[JamKam]

Originalmente postado por Shadow90:

i believe this game is being judged way too harshly. its ealry in the release and still has decent amount of bugs yes but its a major release and it will have issues just like any other game would. yes it is sad the way games have deteriorated into semi foundation/alpha releases bt thats how it is. ive read qquite a few reviews so far about this game and it seems many of those whom write these reviews have not played the game enough yet to fully comprehend what they are saying. the battles are extremely fast. units die extremely fast and i feel as if there is no real strategy somtimes other than telling my units to run into the enemy, but still many times where i have employed actually strategy and needed to in order to come out victorious. and i have also seen the AI use smart tacticts and strategy that actually makes sense on a good amount of occasions. i have also seen plenty of of AI armies where the unit compliment is very diverse and consists of alot more than just slingers and other skirmishers. it does seem to be the norm for facing celtic factions though. fighting a war with the nations to the north of macedon and in germania seemed to be made up of nothing but levy freemen and slingers. overall the game is still pretty solid. i enjoy the look of it and love the way there are now limitations on agents and armies. it gives me a real feeling that losing an army is a big hinderance and more strategic because now i play almost a chess game with my armies moving and counter moving in accordance with the enemy armies. the navy system kind of seems odd now though. but stilll good feel

I'm quoting you because I do because while it has its flaws, it's not a piece of garbage, I still enjoy playing it.

[YoWutSup]

This reflects my perspective as well...

[ArcticCheetah]

yep, saw that yesterday... my thoughts exactly.

[Darlandra]

Originalmente postado por Drahazar:

"Victory Flags"

Are stupid here is why. Why would any general put there flag in the open near the enemy. Why would you put your flag at the base of the hill when any general with a brain would put it on top of the hill.

Really I would be ok with the Victory Flag if you could place it down in your own deployment zone. As it is currently its crap I had plenty of games where I would have won with the few troops I had against his greater force but cause It was not strategically viable to stay in open terrian to guard a flag I lost.

I know exactly what battle map you're talking about. I started the battle off outnumbered, but I had higher quality troops. The first thing I saw was this huge hill, so I decided to move my troops to the top as fast as possible. After all even the game tips say that troops do better fighting downhill. After all my troops are most of the way up, I realize how the enemy AI is going to my ATTACKING position...where they take a flag....and I lose.

In what logical sense does it work out that an attacking army would consider itself LOST because they lost the initial point they started the battle? I had 1400 troops at a tacticlly sound position waiting to grind the enemy into dust and a mob of mobs (literally) "defeat" me by a square.

[Brick Frog -]

Originalmente postado por Kampsaiyan:

Originalmente postado por clairbear_ski:

Lets be honest, I hated naval battles, and I hated the extra time it took to build a ship for my troops. That's something I won't complain about.

Lol.

>Lets be honest.
>I hated.

Sorry, but boats take a long while to build. So, what, there are boats available all over the coastline... everywhere.. for any army?

"Magic" boats are silly.

[Darlandra]

Originalmente postado por Kampsaiyan:

Originalmente postado por clairbear_ski:

This is a bad game what were they thinking I have enjoyed every other TW game including Empire This one is a 60 buck ripoff Note to UNCreative Assemly I want my money back
Oh BTW another bullet point for you over looked there seems to be a limit of only 3 land armies,2 navies and one agent I wish I had read you review before my purchase
Well back to Shogun 2 and my PS3 games

If you conquer enough land, you're able to have more generals, more fleets, and more agents. they all double. i.e. 6 generals, 4 navies. 2 spies. And I do believe it multiplies after you conquer enough land that edictible.
That being said, i feel like this game was rushed, and I do agree with the depth of the game is being dumbed.
One thing I do like though is the MAGIC BOATS. Lets be honest, I hated naval battles, and I hated the extra time it took to build a ship for my troops. That's something I won't complain about. Plus if you auto resolve your navies will DESTROY the transport ships. Even in battle ones, if you have a big ship just ram them all. Duh.

Magic boats are convenient, but I think a great many of use are playing because we want a touch of historical reality. Why else such attention on how the romans and the people then actuall foght? Remember if you will the battle of thermopolae: Half the battle was in fact naval, and the reason the 300 spartans and 3000 atheniens were able to even make their stand was because 2 equal navy's faced off and the attacker suffered ironic circunstances, bad luck, and poor morale. The way the game has it, fleets really dont matter much. Just move your cheap troops onto the water and a ship shows up...which is so far from reality it hurts. I at least play the TW games to think, to try to work on my strategy and tactic skills. The magic boats...make that hard to do realisticly.

[Ozymandias]

Originalmente postado por clairbear_ski:

This is a bad game what were they thinking I have enjoyed every other TW game including Empire This one is a 60 buck ripoff Note to UNCreative Assemly I want my money back
Oh BTW another bullet point for you over looked there seems to be a limit of only 3 land armies,2 navies and one agent I wish I had read you review before my purchase
Well back to Shogun 2 and my PS3 games

That three army and navy limit is actually based on the size of your empire. It will be larger as you expand. It's not a justification just an explanation.

[Manuelman]

Originalmente postado por juiceman:

would this be bad if it was my first total war game?

YES, PLEASE, DON'T TAKE THIS GAME AS A TOTAL WAR GAME, PLAY SHOGUN 2, MEDIEVAL 2, THE ORIGINAL ROME, HELL, EVEN PATCHED UP EMPIRE WOULD DO, JUST, PLEASE, DON'T THINK THIS IS A TW GAME AT ALL.

[hermionegrangerfan87]

This release is reminding me of the awful launch that RO2 had; 3 factions debating, one made of older fans of the previous games, a new group made up majorly by old fans and new ones(the optimists), and the other new players whos playing the series for the first time and are largely ignorant of what the other 2 groups are talking about.