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.

[NadasRevenge]

why the hell are some people defending CA for roman infantry being unable to throw their pilla', its clearly a mistake or missing feature CA even talked about it in their throwing video with brian blessed, seriously some folk need to crawl out of CA's ass

[LaserHawk]

引用自 Rex Skeletor：

Rome 2 is not without its issues, but Raye is just another reticent, aging codger who has 20/20 hindsight and a bad case of blinding nostalgia.

Family trees?

Completely useless in Rome Total War. Most of the time you ended up with 20-30 extra generals all sitting around in cities doing nothing. Many of them collecting bad traits and retainers which, after the list become long enough, became indecipherable as to how good or bad they were.

Loose/Tight formation: This feature was relatively underused and really is ahistorical in its implementation. Rome 2 is about maintaining group cohesion and loose/tight formation would break that. Missile troops are already in a loose formation but melee units, particularly Roman/Greek ones require staying in formation. It would be totally ahistorical for them to fall out of line with one another.

Same with Guard. This looks like it might have been folded into general unit behavior.

So far, this is not akin to "dumbing down" this is merely eliminating superfluous or redundant mechanics.

Troop Behavior will likely be tweaked in the updates and patches ahead. They seem fine to me.

Javelins not autofiring? But wait... isn't autofiring DUMBING DOWN? Stop being lazy and manage them yourself you gangrenous lazy oaf.

"Battles are way too fast"

This is a matter of taste not an objective fact. Battles seem fine to me, about 5-10 minutes per engagement, give or take. If anything I hated the 30 minute grinds of RTW, especially sieges. This is a welcome improvement.

"-MAGIC COMBAT ABILITIES"

This is no different than the abilities that exited in Rome and other total war games. Having a better general made your troops better, generally. They simply expanded upon it.

If you want a dull, lifeless stat-based spreadsheets-turned-games I suggest you go over to Matrix games and find yourself something that will appeal to 50 and 60 year old grognards who find such stultifying "games" stimulating.

"Victory Flags"

This is no different than controlling the square in Rome Total War. If the enemy ceded the sequare they had a countdown in which to reacquire it. This was further expanded in Medieval 2 in which you needed sufficient number of men otherwise you'd lose control.

Diplomacy

Diplomacy has never been Rome's strong suit. IT was worse in the first one. Again, rose-colored old man glasses of nostalgia.


Everything else is mindless complaining. The game's mechanics are a welcome change to the redundant mechanics of earlier games. Anyone who is familiar with the series, not to mention newcomers, should enjoy Rome 2 without a problem (technical issues that need to be fixed, aside).

If you wanted Rome 1 version 2.0 just go back to Rome Total War and install a mod. Otherwise find yourself something else to complain about.

How on Earth can you defend such a lackluster game? 5-10 minute battles? What you slow the game speed down, or is it you just have no concept of time? I've played 7600 vs 10000+ units and battle was over 4:53 decisive victory on legendary setting. There's absolutely nothing great about the game except how good the campaign map is laid out and look of it. But even that is ruined by adding 2148921742 factions to the game when 30 would've sufficed.

[galactafunk]

Almost as astonishing as the general crappiness of the game is the blind zealot devotion of suppose 'fans' who say it's a great game. I hope to God they're getting paid, because if they truly believe this game should stand in the Total War series this franchise has dumber fanboys than Madden.

[Sil.^Fisk]

Completely agree with OP! The game has potential to be grand, but it is just missing soo much atm.

[ATT]

引用自 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 kind of agree. The game has been slammed on way too harshly for nonsensical reasons but CA need to take a page from NaughtyDog's book. They knocked the last of us back a few months for optimisation and design, this made it one of, if not the, best game I have ever played and it recieved universal user and critic acclaim. Rome was brought forwards and its poorly optimised, in many cases doesnt work and has a plethora of small and big issues. My point being it needed more time in production and the fact they sold it in this state is unacceptable. For me it works alright so I have only minor bugs which is to be expected on a game with such scale but the near invulnerability of elephants,total lack of any logical enemy diplomacy (ie I offered the Suebi a non aggression pact, they refused keeping an army stationed at the border even as the Arverni took them to pieces because a much needed army was wasted guarding a pass I had no interest in attacking)

The AI is so dumb, its only smart when it has a lucky accident and the battles end so quickly there is no time to move or flank or do anything other than rush. I actually broke a similar sized army before my cavalry could complete its positioning to strike from the flank, battle duration to wipe out 2000 men? 5 minutes, two of which were drawing the enemy off the hill.

A lot of the units feel cut and paste with a lack of equipment and uniform diversity, a lot of formations such as hoplite phalanx or testudo are broken, my forces have zero cohesion. Its abundantly clear this game needed longer and has been pushed forwards. It needs to have the casualisation reversed returning the important options of Rome 1 and a lot of patching. Thats not to say Im not enjoying it but Im running a lot of mods but until the devs manage to get it back on track I am not overly impressed. If it remains this casualised, simplistic and quite frankly poorly made I will be ending my association with what is one of my favourite series in the industry.