Imperator: Rome Vs Total War Rome 2: Emperor Edition vs Total War Rome: Remastered.

[Talion 2024.]

Good afternoon everyone. I have come across three interesting strategy games set in ancient Rome, and I am curious to know which of the three is worth playing this year.

From what I've heard, both Total War Rome: Remastered and Total War Rome 2: Emperor Edition are critically acclaimed games, whereas Imperator: Rome is rather unpopular despite seeming like a very promising strategy game due to its apparent depth and focus on other aspects other than just war.

Would any of you recommend Imperator this year, especially when the Christmas Steam Sale is on?

[Yorbihtter]

Originally posted by Sledge.M:

But there is no advantage that the remaster has over R2 in terms of mods

Originally posted by Sledge.M:

but I have no idea where you get off calling Rome 2's engine "outdated"

Listen man, I am sorry if I didn't write it right or something - you misunderstood me a little bit. I compared TWR:R to TWR1 in these cases, not to TWR2. Kinda awkward, haha

[Sledge]

Originally posted by Yorbihtter:

Originally posted by Sledge.M:

But there is no advantage that the remaster has over R2 in terms of mods

Originally posted by Sledge.M:

but I have no idea where you get off calling Rome 2's engine "outdated"

Listen man, I am sorry if I didn't write it right or something - you misunderstood me a little bit. I compared TWR:R to TWR1 in these cases, not to TWR2. Kinda awkward, haha

Remaster and Rome 1 are the same core games. Other than updated UI and graphics, there isn’t much that separates the 2 games.

[Yorbihtter]

Originally posted by Sledge.M:

This simply is not true. R1/remaster very much relied on cheats at higher difficulty levels and the AI is certainly much less sophisticated than what a player will face in Rome 2 or newer games. The AI for TW games never really challenges a competent player, but at least in Rome 2 the AI is semi-competent at maintaining a battle line and targeting the player's flanks. R1/remaster's AI is just utterly incompetent in certain scenarios, especially siege/city maps.

Well, yeah, the AI in TWR, TWR:R and even in TWR2 are kinda braindead when it comes to urban warfare. However, in the older games (like Medieval 2 and Rome) the AI had the least amount of cheats compared to the other TW titles. And when in comes to battles, TWR bots get very insignificant cheats in comparison to TWR2 - the main difference between difficulties in the older titles is mostly the AI competence in tactics. And, well, I cant really say I ever had an opportunity to cheese the AI's bugginess on Very Hard both in TWR and TWM2, unlike in TWR2, where the enemy generals sometimes just wont move their armies even when I actively flank them with most of my force. I actually did something very similar to this yesterday, when I was playing Rise of the Republic campaign with DeI.

[Yorbihtter]

Originally posted by Sledge.M:

Remaster and Rome 1 are the same core games. Other than updated UI and graphics, there isn’t much that separates the 2 games.

They are the same game at the core, right, but once again, Remaster has some QoL enhancements, better UI, new mechanics (like merchant agents), and much higher modding potential. Out of these two games Remaster is certainly the better one.

[Sledge]

Originally posted by Yorbihtter:

Originally posted by Sledge.M:

Remaster and Rome 1 are the same core games. Other than updated UI and graphics, there isn’t much that separates the 2 games.

They are the same game at the core, right, but once again, Remaster has some QoL enhancements, better UI, new mechanics (like merchant agents), and much higher modding potential. Out of these two games Remaster is certainly the better one.

I have no doubt the remaster is better in certain ways, but the AI and gameplay is largely the same based on what I’ve seen. CA really didn’t address some of the core shortcomings of R1 with the remaster.

The moddability of the campaign map is interesting - I’ve seen videos of mod teams working on hundreds of new settlements, but I don’t think the game engine and settlement UI lends itself to that scale.

[Yorbihtter]

Originally posted by Sledge.M:

R1/remaster had a Senate mechanic, no-general armies, more sandbox character development and more selection in building slots. That aside, its campaign depth was fairly shallow compared to Rome 2's campaign where the player had to manage a variety of new mechanics: province edicts and building synergies; faction politics and loyalty; army stances; food supplies which affected unit attrition and the larger economy; banditry, squalor & religion (for Empire Divided campaign). Perhaps some of those mechanics could feel stale by the mid or late game, but they still added a dimension of gameplay that simply did not exist in R1/remaster.

Well, as I said in posts above - yeah, these are very cool looking additions to the gameplay that make TWR2 seem very complex from aside. However, couple of hours of gameplay would be more than enough to dissolve the illusion of the game's complexity. Banditry, squalor, province edicts, inner politics - all of these are extremely minor mechanics that can be completely ignored for the 90% of the game. Food is very easy to get since it's generated passively by most villages; banditry was never a problem for me (and in the end it's just a background number that is very easy to reduce); politics are extremely stale and are absolutely irrelevant since you always put your dynastic members as generals anyway; and army stances, although may seem like an addition, already were in some kind implemented in TWR - you could raid, you could fortify (and fortification is done better in TWR1), and you could ambush (which was trickier back then).

Most of the new mechanics of TWR2 only add to that vaguely realistic content clout that are there to make an illusion of this game being something more than it is. Rome 2, in fact, is as shallow as Rome 1, if not shallower - but at least Rome 1 accepts that as a fact in it's design and doesn't try to seem as some overly-complex 4X strategy game.

[Yorbihtter]

Originally posted by Sledge.M:

The moddability of the campaign map is interesting - I’ve seen videos of mod teams working on hundreds of new settlements, but I don’t think the game engine and settlement UI lends itself to that scale.

Bro, just try Imperium Surrectum. You will be flabbergasted.

[Sledge]

Originally posted by Yorbihtter:

Originally posted by Sledge.M:

The moddability of the campaign map is interesting - I’ve seen videos of mod teams working on hundreds of new settlements, but I don’t think the game engine and settlement UI lends itself to that scale.

Bro, just try Imperium Surrectum. You will be flabbergasted.

Is the mod even complete? Last I heard, it was still a work in progress for the remaster.

[Yorbihtter]

Originally posted by Sledge.M:

R2 has strategic fog of war, just no watch towers

Well, you can see absolutely everything inside your borders, which is quite shallow in my opinion. In TWR1 bots often send some squads to shut down your watchtowers, so that they could move inside your borders undetected. You could do that too, although I am not sure that it would lead to any disadvantage to the AI - since, I guess, they could see through the fog of war anyway.

[Yorbihtter]

Originally posted by Sledge.M:

Is the mod even complete? Last I heard, it was still a work in progress for the remaster.

It's not complete yet, but its fully playable and has almost no bugs. The dev team updates it regularly (the last one was in September), so you will still have some great time even though it's not 1.0 yet.

[Yorbihtter]

Originally posted by Sledge.M:

You could also use forts to cheese the AI into certain predictable behaviors in R1/remaster. Also forts do in fact exist in R2, but they are smaller more temporary structures that an army can erect while stationary - which felt more accurate than having permanent structures left behind by the army in R1/remaster.

Regarding the cheesing - well, yes, that's the whole point. Isn't it fun to exploit strategic advantages? I mean, of all things, it may be one of the reasons I play 4X games. Moreover, yes, I know that forts exist in R2, but they are just some walls that cover up your army that stands for too long. In real life forts existed regardless of the armies, and in TWR1 these structures have a lot of strategic use. As I said before, I use them as reinforcement hubs in lands too distant from my recruitment centers. I also love to put forts on the borders with some small garrison inside - in case of an invasion, they could win me some time to move up my forces, and they also repel smaller armies from freely ravaging my lands.

[Yorbihtter]

Originally posted by Sledge.M:

However, there was a much more nuanced and interesting meta offered by R2's building system - the player actually had to use cost-benefit analysis to pick buildings based on variety of factors: public order; religion; culture and synergy with the the larger province.

I partially agree with you on this, however you miss my point a little bit. Yes, synergies are always fun, in any genre of games, and especially in strategies. It's a fundamental game design choice that almost always makes any game much more fun. However, in spite all of this - the map development cycle is extremely straightforward in R2. You have no sandbox, you have nothing to play around with. You combine some building blocks for different effects, which is cool, but there's almost no planning or strategic thinking in that process.
Every settlement has pre-determined specialization to it - village or town; part of a small or of a large province; a special good that determines if it's a commercial, industrial or agricultural town. Once again, this system is very fun and rewarding - when you develop such settlements according to their pre-determined specialization, you get incredible results. However, you have almost no freedom in choosing how exactly you're going to develop a city.

Moreover, in TWR1 you also seek for cost efficiency. On harder campaign difficulties and in hardcore mods, your funds are extremely limited and the costs are quite high, so you always have to balance the development of your city - whether to invest into sanitation to make a settlement grow faster, enabling you to tier it up quicker, or to invest into it's money or unit making capabilites, which may cost a lot but will give you plenty of gold in the long run.

[Sledge]

I thought you said earlier that you weren’t comparing remaster to Rome 2 but rather Rome 1? Which is it?

Like I said, I’ve played all Rome TW games. I’m not a newbie. So your writing is largely wasted on me.

[Sledge]

Originally posted by Yorbihtter:

Originally posted by Sledge.M:

This simply is not true. R1/remaster very much relied on cheats at higher difficulty levels and the AI is certainly much less sophisticated than what a player will face in Rome 2 or newer games. The AI for TW games never really challenges a competent player, but at least in Rome 2 the AI is semi-competent at maintaining a battle line and targeting the player's flanks. R1/remaster's AI is just utterly incompetent in certain scenarios, especially siege/city maps.

Well, yeah, the AI in TWR, TWR:R and even in TWR2 are kinda braindead when it comes to urban warfare. However, in the older games (like Medieval 2 and Rome) the AI had the least amount of cheats compared to the other TW titles. And when in comes to battles, TWR bots get very insignificant cheats in comparison to TWR2 - the main difference between difficulties in the older titles is mostly the AI competence in tactics. And, well, I cant really say I ever had an opportunity to cheese the AI's bugginess on Very Hard both in TWR and TWM2, unlike in TWR2, where the enemy generals sometimes just wont move their armies even when I actively flank them with most of my force. I actually did something very similar to this yesterday, when I was playing Rise of the Republic campaign with DeI.

The AI got cheats in medieval 2 and Rome 1 the same way it got cheats in Rome2…CA titles haven’t changed in that aspect for many years.

Also, I’ve never seen a noticeable difference in AI tactics based on difficulty level….never. Rome 2’s battle AI, while still basic, is noticeably improved from Rome 1 and remastered - both objectively and subjectively. If you disagree, fine.

[Talion 2024.]

Originally posted by HB:

Take a look at Old world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InaSJpJ9X0k

Thank you.