The rome/carthago family system is indeed untill now only confusing without any impact. I assume ill hav to wait for the civil war to see what effects it has.
It's as incomprehensible with the chief system too - I have yet to work out whether I want someone to be adopted or to stop it, or what value I gain from adopting someone.
I'd thought for a while that the influence you have is a proportionate measure of combined gravitas of your characters, but the figures don't add up, and the encyclopedia suggests that it comes from winning battles and completing missions (i.e. exactly like approval in Rome 1). If that's the case, I'm still at a loss as to what gravitas actually does.
However, I'm not seeing any change as a result of either. Nor, since I can appoint anyone whatever their party to be a general, do I know why I'd want to assassinate anybody in my faction.
Civil war apparently comes if your support is too high or too low, but you can always decrease support by taking actions that "cost" senators/chiefs.
Furthermore, untill now its quite passive, with very few open field battles and almost only sieges (although i do play on normal).
This is typical for Total War games. I've been seeing rather more open battles actually in my Hard Iceni campaign, and some pretty large ones. Once you get to that point it does play a lot like the previous games, except that the game speed is still too fast and special abilities seem a surer win than tactics.
The tactical AI is however at the mercy of the strategic one, and if no one techs past their basic units (I've seen Arverni with ballistae and most people now have light cavalry, but that's it. My chariots are still all-dominating techwise) or varies their unit composition, tactical battles are both very samey and not especially challenging.
The problem is that there are very few evenmatched battles. If you bring a single army to besiege, you are quite disadvantaged because of the huge garrisons, bring two and you autoresolve with 99% surviving.
Due to the limited role played by tactics in this game, the 'relative power' bar is often a better indicator of how a battle will go in the field than in past ones, where you could routinely win a hopelessly outmatched battle with good tactics. It's by no means irrelevant, though - I played one battle where I was defending a point and set my army to hold off the main enemy attack before they got there. The enemy reinforcing army then came in from behind and I couldn't get back before they won. Replaying, I set my forces closer to the point and the result was a complete massacre:
The only real tactics I employed were to send my general's cavalry out to hit the enemy slingers - while that fight was going on the main enemy army ran headlong into my defenders. Once the general had finished with the slingers, I just turned him round and hit the main enemy army in the rear - apparently causing them all to start wavering.
Granted, im only 65 turns far, and bout to invade macedon, so hopefully it will kick off a bit more.
It's unfortunate but generally the case in TW games that minor factions are a lot more passive and technology underdeveloped than major ones, so you may have better luck finding a credible opponent there.
Thing that i dont understand is naval. I build more advanced ships rather than raiding hemolias (are whatever they are called), but the advanced ships only have 1/2 amount of men...
I'm in Britain so am not teching to higher-level ships, since the English Channel is not a contested area (or hasn't been - I had a rude awakening when a large Cherschii force hit me with an amphibious landing). Perhaps the advanced ships are better at ramming, or faster, since ramming seems to be what naval warfare is all about? Transports seem to be better at boarding actions than naval ships anyway. There are other oddities with the tech tree like that - for instance Britons unlock skirmishers after slingers (who are the basic ranged unit), but those are shorter-ranged, deal about the same damage, and are no better in melee.
I had a couple of big battles with amphibious landings today and I'll admit that those are fun, but they seem to be bugged. As a unit disembarks, it can't be attacked. However, it seems the way the system does this is to have a section of the beach that can't be attacked, so even if a unit is fully disembarked it can't be attacked at that point. Given that defensive naval invasions place the victory point at exactly the first point where these units become vulnerable again, this leads to odd results - you can't draw troops away because if you do those units will attack you and/or take the victory point, but you can't attack yourself either. In my battle I was facing a landing force that had landed further along the beach as well, so I either sat there watching these immobile enemies and got rushed, or I hit the other landing party and got attacked in the flank and rear by the others, that I would otherwise have been able to deal with before the main force got there.
