PC Gamer: Rome 2 Review

[PhilBowles]

http://www.pcgamer.com/review/total-war-rome-2-review/2/

It actually sounds as though most of the changes are likely to prove disappointing - I was actually holding out particular hope for the politics element that the reviewer slams.

I'm also not enthused by the changes he praises - it seems as though battles have only changed graphically (and not in the AI's tendency to chuck armies away against cities), and the strategic layer has regressed somewhat in its removal of farms etc. as raidable parts of the landscape (touted in Empire, not unfairly, as that game's big innovation to the series). I was saddened that the 'Man of the Hour' system was removed from Shogun 2 - with forced generals for every army, it seems it can't happen in Rome 2 either (and we still have the unfortunate skill tree instead of the older games' organic character development, only now for armies as well as generals). Improved interface for selecting areas where buildings are needed is great, but that's just a UI improvement (and, incidentally, something that Empire had which was removed in Shogun 2 for no good reason).

Having said all that, there are two key positives that still have me anticipating tomorrow as the most exciting game release of the year: longer campaigns, and much reduced naval battles. It was a real drag in Empire, and even moreso in Shogun 2 with its AI that was obsessive about raiding trade routes and its longer, closer-range battles, that naval battles were so common since in Shogun 2 particularly there just weren't opportunities for interesting or varied naval battles, and the AI was appalling. Add to that the greater unit and faction variety - which is key to the TW experience - and I'm sold (just as well since I pre-ordered over a week ago...)

Many of my above concerns of course depend on how the campaign as a whole is structured; for the most part, Shogun 2's shift towards more simplified mechanics and less micromanagement was an improvement, and it may be that the scale of the new campaign demands something like the province system - perhaps there will be other ways of raiding (maybe back to the R/M2 system where just having enemies sitting in your province reduced income and caused damage).

 

[scheva007]

Waitin for my CE to arrive, but since i have an ssd i had to reinstall everything, so i also fired up Medieval 2, and i didnt get far. The constant micromanagement of agents (priests, spies, assassins and merchants), just becomes a pain, even after only 20 turns. Especially because if you want some guilds you need to recruit a lot of them.

Family members could also become a pain, especially if they all became corrupted idiots because you earned too much and then spend 10 turns sendng them to a new residence. So i like the skills tree, only some more random traits would be an improvement (in FotS every general got eye for the ladies). But yes, there was a shortage in Family members in S2 if you wanted to field enough armies

 

[Akka]

Meh, I prefered the MTW1 way of dealing with family.
MTW2 was ridiculous, with adoptions left and right in a time frame where blood links were paramount.

Of course, adoption WAS a common thing in Antiquity, so it would have its place here, but still I prefer family members to be a precious resource and not something you automatically gain by the dozen.

Agree with the traits too. Having a guy getting two pages of malus just because your country is doing good was annoying.

 

[PhilBowles]

Waitin for my CE to arrive, but since i have an ssd i had to reinstall everything, so i also fired up Medieval 2, and i didnt get far. The constant micromanagement of agents (priests, spies, assassins and merchants), just becomes a pain, even after only 20 turns. Especially because if you want some guilds you need to recruit a lot of them.

Yes, Shogun 2 definitely improved the agent system dramatically (especially by removing diplomat and merchant agents), but I was less of a fan of province simplification. I liked the older growth and taxes mechanic and am less a fan of the overly basic Shogun 2 food system, global taxation, or "have enough gold and you can buy anything", or automated teching without scholar agents or any need to reach particular settlement sizes. n particular I liked the way villages grew in Empire/Napoleon. And the building slots and options are very restrictive in S2. You can also no longer have multiple resources and their associated building chains in a province.

And while having half a dozen types of "temple" that affected different flavours of happiness without any detectable difference in their effects was sloppy design, I liked the division between 'class' happiness in Empire - Shogun 2's attempt to replicate this by having one unhappiness bar, but with potentially two effects (either peasants' revolt or noble rebellion) is clumsy in principle (although I've never seen a noble rebellion in either game, and Empire implemented the system badly - two unhappiness bars, yet nearly every building that boosted happiness had identical effects on both happiness bars.

Complexity is definitely not to be favoured as an end in and of itself; Total War games have always been fundamentally very simple at the strategic level and have been plagued by poor interfaces (really, it's taken until Shogun 2 to give the series an encyclopedia? A building browser is such a novelty in the series' eighth entry that it warrants comment in a review as one of the big selling points?) and unnecessarily complex duplication of functions. As I say, most of Shogun 2's streamlining is to be welcomed rather than criticised as "dumbing down", but I feel that that game went as far as was needed in cleaning up feature bloat (and lost some character in the process). More simplification doesn't seem necessary.

Family members could also become a pain, especially if they all became corrupted idiots because you earned too much and then spend 10 turns sendng them to a new residence

You know, I'd never spotted that there was more chance of negative effects if you were doing well - I'd assumed it was purely random.

The traits I miss are in any case mostly the ones that emerge from battles of particular types - use a lot of cavalry, you get a cavalry leader trait, rather than an all-infantry general being able to pick it from a skill tree if you fancy giving him a change of pace. There's one in Shogun 2 for winning a battle with a lot of casualties on both sides, but that's more or less it. Unfortunately changes to the way characters work (everything based on a single stat, command) limits what you can do with traits, and you're in danger of the feature bloat you get with M2 agents, in which assassins have a hundred possible named abilities all of which do precisely the same thing.

And I do like the Shogun 2 system for picking retainers.

So i like the skills tree, only some more random traits would be an improvement (in FotS every general got eye for the ladies). But yes, there was a shortage in Family members in S2 if you wanted to field enough armies

Agree with that. I actually run a lot of armies without generals - Man of the Hour was nice thematically so that's part of it. but the other side to the R2 system I dislike (I'm on EST and still downloading the final update so haven't played the game yet) is the fact that you have a specific cap on the number of armies you can field.

Agree with the traits too. Having a guy getting two pages of malus just because your country is doing good was annoying.

Sure, but there should be some negative traits that can pop up at random (and not linked to your game success). Shogun 2 has no fundamentally negative traits except Eye for the Ladies.

 

[Greizer85]

Personally, I can't play any of the titles beyond Medieval I. The reason is the horrible new map style and the slow movement of units within it. You have to squint to see your army stacks from the colorful-green foliage, and it takes ages for them to get anywhere. Half of the time in Rome I and Medieval II (which I got because hey, Total War), I forgot where my army was heading once I had a few stacks to keep track of. In Medieval I, as long as I had a proper ship-chain established, I could get them where they needed to go in one turn, or two at most. Unrealistic, maybe, but hella convenient.

Oh, and don't get me started on the agents..! They were the worst part of MtW, and it only got worse in subsequent versions. I should be able to simply tell my agent where to go and it should get there without hiccups. Or remove agents altogether; just make me see every province without the tedium of building a million Priests.

Although I never played that much of either, I got the impression that the AI was worse in Rome I and MtW II, too, than in the previous versions. In fact the AI of Shogun I was the most challenging for me; it's only major flaw was its tendency to suicide its generals. Decimating it with Archers was still possible but not nearly as easy as in MtW, because for the most part the units would stick together and not chase your lone Horse Archers. I remember in MtW, in my most memorable game, I had 9 Hungarian Horse Archers (Szekely), and nothing else... Nothing could stand in my way. Byzantines, Egyptians, Mongols, Germans, etc were all vanquished before the might of the retreating and suddenly striking horse... With a 20:1 kill ratio, or 10:1 in a close battle (lol). The key to it was that the Szekelys, as the only unit in the game, combined a decent melee attack value with lightning move speed + ranged capability. So you could use the same units for luring and breaking the enemy, and react quickly to any emergencies. Ah well -- wandered off a little bit here -- good times, good times. Maybe they'll re-visit the old style of campaign map at some point, but I doubt it, because the casual gamers have overtaken the computer game market and they do love their shinies.

 

[Leonidas34]

Personally, I can't play any of the titles beyond Medieval I. The reason is the horrible new map style and the slow movement of units within it. You have to squint to see your army stacks from the colorful-green foliage, and it takes ages for them to get anywhere. Half of the time in Rome I and Medieval II (which I got because hey, Total War), I forgot where my army was heading once I had a few stacks to keep track of. In Medieval I, as long as I had a proper ship-chain established, I could get them where they needed to go in one turn, or two at most. Unrealistic, maybe, but hella convenient.

Oh, and don't get me started on the agents..! They were the worst part of MtW, and it only got worse in subsequent versions. I should be able to simply tell my agent where to go and it should get there without hiccups. Or remove agents altogether; just make me see every province without the tedium of building a million Priests.

Although I never played that much of either, I got the impression that the AI was worse in Rome I and MtW II, too, than in the previous versions. In fact the AI of Shogun I was the most challenging for me; it's only major flaw was its tendency to suicide its generals. Decimating it with Archers was still possible but not nearly as easy as in MtW, because for the most part the units would stick together and not chase your lone Horse Archers. I remember in MtW, in my most memorable game, I had 9 Hungarian Horse Archers (Szekely), and nothing else... Nothing could stand in my way. Byzantines, Egyptians, Mongols, Germans, etc were all vanquished before the might of the retreating and suddenly striking horse... With a 20:1 kill ratio, or 10:1 in a close battle (lol). The key to it was that the Szekelys, as the only unit in the game, combined a decent melee attack value with lightning move speed + ranged capability. So you could use the same units for luring and breaking the enemy, and react quickly to any emergencies. Ah well -- wandered off a little bit here -- good times, good times. Maybe they'll re-visit the old style of campaign map at some point, but I doubt it, because the casual gamers have overtaken the computer game market and they do love their shinies.

I actually really liked using priests Making an enemy region rebel was quite fun.