Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
And yet they still insist on this "three Roman factions" nonsense.
Total War: Rome II Announced
- Thread starter salty mud
- Start date
And yet they still insist on this "three Roman factions" nonsense.
schlaufuchs
Break My Heart
salty mud
Deity
It's three Roman families, not three factions. Rome is one faction with 3 families affecting the game.
Maniacal
the green Napoleon
Thank bloody goodness.
salty mud
Deity
...CA confirmed it long ago. You can even go and check the faction pages on totalwar.com to see for yourself that Rome is in fact one faction, instead of worrying so much about it.
If o nly people looked more around before winding themself up...
Anyway, 8 factions confirmed (last one was egypt), but a mysterious 9th one has appeared. probably pre-order like the ahttori in shogun 2
http://wiki.totalwar.com/w/Factions
salty mud
Deity
A nice list of factions I think. At least two from the three main cultures and nicely spaced over the map. We can rest assured that playing two different factions in Rome 2 is vastly different than two different factions in Shogun 2.
salty mud
Deity
It's a very good game, yeah. It just gets a bit too repetitive with the only culture being Japanese and there being only minor changes between each faction. Still a great game in its own right though.
PhilBowles
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They do look very distinct, and 8 factions is I think the same number Shogun 2 had on release (don't complain, Rome had 3 until you unlocked the others). Treating the 3 Roman factions in the original game as a single faction, even when fully unlocked Rome only allowed control of 9 factions - only the Seleucids are missing from Rome 2.
We don't know quite what "playable on release" means - there is at least one extra faction apparently trailed on the Factions page of the Rome 2 site, and these may be factions that are unlocked after completing the campaign (and so could be said not to be "playable on release"). Most TW games have used this mechanic, except for the Shogun games (not sure about Napoleon), although Empire only had one unlockable faction.
If that's the case we've got 8 immediately playable factions, and an unknown number of unlockable ones. This is better than average by TW standards: Rome had 3 starting factions, Medieval 2 had 5, Napoleon of course had a grand total of 1. Empire is the outlier that really allowed a large number of factions (12, plus the unlockable United States). Even when fully unlocked Medieval II only had 15 playable factions in the main campaign.
Mechanically it's definitely streamlined, I think mostly in a good way. I'm not a fan of the character tech tree system and miss traits (they still turn up, but rather rarely and from a much more limited pool of options than in previous games, few of which relate to the character's in-game performance), and it has AI problems and assorted oddities (such as a level 2 castle being easier to capture or defend than a level 1 castle due to its less defensible layout). It's identifiably a Total War game (complete with voice acting so bad it's borderline offensive, in common with MTW2 and Empire), and a good one, but very predictably-scripted AI campaign behaviour and the limited selection of units can make it repetitive. Fall of the Samurai is probably the best game in the series yet, mechanically, however.
The "unlock factions by completing campaign" is long gone. It was in rome and medieval 2, but could be circumvented by 20 seconds of file editing. And in empire you didnt really unlocked the usa as faction, cause it was a different campaign.
its dlc now. in empire with the warpath campaign, the peninsular campaign for napoleon, and 3 clan sfor shogun 2, 4 for FotS. So im pretty sure that 9nd faction for rome 2 will be a pre-order one, as the hattori were for S2
Its not unlikely that there will be an all factions mod for rome 2, but that can take a while
its dlc now. in empire with the warpath campaign, the peninsular campaign for napoleon, and 3 clan sfor shogun 2, 4 for FotS. So im pretty sure that 9nd faction for rome 2 will be a pre-order one, as the hattori were for S2
Its not unlikely that there will be an all factions mod for rome 2, but that can take a while
PhilBowles
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But completing that campaign did unlock the USA in the Grand Campaign.
Yes, you can enter the code in order to unlock other factions, but those are mostly not designed to be playable - so there aren't campaigns around them, they aren't necessarily balanced to play in single player (think Spain in Rome TW), and they don't have the same variety of options. You can unlock the minor clans in Shogun 2, but you get a whole lot of identikit clans without special rules or unique units if you do. This is likely to be a bigger issue in Rome 2 than in previous releases since the playable factions are so distinct from one another, not only in units but in faction special rules. Unlockable factions are designed from the start to be playable.
As for going into the code to unlock factions, you can if you like, but why would that act as a barrier to the developers including unlockable factions? It probably doesn't take them much longer than that to create the code that locks specific factions in the first place.
EDIT: With news that R2 will have 117 factions, there's more than enough room for 8 starting factions, a whole bunch of unlockable factions, and as many DLC factions as they want even before they get onto expansion content (here's hoping for Britannia Total War as an expansion campaign, focusing on the aftermath of the Roman withdrawal in a similar manner to the early stages of the board game of the same name).
The Warpath, Peninsular and Rise of the Samurai campaigns are separate campaigns - and except for Rise of the Samurai use different maps. That's a wholly separate thing from unlockable factions.
Agreed that, given a set roster of factions, having lots of unlockable factions limits what they can add (and charge for) as DLC, but there's plenty of scope for having both unlockable factions and DLC factions, particularly since it looks as though Rome 2 will have more factions overall than Rome (there are no conglomerate Britannia, Germania, Gaul or Greek Cities factions, so each component group within the equivalent Rome faction is likely to be a separate faction in R2). Both Rome and Empire had a mix of playable, unlockable, and never-playable (without hacking the code) AI factions, so there's plenty of room to have - say - the Seleucids as an unlockable faction but Spain or Scythia as DLC factions.
That would fit with CA's tendency to "when in doubt about something historical, make **** up".
salty mud
Deity
Yeah, God forbid they do something fun.
or make a game that is a bit balanced
PhilBowles
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I don't think anything in Britannia is nearly as egregious as some of Total War's unit choices, or the stretches required to make the Boshin War between factions of equal strength, and unlike pretty much any TW campaign to date you can actually approximate real and plausible historical outcomes.
In fairness, Total War games are designed primarily for single-player, where balance isn't an especially important factor. The AI's not going to cry foul, and any weakness in the player faction's design can be seen as part of the challenge (Shogun 2 even rates the different factions' starting position by relative difficulty). Balance problems only emerge in single-player if they make a player faction too dominating compared with AI rivals.
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